Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The long delayed FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA from earlier this year mostly delivers on its premise yet still disappointed slightly.  Was it because of its expository nature?  Fewer chases? A prequel burdened with detail deployment and painstaking world building?  I found those things to be assets. Co-writer/director George Miller once again realizes a brutal post-apocalyptic Aussie wasteland with great imagination and meticulous engineering.  The five films in this series create a singular world that is both thrilling and depressing, and even if the film falls short, one could simply lose themselves in it and appreciate the artistry.

 

Unlike FURY ROAD, this movie is more about storytelling than nonstop action.  In my review for that film, I complained there wasn't enough information on our heroine and the small group of indentured women she rescued.  This film provides that.  But Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in FURY ROAD, gets a backstory that ultimately fell flat.  In many ways it's a standard issue revenge saga.  A mostly compelling survival tale driven by the performances of Alyla Browne (as the child) and Anya Taylor-Joy (as the young woman).  Both have the physical chops and feel organic to this dust and gasoline landscape.   

Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris deliberately unfold the life of a girl who loses her mother to raiders called the Biker Horde, led by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).  She will become his unwilling adoptive daughter and later finds herself in the Citadel lorded over by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), cutting her locks and disguising herself as a boy to work on the massive war tanker that will prove central to this tale.  She will join with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), Joe's ace driver in an eventual battle with Dementus, who had since acquired Gastown, a fuel center for the Citadel and brought it to near ruin.

As always, everyone is searching for life and water.  Will Furiosa find her way back to the lush oasis of her birth, the Green Place of Many Mothers?  Will her bloodthirsty mission to avenge her mother's death be her Waterloo?

Of course not.  There would've been no FURY ROAD, silly.  But what will ultimately happen between Furiosa and Dementus?  Ah, that I will not reveal, invisible audience.  Though I might suggest that Max may make some sort of brief appearance in this movie. 

FURIOSA does sport at least two lengthy, grand scale chases, the sort Mad Max fans have come to expect.  Mindboggling and super tense as before. Talk about your logistical nightmares! While Kennedy again largely avoids green screen trickery, he occasionally succumbs to the use of CGI that cheapens the effect.  This was too bad, but not enough for wholesale dismissal of the movie.  It was still plenty immersive and kick ass.   His patented use of moody lighting and zooms into windshields again dazzle.

While FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA doesn't sustain the sort of kineticism as some of the previous entries in this franchise, it is a still an arresting and well paced two and one-half hours.  Sorry it didn't do better at the box office.