MOVIE INFO:
Snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers, young Furiosa falls into the hands of a great biker horde led by the warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel, presided over by the Immortan Joe. As the two tyrants fight for dominance, Furiosa soon finds herself in a nonstop battle to make her way home.
REVIEW:
Like T.S. Eliot, George Miller has perfected the cinematic wasteland with his road warrior films. Furiosa, is a sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. Since it’s an origin story Miller can add myth and poetry into all the action beauty. There is no Max here. There’s just Furiosa (Anya Taylor Joy) and she’s both fast and furious. She was the real hero and star of Fury Road anyway.
We get her story from birth to the bridging of Fury Road. Her tale swings from freedom in the semi-paradise of the Green Space, to captivity, to an eventual circumscribed regality. She plucks the peach of Eden. Is kidnapped by hygiene challenged bikers. Eventually she must protect the knowledge of this Edenic Green Space from the exploitation of Dementus played by Chris Hemsworth, sans Mjolnir, and trailing a bloody, dirty, tattered remnant of a cape behind to remind the audience that he once was a mighty Norse god and is just a delusional and fallen deity in Furiosa.
Furiosa’s transition is from matriarchy to illegitimate patriarchy. Miller cuts between close-ups and panoramic long shots to ratchet up the intensity and develop the western stakes. Sound wise the roar of machines and the shouts of the biker warriors against the arid stillness of the wasteland serves as a counterpoint to remind the audience of what is constantly being lost in the gain of noise. Peace is not the inheritance, only violence, strife, domination and war. There are horses, but they are merely source echoes that must yield to iron horses and horsepower. That is how this new western must work.
Dementus is given Blakeian echoes. He conscripts a scholar so that Wisdom is always near. He’s ridiculous and absurd. Hemsworth and Miller squeeze every bit of metaphor that they can from this demented creation. They’re going for something both Milton and Blake, a Lucifer unbound and yet desiring and always trying to acquire what he has been denied. The previous films established the Dante details of this wasteland and why everything must be played out on hell’s battlefield. Now, with Furiosa the sequels can pursue the Paradise Regained.
Miller is a myth maker living in fear that cinema might lose its visual inheritance in the human collective memory. That’s why these sagas remain tethered tightly to the archetypes of the world. It’s best to remember that Miller was a physician turned dream maker. The flamboyant stunt work delights in showing the whirring parts of bodies and machines, of living ecosystems in constant collision with mortality and dreams. He delights in showing their inner and outer workings. Furiosa’s own body and mind are shown in constant turmoil and collision. In the end, she develops an identity that rejects being both handmaiden and mother. She will try to restore the matriarchy she was born into and lost.
Taylor-Joy doesn’t quite have the physical expressiveness Charlize Theron was able to bring to Furiosa. All that is required of this younger Furiosa is that she look good both in long locks and bald, acquire training and mentorship (Tom Burke plays the Mad Max clone and eventual sensei part) and that she goes through the required layers of hell, while myths are crested for the previous films plot holes (where does the gas and all the bullets come from, etc).
Eventually, this Furiosa will develop the raw anger and deep boned melancholy of the older. Like Theron, Taylor- Joy was a dancer. She knows how to move beautifully, and what grants her character physical grace. Her visual fragility, her mesmerizing facial features, gives her a vulnerability that serves the story well.
She’s also a master of the Kubrick Stare. Her eyes lock your own gaze down. They command your attention. When her head bows down, the angle accentuates the white of her eyes. It disorients and destabilizes the viewer. It creates uncertainty about her character and what kind of hero she eventually will become.
Her reticence is the trait she shares with the other Max’s. It protects her and isolates her too. She is the new existential hero for all upcoming stories yet to be made.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga gets a 3.5/5 or a B+.
CREDITS:
Directed by
Written by
- George Miller
- Nico Lathouris
Based on
- George Miller
- Byron Kennedy
Produced by
- Doug Mitchell
- George Miller
Starring
Cinematography
Edited by
- Eliot Knapman
- Margaret Sixel
Music by
Production
companies
- Kennedy Miller Mitchell
- Domain Entertainment
- Village Roadshow Pictures[a]
Distributed by
Release dates
- 15 May 2024(Cannes)
- 23 May 2024(Australia)
- 24 May 2024(United States)
Running time
148 minutes[1]
Countries
- Australia
- United States
Language
English
Budget
$168 million[2]
Box office
$11 million
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