Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa was still a child when she was taken from her home. She grew up surrounded by violence and madness, but she never stopped wanting revenge. In the wasteland, a war is brewing between two armies of brutal dictators, and Furiosa intends to be on the front lines. George Miller returns to a harsh post-apocalyptic world, but in a slightly different way than you might expect. There's still plenty of action, and there are so many ideas in a single scene that other Hollywood blockbusters could live off of it for years. However, this time around there are more complex characters and, above all, a greater effort to immerse yourself in a world full of chaos and discover that it too has its own order. Miller delivers another one of his visually lavish and uncompromising visions, and he knows he can afford not to pander to audiences who expect nothing more than more of what they got last time. (05/22/2024)

George Miller is a god and serves up another excellent post-apocalyptic blast. If Fury Road was a 10, this is a very solid 9! Another great visually lavish cinematic experience, of which there won't be many this year, so don't hesitate any longer and head on over! It tells the revenge story of a young Furiosa in an attractive post-apocalyptic world. All the factions and how they work is very fun and interesting (I liked the costumes and the visuals of all the characters, they were properly insane). It's got an intense and adrenaline-packed pace, and even though the first big action scene comes somewhere before the halfway point, it's decently suspenseful and engaging until then, there's simply no danger of boredom. Anya Taylor Joy is excellent as always, and here she doesn’t even have to speak properly, her look was enough to express all the emotions perfectly. Thor a.k.a. Dementus gives the best performance of his career, he really enjoys the madman perfectly. Visually it's again very intense, the music is beautifully ear-splitting, the action scenes surprise with more and more crazy ideas, and you enjoy every shot and moment. There’s even one delightful small cameo, and the ending with the living tree was awesome! Furiosa with Dune 2 and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is clearly the king of this year's blockbusters. There are plenty of epic moments that will make me very happy to watch Furiosa again. 9/10. (05/22/2024)

After nine years, the spin-off prequel to the fourth installment of the established franchise from a nearly 80-year-old geezer... If it weren't for the Mad Max franchise and the old-timer George Miller, one would have expected a mess. But that series is Mad Max and that old man is the visionary Miller, or once again, a peculiar, lavish, audio-visually polished spectacle, brimming with ideas in literally every scene. My only criticism is that the running time is too (especially in one particular chapter). It teeters on the edge of "more of the same" vs. "more room for characters and world building but not more of the same". Which isn't necessarily a criticism, but a more pronounced lean to one side might not be out of place. Either way, they are just minor details. (05/23/2024)

Mad Max is an Australian cultural treasure that should have only stayed at three or four episodes. For the first hour, it felt like a sequence of mini-stories, with the disgustingly overacting Chris Hemsworth twitching like a pigeon eating grain and his performance actually making it into a kind of interlocking semi-comedy sketches that I really don't want to see in the Mad Max saga. He was the weakest link in the film. The other one was the overuse of obvious green-screen and over-stylized colors. Back then, years ago, with the first two episodes, I admired the punk spirit that came out of them. A punkness that was related to the low budget, when everything was handmade, so to speak, when the wastelanders were played by real bikers, the cops by real cops, the props were invented in the breaks during filming, and it exuded a wildness and realness that George Miller partially revived in the equally wild Fury Road. This is rather closer Thunderdome, which was also over-stylized and implausible in its depiction of the post-apocalyptic world. I didn't believe it. Mad Max doesn't benefit from a swollen budget because then Miller can't keep it up and in trying to cram in as much as possible, it's like that dog and cat fairy tale where they cooked a cake with so many ingredients that it made them puke (the quarry scene is too over the top). As time goes on, you find that you don't really care much about Furiosa's fate because, unlike Mel Gibson, she's not a pivotal defining character for you, you don't experience it with her, and you pray all the while that there's as little Hemsworth as possible. In fact, the only thing worth singling out is the ten-minute attack on the tanker, because you can feel the punk genuineness of it, where the stuntmen have honestly worked their magic along with those who came up with the choreography. And that's not enough for me, George. Too little. (07/18/2024)

Not to repeat himself, George Miller went about it differently this time and decided to focus on what he didn't have time for last time, and we get to know the characters and the world better. But that doesn't mean there's no action. There is action, and what kind of action. The first act alone puts most recent action movies to shame, and it's still just getting started. In short, Furiosa is an excellent film, with a great Anya Taylor-Joy, who actually enters the scene perhaps somewhere in the middle, and a perfect villain played by Chris Hemsworth. I absolutely love it when actors use make-up to help them become someone else entirely, and Hemsworth has done just that to perfection. He's erratic, insane (how else), but he's also hilarious and, in his own way, ridiculous as he speeds through the desert on his post-apocalyptic tricycle. He clearly enjoyed the filming, and I enjoyed the result. (05/25/2024)