Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
One can’t compare George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to Mad Max: Fury Road simply because the two films are vastly different in structure. 2015’s Fury Road is a pure feast of image and sound-making. It’s an almost relentless actioner that continuously dazzles with its thrilling practical stuntwork, colorful cinematography, and intricate sound design that holds up so well nine years later, it almost feels as if it was shot yesterday. It’s also Miller’s masterpiece, to which he knows he’ll never be able to top it.
What’s most interesting about Miller as a filmmaker is how he never makes the same project twice. The Mel Gibson Mad Max films are a great example of this – the eclectic, almost over-the-top Beyond Thunderdome is not similar to The Road Warrior, just like the first Mad Max stood on its own two feet as a classic tale of revenge. In entering Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Miller’s more interested in doing a mythological, slow-burn character piece told in five precise chapters on Furiosa’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) rise as the Imperator audiences knew her from in Mad Max: Fury Road. In that film, Charlize Theron portrayed her with impeccable emotional precision, a far more Oscar-worthy turn than the one she gave in Patty Jenkins’ Monster. This makes sense, especially after seeing Three Thousand Years of Longing, which, complete warts and all, informs audiences on Miller’s experimentation with digital textures and effects, as opposed to how he truly set a benchmark for practical filmmaking in Mad Max: Fury Road.
But Miller’s always been interested in pushing the limits of digital textures, either through the invisible work in Fury Road or his experimentation with his famous center-framing shots through the medium of animation in Happy Feet 1 and 2, with the former film landing his first Oscar. Regardless of the quality of the screenplays of those movies (they are certainly very weak), there’s no denying how Happy Feet pushed the boundaries of what animated movies should look and feel like. This inspiration is still greatly felt in most modern animated productions today. It’s of no surprise that Furiosa looks and feels more digitized than Mad Max: Fury Road. But at the same time, does it have to look this clean? The movie begins with Furiosa (played in the first hour by Alyla Browne) in the Green Place of Many Mothers. It jumpstarts a chase, in which our titular character is kidnapped by a group of raiders who work for Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). In that chase, Furiosa’s mother, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser, basically stealing the show from Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth with only twenty minutes of screentime), boards a horse to pursue the raiders. Instead of filming Mary boarding a horse, Miller digitally stitches her on the animal in an unnaturally stilted and tawdry way, a signal of just how cheap its aesthetic will look in most of the film’s most elaborate setpieces.
Miller hasn’t lost his photographic touch, always filming each shot at a compelling horizon. Center framing will do that, but the horizon is not in the middle of the frame. The character is, since the background is more three-dimensional, creating a sense of immersion and play. Here, the visual language is more akin to what he developed in Babe: Pig in the City and the Happy Feet films than the previous Mad Max movies, which is honestly commendable considering how big of an aesthetic lap it is. The use of artificial intelligence is also interesting on paper because it’s not used as a way to replace artists (like Secret Invasion and Late Night with the Devil previously did) but to help them work on complicated visual effects. One may think of Hideo Kojima’s video game oeuvre in those moments, a figure of which Miller is a massive fan (the director will also appear in Kojima’s upcoming Death Stranding 2). But it quite simply doesn’t work. When the dogs and war boys' body doubles are entirely computer-generated, when the green screen is painfully obvious and badly rendered, alongside non-moving shadows and backgrounds as Miller attempts to distract us by putting characters and objects at the center of the frame, it’s hard to become as immersed in the world of the Wasteland than previously showcased throughout the Mad Max saga.
Sometimes, Miller and cinematographer Simon Duggan will pluck a moment of inspiration, such as a paragliding bravura shot as Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) Guzzolene truck is attacked by Dementus’ raiders. But they immediately hamper it with cuts from inside the truck, as the invisible green screen of Fury Road is replaced by a Spy Kids 3D: Game Over green screen in Furiosa. The colors feel much cleaner and less eye-widening than Fury Road, which honestly doesn’t make its aesthetic as different or unique as the usual green screen-laden, grey sludge slop Hollywood frequently puts out. Scenes at night are murky, drab, and unimaginative, and daylight scenes seem too fake (the sky is too blue if that makes sense), lacking the gritty naturalness of the wastelands previously depicted in the franchise. Everything feels much less involving when the digital sheen makes its already fake environments look much less impactful than they should, and it’s nowhere near as expressionistic through Miller’s lens as when the Wachowskis made an entirely digitized product in 2008’s Speed Racer or a previously Simon Duggan-shot film, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Duggan and Miller have proven themselves to be great image-makers. Still, the shots in Furiosa lack verve, kineticism, and poetry, hindering the momentum of any extensive setpiece shown here (which might have been meticulously planned but are all haphazardly executed).
