Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
While still an essential cinema trip for 2024 this action blockbuster fails to reach the impeccable standards of its predecessor.
Babe: Pig In The City is George Miller's 1998 sequel to the Best Picture nominated film Babe. The film takes place in a surrealist dreamscape where our shepherding hero descends into a sordid underworld and becomes a sort of bestial mob boss, looking after his clan of animals and getting into hijinks involving vets and drowning dogs. Characters flit in and out of the film, some start as villains before becoming trusted friends, some meet tragic ends. Some of them are chimps in makeup. The film naturally ends by repurposing the titular fight from Miller's own Enter The Thunder Dome when Mrs Hoggett dons an inflatable clown suit for reasons that escape my memory.
I mention all this because this is the George Miller who directed the new prequel to 2015's acclaimed Mad Max Fury Road. Given the long gaps in the Australian auteur's filmography it can be easily forgotten that Fury Road's famed narrative minimalism and hyper sharp storytelling are not particularly in keeping with the man who made not one but 2 films about singing penguins, but instead stand out as what can come when the man has to pare down his ideas to the absolute bare minimum in pursuit of Hollywood financing.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is well at home within Miller's usual oeuvre, a grand epic spanning decades and packed full of flamethrowers and hangliding desert pirates. The trailers promised the answers of Furiosa's life story and the film delivers, all the while slightly forgetting to actually make the story about her at all.
We meet her as a young child as she is kidnapped by the forces of The Great Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the leader of a nomadic group of bikers rampaging through the wasteland. Dementus and his false nose immediately steal the film away from our hero, locking her in a cage as if to say to the audience "we'll get back to this later". Soon Dementus learns of The Citadel and Immortan Joe and we are sucked into a grand conflict over who rules the wastes. All of this takes around an hour and does little more than set the stage for Anya-Taylor Joy's Furiosa, who enters back into our story as a mechanic for the Immortan's fleet, who still years later is still plotting to get home.
From here we enter the world of bombastic action fans of Fury Road will be champing at the bit for, there are explosions a-plenty and everyone in the cast gets the chance to pull some wild action while going a hundred miles an hour.
Some will be disappointed to learn that in these sequences Miller has opted to move away from the practically driven set pieces of previous Mad Maxes and has traded "realism" (here to be taken with the biggest pinch of salt imaginable) for breadth of action. Action in Furiosa comes at you from all directions and distances as people take pot-shots at eachother from flying motorcycles, drive up cliff faces and generally go far out of their way to kill each other in as shiny a way as possible. While the heavy use of CGI is a sad sight after Fury Road became a figurehead for practical action the sequences are still crafted for maximum impact and don't leave the viewer wanting. Nothing ever reaches the heights of Fury Road but you get much more insanity packed in to make up for it.
This sense of scale is both Furiosa's best asset and its overall failing as the grandness of the story loses track of the emotion that pulls us through. We never spend the intimate time with Furiosa as child or warrior to really feel her aims; the script overall feels much more excited by playing with the big box of toys generated by the world building of the previous entry, no longer held back by having to convince anyone that this makes any sense at all.
The less-is-more approach is gone and instead we are presented with a wasteland that has been fleshed out to Miller's imaginative lengths. The story becomes more of a medieval epic over who controls the wasteland between Gas Town, the Bullet Farm and The Citadel and the central story of a girl just trying to get back home to her childhood is lost amongst the carnage of lead and guzzaline.
Still go watch it though.
