Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Despite not being in love with the Mad Max series, or even of any the actors that played in it, Mad Max: Fury Road was ****ing great, it was Road Warrior and Speed coming together to make a beautiful little half-life baby. It pretty much immediately landed a spot on my shelf of favorites and since then I've seen it several times and it's reaffirmed that it deserves it's place there. It even won 4th place in the MoFo 2015 Action Movie Countdown I ran, so it clearly left an impression.

I've always said that Furiosa was the real protagonist of that movie, so it'd be great if we got a similar movie but focused more on that character.

Well now we have.


WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Real horses. Fake dogs. Fake lizards. Fake insects.

If there's one movie I wish I'd seen in theaters, it's probably Fury Road, so this time I intended to rectify that mistake by seeing Furiosa in theaters. I'm not going to comment on my experience this time since it was unremarkable, but I will admit upfront that I came into this movie absolutely SEETHING after an astoundingly shitty day.

All I'll say is that the United States Postal Service is run by INCOMPETENT STUPID ********.
They earn a rating of , Irredeemably Awful.

Anyway, shock and awe; Furiosa is not as good as Fury Road. In fact I would say that Furiosa is nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Now, on paper, the idea of this movie is perfectly fine; it's a prequel, so there are opportunities to world-build, you know, flesh out the universe that made the previous movie so interesting, right?

However, in practice, this movie, at least to me, is FAR too concerned with the fact that it's a prequel, rather than interested in living up to the literally high octane standards of the movie before it.

The biggest reason anyone has to see Fury Road is the fact that it's basically ONE BIG CAR CHASE, just a constant climbing intensity through virtually the entire movie with a great brutal and emotional payoff by the end.

That moment where Furiosa gets stabbed in stomach while she's driving and everything is looking grim, the orchestra is goin' ham, and you just want to see how they could possibly get out of the situation? ****in' excellent climax of the movie.

This movie doesn't even try to reach that level though. It's not even a constant car chase, or even a similar format of movie. In this movie, we basically see Furiosa growing up into the character she is at the start of Fury Road, and it's strangely cut up into titled chapters. I don't know how else to say it, but this is practically the opposite of how you presented and paced the action in the previous movie, so I'm rather perplexed by this decision.

This badass character is supposed to be played by Anya Taylor-Joy (unfortunately), and I admit she does a decent job of mimicking Charlize Theron's appearance and manner of speaking, but she literally does not even appear until an HOUR into the movie. Until then we're following a third child actor who resembles Furiosa even less and pitting her against Chris Hemsworth, who's another incredibly bizarre casting choice.

Point being that the Furiosa you showed up to see takes a while to appear and the action scenes she's apart of don't blend together in the same escalation of stylish chaos we got in the movie she was introduced in and would therefor be compared to.

Speaking of comparisons, Chris Hemsworth as the antagonist... I'll credit him for not constantly reminding me of Thor, he does manage to get into character... what little there is. The problem with "Dementus" is that he's a woefully underwhelming and non-compelling threat compared to Immortan Joe and his family. In the scene in which Dementus first faces down Immortan Joe and his cavalcade of twisted associates and sexually-inspired family members, it's just VERY glaring that there's so much more personality on the Immortan Joe side.

You got Joe himself (who's strangely played by a much younger, much less gruff-sounding actor, but he still has white hair and wears the life support armor) who this time is portrayed as even more clever and insightful than before, his sons "Rectus" and "Scrotus" (who I was waiting to die for the entire movie and it never happened), the Bullet Farm man dressing in ammo belts, and the Gastown guy who's constantly playing with his nipples...

And then you got Chris Hemsworth, wearing parachute as a cape, which is a nice touch, but also has a teddy bear chained to his crotch with zero context. It just seems like they wanted him to be mildly quirky, but he really doesn't have all that many amusing lines.

There's a moment at the beginning of the movie when Dementus comforts Furiosa and pulls a whole nice guy routine with her, which suggests that he could have been one of those likable villains, where they're just abashedly evil, but they're so polite and accommodating at the same time, like Long John Silver in Treasure Island. That's a great character, but this pretense is immediately dropped when he tortures Furiosa's mom to death and forces her to watch, literally drinking her tears.

OKAY, no subtlety, GOT IT.

So, the whole movie just becomes a revenge plot against this guy, we expand on the origins of a handful of characters, we visit the Bullet Farm, we visit Gastown, we establish how Furiosa became a War Rig driver and even how she lost her arm.

Now let's talk about her arm, because her arm is unironically some of the WORST CG in this entire movie.

Another big feather in the cap of Fury Road is that there was very minimal computer-generated imagery, and what little there was, was used very sparingly. Most notably, was Furiosa's arm, which is missing the entire movie, but you never really notice it because it's not in focus, the actor is clearly wearing an ACTUAL prosthetic arm, and it's just a neat little bit of movie magic that Charlize Theron is not in fact missing an arm in real life, because her skin is being digitally removed in post. The effect is great because it's subtle, you don't notice it, and it's not a 3D object noticeably superimposed over the movie.

Furiosa takes that achievement, that gold standard, that "look! modern movies can make great use of practical effects and minimal CGI" and shits ALL OVER IT.

I suspected that this would be an issue because it was already noticeable in the ****ing trailers, but there is gratuitous CGI all throughout this movie. In fact, I was intensely aware of when there WASN'T CGI onscreen for a period of time because of how prevalent it was.

