'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' Review: A Cinematic Clinic in Blood, Sweat, and Gasoline
The Mad Max franchise has become well known for an exasperated brand of freneticism and unbridled energy rarely captured in blockbuster action cinema as it stands today. With Fury Road in 2015, George Miller broke a mold that many didn’t even know existed. The Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron led adrenaline fest scored a ridiculously strong 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, and remains a widely accepted standard in the same genre that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga aims to impact now, nine years later.
George Miller doesn’t quite return with a vengeance here; rather, he brings a seasoned sense of meticulous management. Split into five chapters, Furiosa is an experience that demands commitment. You’ve really got to lock on to this one and follow it beat by beat. The 149 runtime can make this task a bit tedious at times, but what we end up with is still easily one of the best movies of this year, and a notch in mainstream action that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
The prequel film follows the early-life story of Imperator Furiosa, as played by Charlize Theron in 2015, who hands the reins to Anya Taylor-Joy in this film. It takes a little while for her to really establish her presence, due in part to the aforementioned strained pace, but once Taylor-Joy steps in, the film unmistakably becomes hers. Even with Chris Hemsworth hamming it up as the demonic Dementus (we’ll get to him) she steals the show with a constrained rage that builds as her reasons for it do. She swells up into a force of destruction held back by only her own willpower up to the point of explosion, wherein you’ll forget you’re watching a movie and may fear that she’ll come for you, too.
Prior to Taylor-Joy’s entrance, Furiosa’s younger years are portrayed elegantly by Alyla Brown; the transition from actress to actress, childhood to adulthood, is perfectly seamless. Watching her trauma as a child fuel her eventual vengeful fire as an adult, tracing those lines as they’re drawn and eventually seeing them loop back around and pay off, is brilliant.
If you thought Hemsworth seemed loose, or off-kilter as Thor in the Marvel stuff, you’ll be astonished by the levels of mania he manages in this film. Suited with a properly evil prosthetic nose and a slew of ridiculous outfits and doings, Hemsworth imbues our main villain with a maligned spirit of superiority. Much of his motivation comes from what was originally a desperate desire to survive the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Mad Max world, grown and mutated into a thirst for power to be able to take that very thing from others.
Much of what makes a memorable movie comes down to a memorable villain, and Dementus is an exceptional example. Miller matches his every motion with movements and jolts of the technical type, pushing in on his expressions and pulling out to reveal the sheer chaos of some of his malicious works.
On the whole, a great deal can be said about Miller’s resilience as a director and storyteller with this one. In addition to his well-worn tact behind the camera, Miller clearly hasn’t lost any fire for this franchise in particular. On the page, which Miller co-penned with Nico Lathouris (who also worked on Fury Road), he crams in just about every ever-loving detail he possibly can. From a brash sense of consistent humor to flurried nods to other films and familiar themes, Miller went full throttle with this story.
Even when the pace drags, it can’t be said that what’s happening isn’t relevant or important; if anything, Miller seems to have struggled to structure the innumerable array of pieces he’d collected for this story. This film could easily have worked with 30 minutes added or taken, depending on how the details were situated. Where we end up works well enough, though it would have benefited from a heavier focus on the titular characters.
Out of the five chapters, the second and third both have moments of apparent insecurity and relative dysfunction. Again, nothing falls completely out of place, but there are more than a few moments where you’ll wonder what exactly you’re watching, and where exactly it’s meaning to lead you. You get there, yeah, but you’ll be a little scuffed up crossing the finish line.
Similarly, the film’s digital breadth struggles to match the conceptual scope. The longer action sequences tend to visually repeat themselves within, and when they do try and mix it up, the special effects are noticeably iffy. That isn’t to say that there aren’t impressive displays of VFX here, of course there are. But green screen, when used, is most often terribly noticeable, and CGI interruptions are far more common than need seemingly be.
One sequence in the middle chunk of the movie specifically suffers a serious blow from the aforementioned issues whilst also trying to introduce a new character in the midst of the insanity. As a result of the former struggle, the effectiveness of the latter task is blunted, and the entire stretch ends up feeling rather listless. You’ll likely find a spot to latch back on shortly after, as this one is constantly spinning around and offering new grips to grab on to, but it doesn’t make the shortcoming any less unfortunate.
Yet to complain about the few issues that Furiosa does suffer would do a disservice to just how much the film gets right, and how important it is in our cinematic climate today. We get plenty of prequels nowadays, but rarely are they near-three hour odysseys detailing the disastrous effects of things we see in power today: greed, piousness, and similar negative traits of the like. Furiosa is a beautiful condemnation of all things evil and most things weak, allowing the darkness in when it needs to in order to get the proper points across.
George Miller swung for the fences once again with this one and, perhaps as expected, hit a home run. As long as he’s making these movies, the theaters will have one that pretty much nobody is going to want to miss, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is just that; unmissable, unmistakable cinema.