December 30th - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

3.25/5

I wanted to love this. I love Fury Road, I love Furiosa's character. This should have been a great time for me. It was not.

My first thought about this movie is. For being of a similar budget, how can it look so much worse? The easy answer is of course, an overreliance on CGI. While these effects don't look bad in Furiosa, much of Fury Road was practical, and it's hard watching things I can easily pick out as 3d modeled, greenscreened, sped up, or reversed. This dissonance is only enhanced by the use of Fury Road footage during the credits, which looks just so much better in comparison.

(Also, as a side note, some stylistic effects were reused from Fury Road, such as day for night scenes with a strong blue tint, but it just felt like a cheap recreation. While Fury Road uses the blue as a vivid shift in plot beats when the movie has previously been very yellow, Furiosa tends to use it simply as a nighttime shorthand so it falls more flat.)

In terms of writing, I feel like Furiosa misses some of the magic that made Fury Road so impactful. There's less that the film is trying to say, about oppression, misogyny, subjugation, and autonomy, in favor of focusing on one character.

While separating the film into acts across Furiosa's life was interesting and stylistically enjoyable, it caused a sort of disjointedness in the narrative flow, and in her character arc. I did enjoy her friendship with Praetorian Jack, but wish we maybe saw more of how they came to trust each other. Jack telling Furiosa about his parents seems to have been meant as a narrative catalyst (maybe for Furiosa to rescue the last of Immortan Joe's wives?) but it felt more like it was dropped in then forgotten about.

I do think everyone's performances were phenomenal, and while I missed some of the more stylized Wasteland dialogue from Fury Road, everything still read as distinctly the same setting. Chris Hemsworth was a delight to see, and Anya Taylor-Joy's intensity as Furiosa really captured the feel of the character. Rictus and Scrotus were incredibly unnerving and I hope to never have to see them again <3