'Furiosa' is an Eye-Popping, Oddly-Humanistic Coda to 'Fury Road'
In which George Miller cements his place as one of the best filmmakers of his generation.
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MOVIE REVIEWS DEPT.
SPOILERS NOTE: I don’t ever write anything in a review that I would consider a “spoiler,” but everyone has a slightly different barometer for what that is. This is a pre-release review so in my view it’s pretty light on plot reveals, but if you want to bookmark it until after you see the film, I won’t be offended.
Before the Furiosa screening began at IMAX headquarters in Playa Vista, director George Miller addressed the handful of journalists and film critics in attendance. He told us that while the movie had been locked only two weeks prior, the script had actually been written before shooting began on 2015’s Fury Road (the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise). Miller said Furiosa (the fifth) started as the script that explained to the crew everything that had happened before Fury Road, the things they needed to know in order to all be on the same page in creating the world of Fury Road.
That these movies are less about the stories themselves, which are kind of straighforwardly bare bones — Fury Road is a chase movie and Furiosa is a revenge movie — and more about the fact that there seems to be an entire living and breathing world that exists beyond the plot and in between the lines of dialogue is what makes them such a joy to experience. They have not only the feeling common to all great movies, that the characters keep going about their business even after the cameras turn off, but also the feeling of a filmmaker who wanted not just to dictate to his collaborators but be pushed by them. They end up feeling like they’re bursting at the seams, maximalist symphonies of creatives all trying to outdo each other. The “plot” needs to be a little quiet to allow you to hear the stories its production design is trying to tell.
The dialogue works in much the same way. Characters demand “guzzoline” and Chris Hemsworth’s character in Furiosa begins his carnival barker speech, “Lady aaaand gentlemans…”
Even from a single word or misplaced plural you get the sense that this story takes place in a crude dystopian world, where people have lost some of their connection to the original language, left to recreate a new one out of half-remembered scraps and malapropisms. The design is its own exposition, like you get to imagine the story rather than just passively experience it; a society of feral children playing at civilization.
“This is our Furiosa,” one of the Vuvalini says, eyeing Charlize Theron’s character in Fury Road. “How long have you been gone?”
“Seven thousand days. Plus the ones I don’t remember,” Furiosa answers.
“What happened to your mother?”
“She died. On the third day.”
Furiosa, essentially, is the story of those seven thousand days.
Of course, the obvious question all this raises is why a movie whose best quality is self-explanatory production design needs an expository prequel. The most obvious way that Furiosa distinguishes itself from its predecessor is in the person of Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, easily Hemsworth’s best performance (Oscar-worthy, if you ask me) and possibly the best use of a prosthetic nose in cinema history (with all due respect to Bradley Cooper). George Miller knew Hemsworth’s normal face was too pretty for the Wasteland and he was right. The nose plays.
Dementus is the meanest, cruelest, son of a bitch imaginable, a king scavenger in a cannibalistic environment of scarcity. And yet he’s also more than a little theatrical, since he has to project leadership qualities, and perform them big and obvious enough that they play even to the gang of idiot bikers he’s trying to lead (insert your own political allusion here). He rides around on a chariot pulled by three big Harley hogs, demonstrating power through elaborate displays of masculinity and extravagant cruelty.
One early scene opens, in a callback to Fury Road, with a closeup of a human skull in a red desert landscape, out of which crawls a gross bug, which gets eaten by a mutated lizard, all of which get smooshed under the wheel of a speeding motorbike. Guts, gasoline, predation — it conveys in an instant the world in which this movie takes place: clever and sardonic in a lurid, slightly perverse and misanthropic way, that highlights the meanness and ephemeral nature of existence. And also feels particularly Australian — a society run by biker gangs from which a primitive Viking religion has sprung based on V8 engines and huffing paint. I don’t think one needs to be from settler nation full of deadly poison things originally envisioned as a penal colony to dream up such a world, but it probably helps.
Our titular character, Furiosa, meanwhile, whom we meet as a little girl, is basically Dementus’s opposite: born into utopian abundance, a hidden river valley in the middle of a vast desert, the secret of which is fiercely guarded by a society of sharp-shooting Amazons like her mother. When some of Dementus’s outriders accidentally discover their home, little Furiosa (Alyla Brown) reflexively tries to sabotage them before they can reveal the valley’s location, only to be kidnapped as human proof that this “green place” exists. While Dementus is fueled by an utter lack of connection, a nomadic monster condititioned to thrive in a burnt-out barren desert, Furiosa is the proverbial sweet summer child, nurtured in familial affection, but driven to vengeance by love of her mother and attachment to her birthplace.
Where Fury Road was more of a ground-level view of the politics of the Wasteland, told largely from the perspectives of Nux (Nicholas Hoult’s gung-ho War Boy), Mad Max the road warrior-turned-Blood Boy (Tom Hardy), Furiosa, and The Wives, Furiosa is a more institutional, depicting the geo-political-ish conflict between the War Lord Clans. These include Dementus, who comes to run Gas Town, Immortan Joe and his Citadel, and Bullet Town (plus a handful of other minor players who probably got credited on IMDB as “torture victim” and “maggot lady”). The three leaders play a sort of game of thrones while jockeying for primacy, while Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy, after she grows up) just tries to survive long enough to bag her ultimate prize and find her way back home.
Like Fury Road, most of Furiosa takes the form of extended road battles, on the War Rig and between the gangs of turbocharged V8s and battle bikes on the paths between the Wasteland’s three fortresses. Meanwhile, some of the best parts are the scenes of these grown up children playing at War Lords, with Dementus trying to determine exactly how much juice he has as a leader, sparring and negotiating against Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), who in turn weighs the advice of his moronic grown-up sons, Scrotus and Rictus Erectus (played by Josh Helman and Nathan Jones* with self-evident Australianness). “Immortan Joe” is itself a perfect nugget of Mad Max vernacular. This florid, grandiloquent and slightly absurd self-designated title that opens with faux Romanistic qualifiers and instantly peters out into the most mundane of informal first names, presumably through stupidity and lack of imagination. All hail our glorious Dirt Father, Omnipitus Steve!
After the power play devolves into slightly repetitive road battles, there were times I wondered whether George Miller had gone back to the well of speeding-tight-shot-of-vehicle’s-grill-to-zoom-of-determined-driver one too many times. The machinations of the three fortresses aren’t always as compelling as the personal journeys of Nux, Max, Furiosa, and The Wives were, and their plans more obtuse. Anya Taylor-Joy, while interesting to look at (ma’am, can I donate some buccal fat?), lacks some of Charlize Theron’s natural gravitas. About two hours in, I actually looked at the time and thought, “shit, there are still 30 more minutes left?”
Ultimately those final 30 minutes turned out to be the best of the film. It’s the part that most distinguishes Furiosa as more than just an extension of Fury Road.
(paywall)