Furiosa (2024)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

This movie makes all the mistakes I was hoping it wouldn't.

As a Mad Max movie, it's too long - the longest by a full half hour. It's over-reliant on CG - there are big chunks of action sequences where it feels entirely CG or at best actors against a greenscreen, giving it that dreaded 'video game feel', and there's a lot of de-aging and actor-merging so a lot of characters have a digital feel to their faces. It uses all the same visual iconography as a previous entry, bringing nothing new to the table. (The only new thing it brings, really, is Dementus, in that it's a prostheticed-up performance at Oldman in Fifth Element or Depp in Tusk levels of silliness that the series has never gone to before. Not that this is a good thing.) It has a romance subplot (could a female-led Wasteland movie really not just get by without one?). It actually slows down towards the end, retreating into montages, lore-and-exposition narration and self-indulgent monologues about human suffering and 'we're not so different, you and I'. I often felt myself zoning out, bored and even losing track of the story, which are very odd things to happen during a Mad Max movie.

It walks into all the usual prequel traps, too. It defangs and demystifies existing villains (Immortan Joe is now some guy who hangs out in his office bartering over exchange rates, almost on the same level as the other warlords and no longer Furiosa's great nemesis). It needlessly and prosaically explains things from the original (hey, did you want to know how the doctor came to work for Immortan Joe? He was part of a barter deal!). It crams cameos from existing characters in, coming up with contrived ways to avoid contradicting established events. It feels the need to link up directly to the start of the original, even though it's not a satisfying ending. It recontextualises little things in odd, slightly less satisfying ways (the other towns have the same skull-on-steering-wheel emblem as Immortan Joe which, while not directly contradicting anything in Fury Road, makes the three warlords of the wasteland feel more like a regimented structure rather than separate unstable elements who sometimes form uneasy alliances). It doesn't manage to overcome the viewer's knowledge of future events to create a feeling of jeopardy.

Fury Road surprised everyone with its freshness and vitality. Furiosa has none of that. File it alongside Prometheus and Crystal Skull under 'directors returning to their series and dashing high hopes by producing what feels like a legacy sequel that provides a superficially close facsimile of the source material while not actually understanding it'.

Rating: a disappointing slog.