This movie opens on a shot of Furiosa picking a fruit off a tree, and it looks fake. This movie had a comparable budget to Fury Road, and yet it looks so much worse. You couldn't afford to buy a ****ing apple at the supermarket for a ******* opening shot? Are you kidding me?

So many shots in this movie look like shit, and I'm sure it's do with the fact that they wanted more elaborate backdrops in certain scenes because the composite wide shots of fictional locations are very noticeable. Ironically, there is still an over-abundance of blank desert scenery.

It's also very noticeable multiple times when actors are superimposed into the shot of a vehicle, as if they are in the vehicle, even though they and the vehicle are not moving synchronously, so you can tell that Chris Hemsworth or Anya Taylor-Joy have just been shopped into the footage in post-production.

There are fake CGI dogs in this movie, but they felt the need to force a real horse into one scene for some reason (and then to leave it out in the desert to die). Is it because it's difficult to mimic the movement of an actor on a moving mode of transportation? Cause I've kinda picked up on that.


I'll grant that majority of vehicles in this movie were probably real, but there were a frustrating number of times when they use CGI stand-ins for wideshots or when the vehicle is driving over rough terrain. There are CGI shots of the prototype War Rig, of Dementus's monster truck, and even of Furiosa just driving on a motorcycle.

Other gratuitous and inexcusable CGI includes tires laying on the ground. This is a movie centered around vehicle combat and they can't afford tires. TIRES. TIRES!

But nothing really puts the CGI in this movie to shame more than the scene in which Furiosa loses her arm. I've already explained that this was a really good effect in Fury Road, but it's BAFFLINGLY bad in Furiosa.

So here's the deal: Furiosa gets her arm crushed between a car door and Dementus's monster truck tires. This does not visibly sever her arm, but it clearly injures her. She soon after survives a crash and is dragged out of the wreck to be hung, by her arm, just off the ground. Her War Rig mentor, whose name I don't remember, is tortured to death (presumably) in a cloud of dust and when we eventually cut back to Furiosa, she's escaped, with only her arm left dangling.

Now, based on that description, where do you think they ****ed up the CGI?

Did the arm look like baby's first Blender tutorial?
Was the dripping blood just really fake looking?
Maybe the cloud of dust was manufactured?

No. The really obvious, blatant, and pointless CGI... was HER ARM... WHILE IT WAS STILL ATTACHED TO HER.

Obviously, if you've seen Fury Road, you know this is the scene she loses her arm, so you're going to pay attention to her arm.

Did she lose it when it got crushed between the tires? Nope.
Did she lose it in the car crash? Nope.
In fact she's just standing there, and her arm is... moving asynchronously with her body???

I'm not kidding, there are multiple shots in which you can catch glimpses of Furiosa's injured arm, but it just looks bloody... as it should. Because it's injured.

So WHY the **** is it CGI?

You couldn't put prop blood on her bare ****ing skin in these scene??? It's not like it's obviously broken or anything either, and even if it was, why wouldn't you make a prosthetic broken arm, or put injury prosethetics on her arm? Why is her arm free-floating irrespective of her shoulder? It's really obvious that they're trying to conceal this effect too because Furiosa is bladed toward the camera and the arm mingles with her clothing and the bad guys surrounding her, but I still couldn't help but notice that gave her a CGI real arm.

Not a CGI fake arm, not the prosthetic she wears later which is ALSO rendered in CG (even though you established that this wasn't necessary in 2015...), no they needed to digitally replace her real arm with a different real arm because REASONS.

And the whole kick in the teeth to make it extra stupid is you don't even see her arm get torn off, which might actually afford you some excuse to digitally render her arm, but no, we just cut away and cut back to the arm just hanging there. Entirely pointless CG, my only guess is they weren't sure how they wanted her to lose her arm until they'd already done post-production on the shot having cut it out and then hastily edited it back in.

There's other shit I could complain about; there are far fewer memorable lines. "Remember me" is a weak callback and "make it epic" just didn't land the way you'd hope it would. Certainly no "witness me!" or "it's a lovely day!".

Furiosa, by the end of things, comes off as a strangely sadistic character. It's suggested that she modded her prosthetic arm into a cutting tool to surgically plant a tree into Dementus's pelvis so he turns into Harold from Fallout? Somehow that's just a little bit less "epic" than tearing Immortan Joe's ****ing face off with his own car wheel.

That shit came way outta left field, I don't think anyone guessed that was the ultimate payoff for Dementus and Furiosa's tree nut that never seemed to deteriorate from age.

The music was also noticeably inferior to Fury Road. Fury Road had at least 4 memorable tracks on it's soundtrack, which is more than most movies manage, but I barely noticed the music at all this time other than when it briefly echoes tones from the previous movie.

I'm also in strong agreement with the few comments I've seen so far about the variety of post-apocalyptic vehicles. Other than Dementus's motorcycle chariot, and the handful of neat flying vehicles that the "Fire Water" guys (or whatever they're called) attack the main cast with, there really weren't too many crazy vehicle combinations that stuck out. I didn't see a car with tank treads, or two Cadillacs stacked together, or some batshit crazy amp tower on wheels carrying an entire percussion section and a dude with a flamethrowing guitar...

You know, that's kinda the sum of the problem with this movie. Fury Road wasn't just a matter of "constant action", or "good music", or "more fictional vehicles"; the whole idea of a society built around a Cult of the V8 Engine mobilized by paint-huffing irradiated sociopaths out to "die historic on the Fury Road" all lends itself to an escalating glorification of cars and violence. And they gotta "make it epic".

I gotta agree with Miss Vicky on this one, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is




Final Verdict:

[Meh...]