Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Jun 2, 2024 12:16:44 GMT -5
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga(5/23/2024)  I think we can all pretty much agree that Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the biggest cinematic wins of the 2010s, right? It looked like something special from pretty much the moment the trailer dropped and the movie itself more than delivered both as a spectacle and as a stealth statement about gender roles and societal power dynamics. The movie won six Oscars and earned a Best Picture nomination, something that’s extremely rare for a wild action movie like that, and five years later I saw a lot of places ranking it as the best movie of the entire decade. Now nearly ten years later George Miller has finally followed that movie up with a prequel and, well, given how much people loved that last movie you’d think there would be more hype and excitement for it than there is, especially given that it’s focusing on Furiosa, a character who was considered the high point of the last movie. Part of it may simply be that some momentum has been lost in the time it took for this to be made, part of it may be that re-casting the title character elicited some skepticism, and some of it may just be that the trailer they cut wasn’t quite what it needed to be, but really I think the disconnect was just this tacit assumption that no matter what George Miller delivered with this movie there was just no way it could ever surprise and excite people like Mad Max: Fury Road did. Now that the movie’s out I think that last fear might have been correct, but that also shouldn’t make people ungrateful for what Miller has delivered here.
The film opens with Furiosa (Alyla Browne, later Anya Taylor-Joy) as a child who apparently grew up in a hidden “place of abundance” within the wider wasteland. This upbringing is upended when a handful of men on motorcycles stumbled upon her oasis. They end up kidnapping her and rushing off to tell their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), about this potential raiding location but Furiosa’s mother Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser) pursues them and manages to kill them to protect their home’s location but isn’t able to save Furiosa. Held captive by Dementus, who views her as some sort of curiosity, Furiosa plots her revenge but that needs to wait when Dementus and his large nomadic motorcycle gang stumbles upon The Citadel and its leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) whose greed and brutality we saw in the last movie. Dementus quickly determines that it’s his destiny to take The Citidel and the other strongholds in Immortan Joe’s wasteland empire. Furiosa will watch this post-apocalypic war take place over the course of several years and will see the conflict from both sides, always keeping her eventual goal of vengeance in mind.
When the world was going mad for Mad Max: Fury Road I was actually a bit more measured than most in my praise. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the movie was awesome but I think I liked it maybe 20% less than a lot of people and “only” put it at number seven on my year end top ten list. Looking back I probably would have put it a few slots higher on that list in retrospect, but I did have issues with it, namely the fact that I thought Mad Max himself was something of a blank cypher of a character which is kind of a problem. Many would argue that this is because the new character, Furiosa, was the real star of that movie whose arc mattered but at the end of the day Max was the point of view character at the center of things and if he was going to be there I would have liked a bit more to him. To some extent that’s been something keeping me at a distance from the entire Mad Max franchise: Max himself rarely talks and just shows up in the middle of situations, solves them, then moves on. It’s a franchise structured a bit like Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy, but I’m not sure either Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy quite pull that kind of minimalism like Clint Eastwood ever did. Fortunately that’s not a problem here both because the Mad Max character is out of the picture and also because this movie has a completely different structure than any of the previous movies in the series.
Unlike Mad Mas: Fury Road, which was essentially a chase movie set over the course of just a couple of day, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is (as the title would imply) an entire saga chronicling the life of Furiosa as a character from her childhood right up to what we saw in that previous movie. As such we certainly see a lot more character development here than we usually see in a Mad Max movie but Furiosa, like Max, is often a person of few words. So the thrust of the film is a revenge story in which Furiosa finds her footing within the politics of the wasteland and the various colorful villains populating it and how she came to rise in the ranks in Immortan Joe’s army to become the trusted general she was in Mad Max: Fury Road. I’m not going to sit here and say that this is the deepest character study I’ve ever seen or that it has a particularly complex take on the subject of revenge, but compared to what we got in the other four Mad Max movies it’s practically a Russian novel. This of course comes with its pros and cons, on one hand it gives the movie a bit more substance and weight and paints a more detailed picture of this world and its politics, on the other hand it kind of slows down the pace and maybe takes away from some of the immediacy. Personally I’d say the tradeoff was probably worth it, even if only because we’ve already seen the other approach done about as well as it could possibly be done in the last movie and this was the right time to shake things up.
