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)

An excellent flashback to Fury Road. It lacks Max Rockatansky, it lacks the frenetic pace, but the story is more substantial. Furiosa explains the laws of the imagined world. George Miller seems to realize that he skipped over a lot of things and presented them as fact without showing them. He describes a fragile symbiosis that is disrupted by Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, one of the best creations of his career. If it's true that the previous Mad Max was mostly about Furiosa then Furiosa is mostly about the foxy Dementus. He's the one who shows the world turning into an oil-soaked desert. Anya Taylor-Joy is good, but the little girl who plays her when she was young is even better. Weaker music and slightly worse visual effects. Still, very good. (05/25/2024)

George Miller took a nine-year hiatus after Fury Road dabbling in a less exciting romantic fantasy, before returning to deliver one of the best action films in recent years. Furiosa is an absolute blast, albeit different from its predecessor. It tells the epic tale of Furiosa’s relentless quest for revenge in one of the most brutal cinematic worlds ever created. The film oscillates between sheer brutality and absurdity, keeping the audience entertained despite the mind-boggling moments that seem to defy imagination. At times, it felt like watching a Tarantino flick on steroids, especially during the meticulously planned revenge in the second half. Chris Hemsworth shines in his role, clearly having a blast. Anya Taylor-Joy and her younger counterpart Alyla Browne are also fantastic, but it was Tom Burke who unexpectedly stood out to me in this harsh world. Each actor contributes to a story that is gritty, thrilling, and occasionally illogical, yet not as shocking as Fury Road. I have a feeling this will be one of the standout films of 2024. (06/04/2024)

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. (05/26/2024)

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. (07/19/2024)