By Mark Fields
Full of Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing
It’s hard to fathom how a movie so full of everything – post-apocalyptic machinery, frenetic steam-punk characters, harsh but vibrant landscapes, and buckets and buckets of effluvia – can nevertheless be so barren of interest, even boring. It is even more baffling when that movie, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, comes as the much-anticipated prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, the acclaimed film that relaunched the epic Mad Max series.
Furiosa is the origin story for the character vividly played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road (now evoked by Anya Taylor-Joy). Curiously, Taylor-Joy doesn’t make an appearance until nearly an hour into the unnecessary long (148 minutes) movie. And when she finally shows up, she is strangely mute for much of the rest of the film.
We see the kidnapped young Furiosa treated as a prize or a pawn by a series of eccentric yet menacing warlords, including the fearsome Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the main villain in Fury Road and a new character, Dementus (flamboyantly, brutishly portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, going full Aussie). The young woman absorbs the harsh realities of her situation and learns survival skills (that Dementus calls “purposefully savage”) while she bides her time for vengeance and a trip home to her family.
On this most slender of plots, screenwriter Nick Lathouris and director George Miller grind out a seemingly endless progression of set pieces filled with the same baroque apoca-punk aesthetic familiar from these films dating back to the original Mad Max in 1979. But this time, with so few genuine human characters – really only Furiosa – I just couldn’t muster up enough caring to sustain my interest through the slog of a movie. It all felt performative, stretching out a universe that has run out of new ideas or energy. The flair and wit of previous installments has been replaced with nothing but mayhem and carnage, all with no real sense of loss.
Taylor-Joy, with her large expressive eyes, has been a compelling presence in recent film and TV roles (Emma, The Queen’s Gambit, The Menu), but she is given so little to work with here that even she cannot transcend the thread-bare material.