It also doesn’t help that the mythmaking shown by Miller in its five-part story (The Pole of Inaccessibility, Lessons from the Wasteland, The Stowaway, Homeward, and Beyond Vengeance) isn’t particularly enthralling. Beyond neat crossfades where its narrator, The History Man (George Shevtsov), discusses humanity’s obsessions with wars (“the one day, six-day, thousand-day wars”), Furiosa’s tale of revenge against Dementus is inherently paper-thin, with Taylor-Joy completely failing at giving the emotional complexity needed for her introspective performance to work. Of course, Taylor-Joy would never match Charlize Theron’s career-best performance, and that’s obviously by design. Audiences are observing two young versions of the character whose experiences with life away from the Green Place of Many Mothers shaped her into the imperator she ultimately becomes by the movie's end. But Taylor-Joy severely lacks the microphysiognomy needed to properly convey her torment as she exacts her vengeance on Dementus (Hemsworth fares much better, but his cartoonish antics and quip-heavy lines begin to wear thin). Having a dialogue-less performance is fine, especially when you set it up within the film’s diegesis. Mary’s death at the hands of Dementus traumatizes Furiosa so much that she only speaks when she desperately needs to.
Browne, in particular, blows Taylor-Joy out of the water through her implicit facial expressions that take a much deeper turn as she begins to speak to Lachy Hulme’s Immortan Joe in an attempt to free herself from Dementus’ shackles. But Taylor-Joy can never match Browne's immense depth and contemplation to her portrayal of Furiosa. Not speaking requires a deep, innate understanding of micro-expressions. Female actors like Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Lilian Gish in Orphans of the Storm, Maggie Cheung in Center Stage, and most recently, Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver have pioneered performance techniques that showcase how an individual can bring as much complexity with only their eyes as they would with dialogues.
Taylor-Joy doesn’t seem as enthused with this proposition as much as Browne is, ultimately making her Furiosa hollow and dull. In contrast, the child version of the character is a far more intriguing evolution that naturally leads up to Theron, while Taylor-Joy feels unnaturally out of place. It also doesn’t help that there isn’t much about Furiosa’s arc that audiences didn’t know about already (other than how she ultimately lost her arm and cut her hair in the lead-up to Fury Road). And even then, sometimes the aura of mystery is far better than wanting to know everything about the character, especially in how Theron gives the audience everything they need to know about her.
Theron showcases emotional restraint (but intense anguish through her rage-filled eyes) in the first act of Mad Max: Fury Road until the devastating realization that the Green Place is no longer leads her to break down in pure horror. This showcase is far more staggering than the gaps Miller fills in his prequel film because her primal connection to it gives the audience catharsis – Furiosa’s purpose is over. She must then be born anew to continue her life in the wasteland. Miller doesn’t really know how he wants to depict Furiosa’s story of revenge in his prequel and spends way more time developing Dementus than he does Furiosa, which makes their final confrontation feel much less impactful than it should (on a sludgy green screen soundstage too, yuck).
Adding insult to injury, Miller populates his end credits with (pixellated) clip of Mad Max: Fury Road, showing audiences how far superior his craftsmanship was nine years ago than in Furiosa, ultimately making us want to watch that movie instead of the one that just finished. With such dull myth making and turgid images, there’s no real reason for Furiosa to exist, other than to allegedly cash in on the success of one of Fury Road’s best characters. But Fury Road was a modest box office success, and audiences aren’t as interested in prequels as Miller thinks they are, especially when this prequel doesn’t give as much insight to Furiosa – or the wasteland’s side characters for that matter – than they should.
When Dementus asks Furiosa, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” one likely thinks he’s talking to George Miller, asking him if he still has the juice he seemingly had while making his Mad Max trilogy and Fury Road. But his obsession with the digitalization of filmmaking has unfortunately tarnished the doctor’s artistic prowess, preferring artificial movement and synthetic, video-game-like images to the grittiness and naturalism of the wasteland he created in 1979. Nearing 80, Miller still has it in him to make it epic, but he probably isn’t willing to do it like he did when setting the standards for how action should look and feel. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when an audience of zero standards in filmgoing is eating it up when they deserve far better than the same ol’ slop that’s unfortunately infected Miller’s directorial techniques.