The tale of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her quest for vengeance against the man (Chris Hemsworth) who murdered her mother.
The simple fact is that no Furiosa prequel was going to be able to live up to a single close up of Theron’s eyes. And Furiosa is at its least interesting when it is dealing with Furiosa’s rise through the ranks of Immortan Joe’s (Lachy Hulme) colony.
It is probably best to try and keep Fury Road out of mind. And it is definitely a movie worth watching.
My first pull quote idea was that it is the Beyond Thunderdome to Fury Road’s Road Warrior. It is completely different in structure and even tone. Whereas Fury Road was pared to the bone, and limited in location and timeframe, this follow-up is an epic tale taking in decades, going back to the title character’s childhood.
With her exaggerated features, Anya Taylor Joy is almost designed for George Miller’s universe. Her eyes are such a focus of the mise-en-scene, she spends most of her early scenes partially masked. When she talks (rarely) it is almost disconcerting.
Special mention should be given to child actress Alyla Browne who plays young Furiosa for the first third of the movie. She holds the movie’s centre, even more so, I would judge, than Taylor-Joy.
Not that Taylor-Joy is bad, but she never catches the character’s blazing fire - there is something too remote and collected about the actor that I was never fully invested.
There are times in the movie where she almost fades into the background. The film feels more like an ensemble piece than perhaps intended, and the key turning points - like the loss of her arm and her friend Imperator Jack (Tom Burke) - feel less impactful.
I was wondering why they did not hit, and it took me a while to figure it out - they are essentially repeating the trauma of her mother’s death. I can see the intention - making Dementus the key link in preventing her from returning home, but it still feels like diminishing returns.
That being said, when the movie is about Furiosa and her nemesis, Dementus, the movie is on fire.
Played by Chris Hemsworth with a childish self-centredness, Dementus is one of the more fully-rounded and least powerful antagonists in the wider franchise.
A spiritual descendant of Toecutter and Lord Humungus, Dementus a rootless bandit who has given up on the world, he is either betrayed by, or betrays, his followers. And he cannot even remember killing Furiosa’s mother, derailing whatever satisfaction she is seeking.
Dementus is the anti-Max - it is implied that, like the Road Warrior, he had an unseen life that was destroyed. Unlike the franchise antihero, he has made himself a part of the chaos around him. Dementus is unable to grow or change.
Most horrifyingly, he cannot even rise to the level of Immortan Joe.
Does this movie justify its existence?
Not quite - as already stated, there is something to be said for leaving backstory to the imagination. There is a literalism to the storytelling that starts to wear - Dementus destroying all of Furiosa’s hopes would probably work without him literally shouting that in her face.
What gives Furiosa a heartbeat is its focus on character. Unlike other prequels, which seem overly concerned with the details (Solo’s dice), the focus is on a character’s transformation - the problem is that that transformation is not nearly as profound as the film thinks it is.
I might have been more onboard if the finale did not try to link the movie so directly to what comes next, and if the credits were not intercut with flashes of key moments from Fury Road.
It is meant to create an additional catharsis, but all it did was deflate my feelings toward the movie compared with its predecessor.
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