That the movie has a slower pace should not suggest that it skimps on the action scenes though, because on the contrary, once the movie does get into action mode it really delivers. There are two or three huge action sequences in the movie that are among the best set-pieces you’re likely to see this year. A lot of them are the car combat you’ve come to expect from the franchise but there are other types of action sprinkled throughout. Some of these scenes are a bit slower and more elongated than what you’d get from other franchises. I’ve heard people describe George Miller’s car chases described as being like the twenty minute prog rock songs to the three minute punk songs that other action movies give you and I think that’s even more true here. Those more interesting in George Miller’s wild art direction and photography will also get plenty to like here with him having even more of a canvas to work with and introducing even more wild wasteland locations. If I do think the weak link here might be some of the casting. I’m not the biggest Chris Hemsworth fan generally and I do suspect that he was brought onto this project more for his marquee value than because he’s necessarily perfect for this villain role. The guy is certainly trying his hardest and he’s far from terrible for even bad but I don’t think his work here entirely hits. I also don’t think Anya Taylor-Joy is quite perfect here either, she never quite connects up perfectly with the character we saw in the previous movie and just on her own terms she never came close to impressing me like Charlize Theron did. There’s also a character played by Tom Burke who emerges in the second half who just doesn’t really pop off the screen like I think they want him to. Beyond that, well, as suspected there was just never going to be a way for this to match the impact of Mad Max: Fury Road and its slower pace does probably contribute to that but I also feel like this isn’t something to be taken for granted like I maybe did on the last movie at first. ****1/2 out of Five |
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Jun 3, 2024 20:24:45 GMT -5
Not long into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga -- maybe even before seeing it -- I made peace with the fact that this film just wasn't going to be the same non-stop adrenaline-pumping chase movie that Fury Road was. And that was honestly the right call on George Miller's part, because trying to replicate that masterwork of action filmmaking would've been ill-advised. Instead, Furiosa is a slower-paced, years-spanning narrative showing how the titular character got to where we saw her in Fury Road, and I'm perfectly fine with that...but still found the end result slightly underwhelming? Even though I still liked it. I think -- to a degree -- this is just kind of a case of diminishing returns. To an extent. And to quote Dan Murrell's review of the film, it's a movie I kept waiting to really get going. The film is about Furiosa's odyssey in life from a child to where we see her in Fury Road, and it's divided into chapters. But that, in turn, gives the movie a more episodic feel rather than the more freely-flowing feel that one may expect, and that's on top of the slower pace. I wouldn't call the movie laborious, exactly, but...to use an appropriate metaphor, it felt like the tank wasn't filled up all the way. It lacks the propulsive energy of Fury Road, at times, when it could've stood to use some of that. I'm not saying just make Fury Road over again, just that the story here -- as it is -- could've used more of that previous manic energy. Even one of the film's central action setpieces around the midpoint: while impressively crafted on an action level, even that moves at a different pace than any of the ones in Fury Road, and it was a hard feeling for me to shake. But this isn't me saying that I was somewhat disappointed here simply because this was a slower, and even more thoughtful and drama-focused movie; I got the purpose here. No, it's more that the story this movie tells to fill in the background on Furiosa...just isn't quite as engaging as George Miller thinks it is. But again, this is me feeling somewhat conflicted about the movie. Because Furiosa definitely does an admirable job of further worldbuilding with the Wasteland, showing how the sort of politics and inner workings of this Hellscape operates. But I felt this came across more as connecting the dots at times, rather than filling in the blanks. And it's not so much that Furiosa's story is uninteresting, it's just that I think the movie never quite manages to get out of the shadow of Fury Road enough to forge its own, more completely unique path. I think it's absolutely possible to make another movie set in this version of this world that's as compelling as Fury Road in its own right...it's just maybe not this movie. I can't fault Furiosa for lack of ambition, though, because in nearly every sense of the word, this feels like a true-blue Hollywood epic. Apart from some pretty wonky uses of CGI (less-cleanly integrated than in the last film) and keying in certain scenes, Miller and his cinematographer photograph Furiosa in ways that benefit a lot of the production value, and effectively communicate the scale of a lot of the action and especially the landscapes. Make no mistake, this is still a handsomely and confidently-made film, and even if I think it falls a little short on the narrative front, this is often still impressive as a piece of action cinema and big-budget filmmaking. Also worthy of praise are both Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa and Chris Hemsworth as Dementus. Taylor-Joy manages to replicate a lot of Charlize Theron's mannerisms in ways that don't feel just like mere imitations, and she manages to be a commanding and believable screen presence. Hemsworth, meanwhile, is giving one of his best and most memorable performances as the villain Dementus, clearly relishing every minute he's on screen and getting to really let loose. And I really do wish the movie had been more honed in on the two of them, rather than also trying to expand outward a lot with all these other details and characters that don't leave as much of an impact. The movie tries to do too much, when it would have benefitted from sticking to just one or two lanes. All that said, though, I really can't be TOO down on Furiosa. Because this movie still has more energy and inventiveness in its little finger than most other movies do now, and for all my own qualms with the film as a whole, it still very much feels like a singular vision of a skilled storyteller. And there's definite value in that. So, no, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga doesn't match Mad Max: Fury Road (though who knows how kind time will be to this), but even then, there's absolutely enough here to keep it fueled up.
***/****
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Jun 3, 2024 23:25:41 GMT -5
You know what is four stars? |
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Jun 8, 2024 7:12:25 GMT -5
I ate too much popcorn...
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Wyldstaar
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Post by Wyldstaar on Jun 8, 2024 23:14:22 GMT -5
Turns out that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the last movie I got to see at a North Texas Alamo Drafthouse. At least it wasn't the latest Bad Boys movie. That would have been completely unacceptable.
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frankyt
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Post by frankyt on Jul 8, 2024 9:57:53 GMT -5
Liked it didn't love it. Enjoyed them leaning into the brutality a little more, really enjoyed Hemsworth because he was a very formidable bad guy.
Kinda disappointed that it ended with basically them going straight to fury road - coulda done a little more with it but alas no appetite for it anyway seemingly.
Action was still solid once it got going.
7.5/10
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Aug 9, 2024 12:02:27 GMT -5
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Aug 9, 2024 12:07:13 GMT -5
I finally caught this a few weeks ago, loved it.
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