2024 action, dir. George Miller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth:
IMDb /
allmovie.
How did Imperator Furiosa get to be who she was at the start of Fury
Road?
Well, part of the problem here is that Fury Road already told
us: she grew up in a Good Place, she was taken away as a child by
raiders, she grew up and became a fighter for one of the local
warlords, and at some point she lost her hand and gained a prosthetic
one. So one source of tension is immediately removed from this film,
which tells essentially that same story, but over the course of two
and a half hours rather than in snippets of background detail in a two
hour film that also has plenty of other things to say. As with the
failure that was Solo, we don't need to see the origin story in all
its detail; we have imaginations. (Citation needed.)
But there's fighting, right? Yup, and lots of it, and this is
essentially why I watch a Mad Max film. But this is the first time
I've been disappointed by the action; even in Fury Road, which used
a fair old amount of CGI filler, there was always the sense of real
vehicles with real weight to them, real people acting out the
desperate struggle not to fall off and be crushed into the sand. And
yes, there is some of that here…. but there's an awful lot of CGI in
the foreground, sometimes very obviously. In the earlier films,
things too dangerous to be done with actual stunt crew were rewritten
into things that could be mounted in reality; this time, when things
got hard the filmmakers reached for their computers to show something
amazing.
But for me those CGI moments never quite have the same heft as the
real ones. Nobody ever gets the inertia right; a toppling structure
just doesn't quite move like that. An unconscious body doesn't flop in
that way. Damnit, Ray Harryhausen was getting this stuff right with
stop-motion in the 1960s, why can't you? Have you never watched video
of large structures being demolished to see what the real thing looks
like? I have, and it's not even my job. And when you do it on the
computer, it looks wrong.
And the third let-down is Anya Taylor-Joy. I mean, she's not bad, but
she's not even as good as Alyla Browne who plays child-Furiosa. They
could have had Charlize Theron back, but felt that de-aging CGI would
make her look weird. Fair enough, but under all that makeup you can
hardly tell how old she is in the first place, and during much of the
film the character's only a little younger than she is in Fury Road…
So there were three big strikes against the film which collectively
impaired my enjoyment of it. What was left… was OK, but I was never
able to sink into it. So I find myself thinking: building a War Rig?
That's not a Mad Maxy thing to do; what we've always seen before is a
starting situation with painstakingly hoarded resources, built up over
time and destroyed in a brief orgy of carnage, until what you've got
left is one guy walking across the desert. But hey, now we'll just
build another one. And the same applies to Furiosa's prosthetic hand,
which we see whipped up out of scraps by someone with no experience
and working perfectly first time.
It has its moments, sure, but for me a lot of what made the earlier
films distinctly Mad Max (even Beyond Thunderdome) is gone. It's
just another modern action film, with the same lack of visceral
involvement. It's not as bad as Beyond Thunderdome but it doesn't
engage me. (The film lost money. Doubtless Hollywood will use this as
an excuse to cut back on female-led action films for a few more years,
I suspect because the producers and financiers literally cannot tell
good film from bad so they reduce it to a set of tags: action,
post-apocalypse, prequel, female-led. And other post-apocalypse action
films have done well, so…)
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.