Directed by:
George MillerCinematography:
Simon DugganComposer:
Tom HolkenborgCast:
Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Alyla Browne, George Shevtsov, Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, Angus Sampson, John Howard, Charlee Fraser (more)VOD (2)
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As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and 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. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home. (Warner Bros. US)
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Reviews (15)
Never go full Lucas. Furiosa doesn’t deny the ambitions in its execution, as it contains many great elements and is frequently breathtaking and absorbing. However, the project undermines itself not only with its shockingly blatant CGI artificiality, but primarily with its prequel concept. All of the previous films in Miller’s franchise are not so much sequels as they are different variations on a post-apocalyptic myth. Every Mad Max movie contains identical elements (including details such as a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and shells, key events like a convoy battle, and the overarching message in the motif of escape and return). But not only does Miller also alternate these elements based on the myths of various ancient cultures, but he mainly conveys them in the different context of a different culture or tribe in a devastated world. Though Furiosa is fascinating as a post-apocalyptic opera, in the guise of a visually bombastic spectacle it offers only a repetition of a previously seen world built on the principle of DLC video games, where the audience gets only another piece of a familiar map with a new boss (and there has to be a literal franchise easter egg). But this not only has zero benefit for the main narrative that is already taking place and rather trivialises it, but it hardly stands on its own. The old lament that contemporary franchise-based pop culture lacks drama because the audience for prequels simply knows which characters will survive and which will not is very much substantiated here. Taking cues from fan-art creators, Miller dawdles by putting most of the prominent supporting characters from his hit back in front of the camera, thus making Furiosa a mere set of biographies of familiar characters. Fury Road became a milestone of both the action genre and modern cinema because it was a brilliantly concise, well-thought-out and narratively polished vision that Miller had refined over the course of many years. That film’s narrative tied the audience to the hood of a roaring car and let them take in the whole world of the film and its mythology in an adrenaline haze. In Furiosa, we travel the same route in a sightseeing bus, whose driver occasionally puts the pedal to the metal, but we spend most of the time just listening to the jaded tour guide as he gives a long-winded explanation of what we’ve already seen. Despite all of the disenchantment, however, Miller is still able to captivate with brilliant staging and originality, the opulence of his vision and the enthusiasm that comes with being able to start over with popular characters and wild new vehicles that seem rather like comic-book fantasies free of realistic dimensions and physical proportions. Furiosa is still dramaturgically more functional, generally more original and more sophisticated in terms of craftsmanship than most contemporary blockbusters, but those are only minor mitigating factors. In the context of Miller’s filmography, it is an ideal bridge between his post-apocalyptic milestones with campy, unreasonable parallel storylines and the cheerfully unfettered wildness of, in particular, Happy Feet and The Witches of Eastwick. _____ I can’t refrain from a more detailed rant ____ While reading reviews and viewers’ reactions to the film, I was surprised how willingly a lot of them parrot the promo narrative, according to which Furiosa allegedly has more complex characters and a more sophisticated world. The truth, however, is the exact opposite. Just because we see more action, that doesn’t mean that the characters are depicted in a more complex way. We’ve already learned from the previous film that Furiosa was abducted from her idyllic society as a child, grew up in the pain of the wasteland, adapted to the conditions of her surroundings, became a respected warrior and spent the whole time planning her return. Here we see only the circumstances in which all of that happened, but we don’t learn anything more about the character herself. Rather, it becomes apparent that the desired complexity was actually a characteristic of Fury Road, where each character had their own well-thought-out personal story that only resonated in the current situation and conditioned their motivations. The fact that the prequel literally shows us these stories rather strips the character of their non-specific multi-layered nature. It’s the same with the way the prequel works with its own world, which is most evident in the depiction of Gastown and the Bullet Farm. Fury Road spends relatively little time in the bowels of the Citadel, but through the set design, costumes, the characters’ motivations and their role in the narrative, it managed to give a complete picture of that society, its hierarchy, mythology and practical functioning. Furiosa doesn’t show us anything that we don’t already know, instead just repeating the same information in a different time period or dully putting it in specific terms (like when a historian explains what Valhalla means). In a number of cases, it outright depends on the audience’s familiarity with elements from the previous film. And we learn absolutely nothing about the operation of the other two fortresses; we only see how they look and who their leaders are at a certain moment.
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Miller finally has the opportunity (but unfortunately also for the last time) to capitalize on far greater ambitions than to present an action movie with a long journey or a big escape for the fifth time. Not that Furiosa wasn't action-packed, there was traveling back and forth in it, not fleeing wherever the script demands. But everything happens to proper and memorable characters, there are several plot twists hidden in the turns, and the perfectly graded chase scene serves not as the climax, but as the spice of a suspenseful plot, thrown in front of the audience at the right moment. Regular doses of bizarreness and tough supporting characters bother me similarly to last time, but for the first time, I feel that the saga speaks to me deeper than at first glance.
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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.
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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.
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A desert adventure for big boys and fiery girls. While the snippets from Fury Road during the closing credits recalled the tank scene from The Last Crusade, what came before was Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, missing only Bravestone in a buggy and a flock of aggressive ostriches. But I won’t complain about the special effects, given how charmingly frantic, energetic, rule-free, and playful the details were in the costumes, masks, and auto-moto park (like the cut-outs in Immortan Joe's advisor’s suit, used to stimulate his nipples, or the extension of Tom Burke's real scar above his lip). The finale, where Dementus Hur, without his team but still with a nose covering half of New South Wales, was chatting with his Nemesis, only underscored George Miller's creed that dialogue slows down a film. “Ladies and gentlemen! Start your engines!”
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Photo © Warner Bros.
![Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - Photos](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/168/356/168356608_3vilgy.jpg)