A lot of time when a sequel or prequel comes out, I try to go back and watch the previous movies. Sometimes I don’t get that opportunity. However, with Furiosa I wanted my wife to go see it as well (she’s a fan of girls kicking ass), which meant she needed to watch Mad Max Fury Road first. So we both went into the movie this evening with Fury Road only a couple of days old.
First… I really dug the movie (Courtney liked it a lot as well).
Chris Hemsworth is a worthy addition to the villains of this world. You could tell that he was having a ton of fun just playing nearly every moment as big as possible. Anya Taylor-Joy has very large shoes to fill in the titular character’s role, and she does a great job in making the character hers.
As to the story… while it is one overarching story of Furiosa’s life, Miller does an interesting thing where he breaks up these tales into segments, with each having their own title. I thought that was a cool way to tell these little tales that still allow for the time jumps we need for Furiosa to grow up, but I also realized that these Mad Max stories could happen in almost any order (prior to this movie), and as such they are little stories you might tell about the heroes and villains in mythology. Each of the chapters in this movie are exactly that, chapters of a larger tapestry within this world.
With the box office results so far, it would be fair to say that it hasn’t performed as the studios would have liked it to perform. And while I don’t have the answers to all the questions pertaining to why people aren’t going to the movies like they used to (although I do have plenty of theories that range from the cost of movies to make down to the cost of seeing a movie and a bunch of other things in between), I do have a couple of thoughts about why this particular movie might have stumbled out of the gate.
Both Fury Road and Furiosa ask something of its audience that I’m unsure how it works across the broader spectrum. They ask you to buy into a post apocolyptic world that is gonzo. The characters are over the top, larger than life, in a world where the lives of the extra characters are beyond meaningless. And by that, I mean those people are sacrificial lambs in the entire sense of the word. I’ve heard that the best science fiction asks you to believe one thing, but then grounds the rest within the rules you would expect. Mad Max says this is a dead world run by insane men… and oh, yeah, there’s going to be over the top, in your face action to the point you are going to question how anyone would live for an hour in this world.
But that’s the charm of these movies as well. I think it is why Fury Road did as well as it did. It got the good word of mouth to help slowly build to a success. Whether Furiosa does the same, it’s hard to say, but given Hollywood’s penchant for taking these “duds” and immediately trying to go to streaming, we may never know the real answer.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
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His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
