Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Never go full Lucas. Furiosa doesn’t deny the ambitions in its execution, as it contains many great elements and is frequently breathtaking and absorbing. However, the project undermines itself not only with its shockingly blatant CGI artificiality, but primarily with its prequel concept. All of the previous films in Miller’s franchise are not so much sequels as they are different variations on a post-apocalyptic myth. Every Mad Max movie contains identical elements (including details such as a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and shells, key events like a convoy battle, and the overarching message in the motif of escape and return). But not only does Miller also alternate these elements based on the myths of various ancient cultures, but he mainly conveys them in the different context of a different culture or tribe in a devastated world. Though Furiosa is fascinating as a post-apocalyptic opera, in the guise of a visually bombastic spectacle it offers only a repetition of a previously seen world built on the principle of DLC video games, where the audience gets only another piece of a familiar map with a new boss (and there has to be a literal franchise easter egg). But this not only has zero benefit for the main narrative that is already taking place and rather trivialises it, but it hardly stands on its own. The old lament that contemporary franchise-based pop culture lacks drama because the audience for prequels simply knows which characters will survive and which will not is very much substantiated here. Taking cues from fan-art creators, Miller dawdles by putting most of the prominent supporting characters from his hit back in front of the camera, thus making Furiosa a mere set of biographies of familiar characters. Fury Road became a milestone of both the action genre and modern cinema because it was a brilliantly concise, well-thought-out and narratively polished vision that Miller had refined over the course of many years. That film’s narrative tied the audience to the hood of a roaring car and let them take in the whole world of the film and its mythology in an adrenaline haze. In Furiosa, we travel the same route in a sightseeing bus, whose driver occasionally puts the pedal to the metal, but we spend most of the time just listening to the jaded tour guide as he gives a long-winded explanation of what we’ve already seen. Despite all of the disenchantment, however, Miller is still able to captivate with brilliant staging and originality, the opulence of his vision and the enthusiasm that comes with being able to start over with popular characters and wild new vehicles that seem rather like comic-book fantasies free of realistic dimensions and physical proportions. Furiosa is still dramaturgically more functional, generally more original and more sophisticated in terms of craftsmanship than most contemporary blockbusters, but those are only minor mitigating factors. In the context of Miller’s filmography, it is an ideal bridge between his post-apocalyptic milestones with campy, unreasonable parallel storylines and the cheerfully unfettered wildness of, in particular, Happy Feet and The Witches of Eastwick. _____ I can’t refrain from a more detailed rant ____ While reading reviews and viewers’ reactions to the film, I was surprised how willingly a lot of them parrot the promo narrative, according to which Furiosa allegedly has more complex characters and a more sophisticated world. The truth, however, is the exact opposite. Just because we see more action, that doesn’t mean that the characters are depicted in a more complex way. We’ve already learned from the previous film that Furiosa was abducted from her idyllic society as a child, grew up in the pain of the wasteland, adapted to the conditions of her surroundings, became a respected warrior and spent the whole time planning her return. Here we see only the circumstances in which all of that happened, but we don’t learn anything more about the character herself. Rather, it becomes apparent that the desired complexity was actually a characteristic of Fury Road, where each character had their own well-thought-out personal story that only resonated in the current situation and conditioned their motivations. The fact that the prequel literally shows us these stories rather strips the character of their non-specific multi-layered nature. It’s the same with the way the prequel works with its own world, which is most evident in the depiction of Gastown and the Bullet Farm. Fury Road spends relatively little time in the bowels of the Citadel, but through the set design, costumes, the characters’ motivations and their role in the narrative, it managed to give a complete picture of that society, its hierarchy, mythology and practical functioning. Furiosa doesn’t show us anything that we don’t already know, instead just repeating the same information in a different time period or dully putting it in specific terms (like when a historian explains what Valhalla means). In a number of cases, it outright depends on the audience’s familiarity with elements from the previous film. And we learn absolutely nothing about the operation of the other two fortresses; we only see how they look and who their leaders are at a certain moment. (05/23/2024) (less) (more)