Furiouser and Furiosa
dir: Dr George Miller
2024
You’ve got to admit, this is a fine looking movie. Like, I’m not a car guy, in that I don’t salivate over cars or read car magazines or care about them at all, but if I see a fine looking vehicle, it stands out, even to me.
This film just looks amazing. For a representation of an ecologically doomed Australia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there sure are a lot of bright blues, yellows and deep reds.
And some shiny, shiny rigs.
The people look pretty shiny and weird too. I don’t think any part of this is trying to look realistic. It’s trying to look mythic, and it quite often succeeds.
Since this director has been making Mad Max films since the 1970s, I can’t really fault him for making the same kind of flick again and again, and also, I can’t really imagine anything more pointless than an origin story for the Furiosa character. Her origin story, for all that we needed to know, occurred in Fury Road. She drives cars and trucks real good, she’s missing an arm, she’s mean as fuck and she hates the jerks who rule the wasteland.
That’s all we needed to know. The look of absolute contempt Charlize Theron aimed at most people, but especially at Tom Hardy as some kind of rejiggered Max was more than enough to know everything we needed to know about Furiosa.
But Dr Miller figured there was essential stuff we absolutely needed to know about the past. Backstory to be filled out. Details to unpack. References to reference.
It’s his call, and he is absolutely meticulous about it.
The wasteland is a terrible and unforgiving place, still. But there was one enclave, one green place left, and little Furiosa was from there. A place of abundance. With trees, and peaches, even.
And then some jerk bastards on bikes came along and kidnapped her, prompting her mother to grab her sniper rifle and go off in pursuit.
The pursuit’s purpose is twofold, in that obviously she’s keen to get her kid back. But she absolutely also needs to kill the two jerks, the two idiots who follow a grandiose warlord who calls himself Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
That first part of the film is almost a complete story itself, and I really thought it was immensely strong, however unlikely. Dementus is a berserk character, and yells at top volume a lot, but he’s not a complete fuckwit. I mean, he’s a terrible leader, and has no idea what he’s doing on the strategic level. But he’s got a plan, at least, and can have a conversation with people.
Even in a film that has characters called Rictus Erectus and Scrotus, and has a bunch of almost sub-human mutants, and a legion of suicidal haemophiliacs called Warboys, there is cunning and eloquence in the script. There are some phrases and lines funny only because of the people who are saying them, however unlikely they might be. It’s like listening to Shakespeare, but from someone speaking with an ocker accent.
As an example there’s a whole conversation about the definition of abundance, from a bunch of people none of whom has seen the inside of a schoolhouse, or a thesaurus, for that matter, for their entire lives. And it’s a joy to hear.
There is something confronting (for an Australian) about watching and hearing a movie made, yes, predominately for an overseas market, but with predominately Australian accents (except for grown up Furiosa, who just sounds American with the three or four sentences she speaks in the whole film). It’s almost like it’s an Australian movie. And even Hemsworth, who, last I checked, is Australian, sounds extra Australian with that voice that he puts on.
It’s a remarkable voice. And a remarkable prosthetic nose, a Roman nose, even, deliberately chosen not to ugly Hemsworth’s perfect features up, but to go along with the bizarre Roman verbiage that follows his reign. He’s an amazing character, and despite what the film is called, he’s pretty much the main character for this flick.
Since there’s no mention of him in Fury Road, we can suppose even without watching this flick that he’s probably not going to make it to the end alive, but we could be mistaken. This is without doubt a film about righteous revenge against a deeply hated enemy, but there are all sorts of revenge to be had. Of course, just killing someone violently is pretty vengeful, and biblical, in that God used to do it all the time in the Old Testament, every time someone looked at him funny or he was bored.
Furiosa, however, maybe has a nastier plan in mind.
She remembered the way back to the Green Place, and recorded the stars which would lead her there on her arm, in her spare time, with the tattooist’s needle. But if we’ve seen Fury Road, we know that there’s something that’s soon going to be missing, and I’m guessing this was Miller’s way of making that loss even more painful, and memorable.
I guess someone with absolutely no exposure of any of these films could in theory watch this film first and have a full and complete viewing experience. There might be a bunch of Anja Taylor-Joy fans that watch everything she does regardless of genre or franchise, because they’re just that committed.
I can’t really see it, though. I think anyone who’d never seen any of the preceding films would be unlikely to wander into a cinema playing this and enjoy it, despite the fact that it is a superb version of what it is.
Audiences, pre-covid, became accustomed to action flicks being over-edited incoherent monstrosities with hacky dialogue and dull catchphrases or one-liners. Michael Bay, all the hacks who made Fast & the Furious movies, Luc Besson, a lot of the Marvel stuff – it’s easy and convenient to blame people like that. The fact is the blame sits squarely with the audience, with people like me, who give up and say things like “switch yer brain off and don’t think about it, and you’ll have an okay time”, defending mediocrity out of laziness.
It’s us, we let the apocalypse come and go, because we didn’t differentiate between the stuff that was well made or well crafted, and the shit that just killed a couple of hours for us. So the studios had no incentive to reward the good filmmakers, and ignore the mediocrities, so something like Furiosa “fails” at the box office, when Godzilla x Kong makes half a billion dollars.
I thought the middle section of the flick was the strongest, including and especially the relationship between Furiosa and the pseudo-Mad Max, who was a great Mad Max, as played by Tom Burke who’s pretty great in everything he’s been in, but called something like Praetorian Jack or Impervious to Criticism or something Latin-like.
The first run on the rig to Gastown is classic George Miller, classic Mad Max, and phenomenal stuff, recalling the past but improving, always, upping the ante in great and meticulous ways. And the action is always clear, and looks dangerous and daring. There is an emphasis on physical stuntwork over a lot of digital stuff, but there’s still also a massive amount of digital stuff, but it looks solid, and not shoddy, not hastily rushed.
And it all looks so glorious. I think in some ways however unnecessary as this flick might be, that it’s superior to Fury Road. It’s not always that something is improved by not having Tom Hardy in it, but this is one of those rare cases. Surely a future Furiosa as well doesn’t need Tom Hardy either, and whether it stars Anja Taylor-Joy or Charlize Theron, it hardly matters. Cast both of them for all I care.
Still, it does make me want to go back and watch the earlier film again, to capture some of that magic, again. This is a grim world, but it’s not entirely without hope.
8 times this flick is an embarrassment of visual petrol-head riches, by which I mean “lots of stuff” out of 10
--
“You fabulous thing. You crawled out of a pitiless grave, deeper than hell. Only one thing that is going to do that for you. Not hope. Hate. No shame in hate. It's one of the greatest forces of nature.” – where’s the film detailing Dementus’ backstory, huh? - Furiosa
- 484 reads