furiosa george miller

Furiosa L A mad max saga

As I type this, I see a fury road behind me. It was 2015. Now, in 2024, we finally see the prequels of Furiosa. As I went in, I kept thinking of a podcast I did. This was when it emerged Charlize Theron would not be returning to the character as the story would require a younger actress. My sense of virtue tingled, and I said she is in every action film her way. So, with that swagger, I went in to see Furiosa. I saw both how this film only compliments her work in the first one and how outstanding Anna Taylor Joy was in a movie that relied on such a mu physicality.

This is a very different beast.  We have chapters and time jumps in the critical premise of following Furiosa from a child into a young woman who would grow to be on the road. It’s hard to describe a film like this without giving spoilers, but at two and a half hours. This spends the first-hour world-building. It’s a culture this film is selling, without any gravelly voices of scrolling text. It’s just a momentary flashback, but ultimately, you can see how innately Australian in its sentiment this world is, in the cinematic sense, I’ve never been.

Taking the citadel and what we know will be the outcome, we meet immortal Joe’s early doors. But this is about more than any one kingdom; the fiefdoms of this world and the trade it has so well shows in Hemsworth’s dementor, part PT Barnum and part Conan the barbarian, a man of rhetoric and Flashheart levels of confidence that even an apocalypse can not check this man’s sense of entitlement, that others go along with it! It’s baffling how desperate and weak the world has left so many.

This makeshift brutalism meets utilitarianism comes across with every scene in the fashion and fixtures of this world—even the entrepreneurial skills for the desperate in their form. Everyone knows how to jury rig and makeshift short-term solutions. You need that in this world, or you would already be dead. And it expands into the action#and good god is their action, 

It’s not just the explosion and eviscerations bordering on a biomechanical fetish, but fight sequences in constantly moving and revolving situations, war tanks and tops of cars, all sold with a real physicality and camera construction within the lens. This has none of the shiny glare of a Transformers film or the over-bouncy weightlessness of swinging apes in the dark; the sun and the desert are unforgiving for cheap production that shines throughout.

I do have to share some reservations; there is a tendency to play up the stupidity of others on a level that borders on bullying ‘special needs’. I get it’s not an excellent world, and these are not likeable characters. Still, it does play to be punchlines for us to laugh at. There is a tendency for some quasi-spiritual motifs to not quite land in this world. There is a version of how this plays out about colonists and their toxicity devouring themselves. Still, given the indigenous voice referendum was held just last year, with a resounding no, it feels a bit like you have your cake and eat it.

That said, it’s Lawrence of Arabia. If Lawrence had his arm chopped off, chased Moby dick and did it all from the back of a Bentley, he had already set on fire, and not in a good omens way. And that is impressive. Also, taste is not the force of a mad max film, and I get there may be other elements off-putting to any eco-activists that I gave no poops about for the duration of the movie. 

It is bold, blood and fire for two hours with a pace that makes sense and none of that Snyder ominosity that makes work impenetrable. Check it out as soon as you can