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| Chris Hemsworth's arms deserved their own screen credit, They steal the movie in scenes like this one! |
- The script is mostly about Furiosa, it's a deliberate handoff from Max to Furiosa, because writer/director George Miller is done telling Max stories;
- The script used to be about Max too - perhaps there was more about Max's redemption/haunted by ghosts storyline that was reduced in editing;
- Charlize Theron is a brilliant actress and was iconic in this role;
- Tom Hardy wasn't as brilliant as Max;
- By all accounts, Tom Hardy was impossible to work with making Fury Road, so Miller deliberately minimized his character's role
Regardless, I stand by my 2015 review. Fury Road is "a crackerjack thrill ride with the same vision, finely tuned action sequences, and inventive imagery we'd hope for, cranked up to 1,000." In 2019 I called it the "Best Movie of the decade (for grown-ups)".
Furiosa is also excellent. Somehow the action sequences are even better. The cat-and-mouse chases across the desert are innovative and exciting, even if I don't believe anyone is such a good sniper.
The challenge is making a prequel where you start with a young girl in Paradise, and the audience already knows how she ends up: she never returns to her home, her family is dead, she ends up working for the most evil warlord in the Wasteland, she loses an arm, and so on. We know that all of young Furiosa's struggles are for nothing. By the end of Fury Road there's hope for creating a new Green Place, but we know she won't get there in this movie.
The plot of the movie concerns a power struggle between Immortan Joe, the owner of the water and food, warlord of the Citadel we met in Fury Road, and Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), ambitious and wise leader of a nomadic gang. Dementus has ambitions of toppling the three-pointed balance of power between Joe, his brother who runs Gastown (a massive pumping station + refinery), and the Bullet Farm (a strip mine with a forge). Furiosa grows up in the middle of all this, and uses the conflict to steal an opportunity to seek vengeance.
Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't appear for at least 30 minutes, in fact, one of the early truck chases features Furiosa, but I can't tell whether it's Taylor-Joy or a younger, smaller actress with deepfake SFX making her look like Taylor-Joy. Her recent interview on the Late Show implies the latter. Of course, a truck chase that's probably 80% stunt personnel, what difference does it make? Taylor-Joy's enormous wide-set anime eyes are compelling, and they are even more remarkable when she's wearing a facemask, and she's slathered in black grease. Just like Max, she's a protagonist of few words. Her wordless replies are effective, even if they feel overused by the end of the movie.
It reminds me of a Humphrey Bogart story: while making Casablanca, one day the director told him to enter frame, look to the right, and nod. "Who am I nodding to, and why?" Bogart asked. Doesn't matter, he's told. Turns out this shot was used for when his character Rick lets his band play the French national anthem as a retort to the Nazis. It's a powerful moment for the character and the movie, and it could have meant anything to Bogart. By the end of Furiosa, it felt like the director had a library of "Taylor-Joy looks off camera in closeup" and he just stuck them in where he needed them.
Hemsworth is great as Dementus. His shirtless, bearded, and long-haired warlord might look too much like Thor, so he wears a massive hook nose prosthetic, which does a great job of distinguishing him from the God of Thunder. Only in one shot, does the nose look fake when the sunlight shines through it a little too easily. Also, his heavy Aussie accent and proclivity for utilizing excessively copious verbiage are also nice details. Hemsworth balances strategic thinking, impulsivity, and a strong intellect...plus sociopathy.
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| I suspect he keeps his hair looking good with the same grease that's on his forehead |
Another movie with Furiosa is what we were all looking for. It had to be an epic tragedy with a smidgen of hope, but then again, that's all Mad Max movies. My Grade: A
NIT PICKY: a conceit of the Mad Max movies is that the characters live in the Wastelands, and there's no escape, no hope in any direction...yet they drive cars and trucks that look like they're travelling at 30-60 miles per hour. Australia is 2,500 miles across, total. If you started in the very middle of the continent, and drove east or west at 30 mph, you'd reach the ocean in 3 or 4 days with sleep breaks. Am I wrong?
AND Another Thing... before this movie came out, it was strongly implied that Tom Hardy's Max is the same Max from Mel Gibson's three Mad Max movies. The first movie takes place in the not-too-distant future, where we have a civilization, but it's fraying at the edges. The second and third take place after World War III wipes out civilization.
Here's the problem: in Fury Road Max is six years older than Furiosa, yet when Furiosa is 12 at the beginning of this movie, World War III happened already. How can Max be a cop at age 23 before the war if Furiosa is only 6 years younger than him? I used a spreadsheet and two line graphs to figure this out. The opening scenes of Furiosa would take place 5 years before the first Mad Max movie, when WWIII hadn't happened yet.
How do we fix this? Let's say WWIII happened when Furiosa was a newborn. That means, in Fury Road, the actors playing Max and Furiosa would have to be 24 years apart in age, not 6.
Caveat: this is all assuming all the actors are playing their real age, which means 10 years goes by between the end of Furiosa and the beginning of Fury Road. It's strongly implied Furiosa escapes with the mothers soon after the movie ends. Let's say Fury Road begins immediately after Furiosa, and Theron's character is the same age as Taylor-Joy's. Tom Hardy's Max is still 14 years too young to be the same character in all five movies.
June 1 at the Beacon with H; with Aaron, Richard, and Nic at the Triplex June 12.
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| Alyla Browne is the actress who played Young Furiosa. |