Furiosa

One of the strangest choices made by director George Miller comes during the end credits. A movie doesn't need to make use of that time, but Furiosa does. However, instead of a mid-credits scene, or behind-the-scenes, or highlighting of character moments, he choose to show clips from Mad Max: Fury Road. That is, show us bits from another movie. Sure, that film consists of the events which immediately follow this one, but you're still pointing elsewhere and saying "Remember how great that was?" It's as if he's trying to distract you from the story he just finished telling you moments ago.

Given how heavily this story leans into that one, it shouldn't be surprising. Each previous entry in the franchise introduced a brand new piece of the world, with Max the only connective issue. Since they were marching forward in time, we even got to see how the fall of society progressed and people began to reorganize, albeit mostly through various power struggles, cults of personality, and horrific brutality. Furiosa zooms in to look at how its titular character (Alyla Browne in the preamble, Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult) ended up at the Citadel, while investigating how her most distinguishing characteristics came to be. Her history is tied up with Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the one new piece on the board. Cut from the same cloth as Toecutter and Lord Humungus (the latter of whom is eventually name-checked), Dementus is more successful, quickly gaining control of Gastown. However, his ambition is far greater: he wishes to take the Citadel.

If it seems strange that I've yet to mention Furiosa's ambitions, I agree with you. Despite carrying her name, this is more of a two-hander, with the first half largely sidelining her. Her primary role is to be kidnapped and find a way to survive, and her only action is to get transferred to the ownership of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) by speaking for the first time in years. She's scarcely a character until we're re-introduced to her as an adult passing as a mute War Boy training to be a Black Thumb (i.e. mechanic), which doesn't come until halfway through this 150 minute movie.

It's then that things really get going. While we began with a motorbike chase, it played more as a hunter stalking their prey than the big, dramatic set pieces the rest of the series has trained us to expect and desire. So it's a welcome sight when the War Rig we were first introduced to nine years ago goes on its inaugural run, and is very quickly besieged. I won't spoil anything about the battle, but it's freaking sweet, introducing some new types of vagrants which are hella cool. It's obviously not the only set piece, but it's almost certainly the best. That being said, it's notable how lackluster the special effects were in many spots. While I'd bet there were still a ton of practical effects used, there was way more (or at least way more noticeable) CGI and green screen. Lighting was off, there was a soft fuzz just at the edge of some characters in some shots, and it was all around less impressive.

Which goes a long way towards highlighting the underlying problem. It wants you to be constantly thinking about Fury Road, but it doesn't quite want to be Fury Road. This middle ground leaves it with an odd identity, almost entirely defined by the movie to which it's a prequel, but remaining a pale shadow. It mostly wants to set up for that film, and as such goes to great lengths to explain certain details of it. How'd she get to drive the War Rig? What's the deal with Gastown and the Bullet Farm? What does The Green Place actually look like? How'd she lose her arm? And so on. Many minor characters from the 2015 masterpiece are expanded, such as The People Eater (John Howard), Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), and The Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), and each setting is ripped from Fury Road. Taken together, it's a movie of retreads, answering questions we didn't have in ways that at best don't deepen their subject in any ways, and sometimes actively harm it.

As much as I wish it would have tried harder to be its own thing and only tie into Fury Road at the very end (like The First Omen successfully did), maybe the strategy was to mirror that movie more closely. There are ways in which it explicitly does: it begins with the opening discussion of the world dying and earth turning sour while showing the exact same clip of a nuclear blast slamming into trees, continues with just how little Furiosa speaks, and hits its most eye-rolling with a single shot of Max (Jacob Tomuri), unnamed but completely obvious standing next to his vehicle looking out over the wasteland, just like we first encountered him in the earlier film. But the deviations are where the film really hits rough terrain. This is more exposition heavy, and I wasn't impressed with Miller's dialogue. Some of that is just because characters like Joe's sons and the War Boys are not meant to be all that smart, but even when delivered by more capable characters it fails to engage you. Dementus doesn't have his own "Just walk away" tier speech, although his motormouth tendencies are quite amusing. Nor does he espouse an identifiable philosophy besides "Gimme!" and that hope is pointless: there's an attempt to expand on this near the end of the film, but even that is so on the nose as to be meaningless.

The other thing, which isn't a huge deal but absolutely harmed my enjoyment of the film, is the confusion of the timeline of the world. This series has never had the tightest relationship to time, but they've at least made sense relative to each other. Part of what I love so much about that first film is how it shows a society mid-collapse, with some social structures still in place but crumbling. In the time since, the world has fallen so much further into chaos. But despite Furiosa starting 15 years before Fury Road, the only difference is that The Green Place still existed. Everything else looks the same, implying that the world collapsed long before Max's family was murdered, and thus that he grew up in a world that was disintegrating before his eyes, making his previous employment as a cop baffling. Rituals and cult-ish beliefs must have emerged almost immediately, manifesting in ways that imply forgetting the previous world existed. It also means The Green Place disappeared and the Crow Fishers moved in absurdly quickly. All of this to me reads as the world of Mad Max getting too waterlogged with lore, which is of course going to be most acutely exposed in a prequel forced to respect it.

My initial reaction to hearing that a prequel based on Furiosa was in production was apprehension, much for the same reason I'm always skeptical of franchises. Maybe if it had been a sequel, exploring the Citadel under Furiosa's rule, as that would present a chance for Miller to explore another expression of society rebuilt. But as I learned more about the project and how it tied into the original plans for Fury Road, the possibilities unfurled before me, envisioning Furiosa having a Max-like adventure before eventually coming into contact with Joe. Maybe it would even involve the rise of the Citadel! Instead, we got a story which doesn't have much to say about revenge, and a world lacking in new ideas, which is occasionally punctuated by solid action and Anya Taylor-Joy's withering stare. After a nine year wait, it's not what I was hoping for.