Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Review
This past weekend Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga raced its way into theaters and was met with a disappointing opening weekend box office. But I was able to see the film a couple days back, what did I think about it? Is it any good? Let’s get started!
NOTE: I did plan on doing a Mad Max ranking, but time got away from me and I wasn’t able to watch all of the movies. I did the original film and Mad Max: Fury Road before watching this film. That was my perspective going into this movie, I only watched Fury Road, two weeks before this movie came out.
The Good
If you saw my review of Mad Max: Fury Road, I did give it a very positive review but I did say in there that at points the film felt like visual noise at points. You learn about the backstory for Fury Road, George Miller has said that has the images for the film before he had a completed script. I think at points you can feel that with that movie, this movie is the opposite of that. Furiosa, functions as a revenge film in the Mad Max world. Where they set up Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus as this evil dude that does some brutal to Furiosa. And Furiosa spends a decade trying to find him and kill him. It has a very clear goal and objective fur Furiosa. We know what Furiosa is trying to do from the very beginning to the very end of the film. You care about what’s going on, you care about Furiosa’s journey. Some people criticized the film for having a pretty generic plot. It’s a revenge story where a bad dude wronged our lead character, she builds up her skills for years and seeks revenge. Sure, we’ve seen that plot before. But it’s a plot done right, it’s a great version of that. I get and respect what George Miller was going for with Mad Max: Fury Road of doing one continuous car chase. I really dug the film, it was a lot of fun. But I felt like I needed some more character work done, this does that character work. In a sense, this movie makes Fury Road better for me.
While this movie isn’t as high energy and weird as Fury Road was, there’s still some great action set pieces present here. They very wisely didn’t try and outdo Fury Road, that movie had crazy over the top stunts. This movie doesn’t have anything as grand, but it’s still great. George Miller still knows how to shoot and stage the action to make it very cool and brutal to watch. There’s a sense in which the action being smaller in scale is better, because it’s able to focus more on the characters. You know what Furiosa and her friends are trying to do in a given sequence. This movie has some very cool car chases, the one with the war rig about 55%-60% of the way through the movie is very cool. They bring in some aerial stuff to make it interesting and stand out from the other Mad Max movies. But this movie has more gun battles then some of the previous films. I really appreciate the film didn’t try and outdo Fury Road with the stunts, they tried to make very cool action set pieces and they aren’t as big and that’s ok. Not every new installment has to be as big or grand as the last.
From there, you have to talk about our cast and characters. The big stand out here is Chris Hemsworth as our villain, Dementus. Ever since we saw the first glimpse of him in the trailer, he very much transformed into this character. The makeup and prosthetics make him look very different. Beyond the prosthetics and look, Hemsworth is giving a great performance. He’s very clearly having a whole lot of fun playing this character. He’s this character that you hate, he’s evil and despicable. Where early on, in the middle, and at the end of the movie he’s doing these terrible things. It makes you want Furiousa to get revenge even more as it goes along. We also have two different actresses playing Furiosa. The marketing mainly focused on Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa, but it’s a while before she shows up. For a large percentage of the film, it’s this younger Furiosa played by Alyla Brown. Both of them are very solid here, Anya Taylor-Joy only has 30 lines of dialogue in the film. So a lot of emotions are communicated through her facial expressions. She’s very convincing in this role, at any given moment you know exactly what she’s thinking.
Also, I appreciate this film does a lot of world building and fleshing things out. Mad Max: Fury Road took forever to get made, Miller had the idea going back to 1996. He had Furiosa’s backstory and origins figured out for years. Since he’s sat on her origin story for years, he paid attention to the details and made sure everything got fleshed out. You can definitely see that when you watch the movie. All of the places and locations that are visited are fleshed out and developed. Immortan Joe is in here and we see more of him and what his rule was like before Fury Road. We see what Furiosa’s family and living situation was like. It’s just these details that we learn about the world and the characters that make the movie that much more interesting and engaging. You care more about Furiosa because the movie does such great world building.
Finally, I feel like this is a movie prequel done right. A common trope of prequels is they're answering questions nobody was asking or giving answers in a very stupid way. For me, this movie doesn’t do that. This movie actually makes Furiosa a better character, it doesn’t cheapen her character. The questions it does answer, like how did Furiosa lose her arm and stuff like that tie into the plot. They make sense with what happens in the plot as to why certain things would happen to her.
The Bad
The first thing to talk about here, there’s some questionable CGI. I heard that as a common criticism of the film. People were making it sound a lot worse than it actually was. For me, it wasn’t a big issue. It didn’t pull me out of the film or sequences. I was still engaged with the story and characters. But there’s a few shots very clearly Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, or any of the actors were on a green screen and not on location. Especially coming off of Mad Max: Fury Road, nine years ago with no questionable CGI. It is a bit weird to watch this movie, nine years later and notice a bit more awkward CGI shots.
Also, the movie feels a bit too long. It’s just about 2 hours and 30 minutes. A couple of times, it felt like scenes or shots lingered a bit too long. Where a scene would be 90 seconds long and it could have been 70 seconds. Little stuff like that, certain scenes or shots trim up, especially in the middle act of the film. Again, this wasn’t a big deal because I thought the movie moved at a brisk pace from beginning to end.
Final Thoughts: I was excited for Furiosa, but I was more so excited based off of the trailers for the movie. This movie was really really good, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It has a very clear story that gives depth and details to Furiosa and the world. The action here is very well done, it’s big, exciting, and thrilling to watch. Chris Hemsworth gives a great performance, maybe the best of his career. When you put the pieces together, you get a rock solid Mad Max movie.
The Score: 9.1/10 (A-)
Comments