Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and the Current Plight of Entertainment Cinema
Any casual moviegoer will agree that a big part of the pleasure of seeing the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, and DC comes straight down to our cravings for escape. It’s the most basic human instinct made possible by our unique endowment for imagination and creativity. It’s quite revealing to see this in existing research on sensory deprivation: as all sensory input is being cut off, having no new external stimuli required to function, the brain tries to create its own sensations in the form of hallucinations. By biological design, it’s only natural that we escape and fantasize. And if Maslow’s hierarchy is anything like how we experience and criticize art, it’s only natural that we would want to satisfy our basest needs for eye candies and trashy sentiments before meaningfully making contact with deeper parts of our humanity as well.
It seems chic now to look down on superhero movies and other such kitsch, with good reason — there’s perhaps no better scapegoat to point to as the culprit of the creative stagnancy in the industry than billion-dollars worth media empires that put out blockbusters designed for the widest possible range of tastes and easily comprehensible to a sub-literate audience in children and the Global South (even though there are other factors that are just as serious, like auteur-worship and the shareholder model of capitalism beginning in the late-70s). For the younger generation of aspiring filmmakers not keen on selling their souls, there are still more reasons to hold these works of trash in contempt: they crowd out everything else on the markets and stifle their ideas in their wombs.
But I suspect that there’s even more to it than that. Cinephiles, especially those whose cultural milieu when growing up is postmodern (or post-70s) or metamodern (or post-2000s), having matured and now been exposed to what the culture considered art and style, will tend to nod with their friends in conversations about how nostalgia is the only possible saving grace of entertainment cinema, all the while masking their shame, however slight or substantial, for their initial enjoyment of their childhood indulgences. If a pretentious arthouse or incomprehensible experimental film gets overwhelming acclaim on Letterboxd and not IMDb or anywhere else, and a relatively handsome Marvel film gets a rating that normally belonged to garbage, you know something’s up.
Between a synthetic creation for profit and an inspired work of art, it appears as if some auteurs like Christopher Nolan and George Miller have the privilege to exploit the best of both worlds, but for anyone who grew up on John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, among others whose sensibilities are appealing both sensationally and aesthetically, it’s rather like a return to nature. Part of the problem now is with how the masses perceive and categorize cinema and how they discriminate between art and entertainment, like black and white. It’s embarrassing that something like Mad Max, or Barbie, or The Holdovers would get marketed on AMC and elsewhere with a golden frame around them that says “Artisan Films” when there was a time when people would die of laughter if someone had suggested that Bullitt, or Annie Hall, or Oklahoma! are art films (if you were the publicist and you drive people out of the cinemas by putting the big bad “art film” labels on the posters, you’ll need to hire security and be on the lookout for the studio exes ready to lynch you with their bare hands).
So when Furiosa is reported to have bombed at the box office this Memorial Day weekend, I doubt if there is enough room for surprise. Our first instinct is to point to somewhere else as the root of the issue — streaming services, television, online piracy, inflation, factitious diabetics who prefer a pause option, the permanently online — but if Barbenheimer has taught us anything, it’s that marketing, in tandem with the right forces, is perhaps more central to a movie’s success than some people realize. Furiosa had just as many reasons to succeed at the box office as Barbie and Oppenheimer: the name recognition of George Miller, the director and mastermind behind the Mad Max series, of the stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, of the characters and the post-apocalyptic desert setting carried over from Fury Road, and perhaps most of all, of the franchise itself. And it didn’t, but Barbenheimer did. As I pay no attention to trailers or commercials like a mewing gigachad, I can’t speak about the marketing strategy either; though it’s clearly no Barbenheimer, the reported marketing budget isn’t insignificant either (it’s actually more than the entire production budget). Having eliminated all these which are possible, we should now turn to whatever that remains, which, however improbable, must be the truth.
Spoiler alert
The film scurries about in five episodes (was there a need for serializing?), and it’s so preoccupied with action that the setting and characters in this one are impenetrable. What is it about the Green Place, other than the harshness of the outside world, that compels our heroine to find her way back? Having seen Fury Road, viewers would probably want a little more than a “green place where women lived” from a prequel that’s supposed to have explored the background behind Furiosa, an enigma in much of the 2015 film who anguished when she learned of the eventual fate of her birthplace.
Judging by past cases of different actors playing the same role in different contexts, one could not have expected Anya Taylor-Joy to have fared nearly as well as she did in her mimicry of Charlize Theron’s tomboy composure. Yet the screen presence isn’t hers — she went too far with it, maybe for fear of failing to live up to Theron’s brooding grace and the audience’s expectations. She even sounded with the pitch and tone of Theron towards the last act, almost as if someone did an AI job on the dubbing.
Like most actors, Taylor-Joy is a radiant performer when the material allows her to bring a hidden part of her personality out to the fore. But unlike Theron, for whom this character type emerges out of her sensibility naturally, Taylor-Joy is instead searching on the outside for a way in. Her characterization is also low on marrow (as opposed to in Fury Road), so her stoicism here seems rather like tapping into something underneath that’s actually not there; it’s more flamboyant than graceful.
In Fury Road, Theron’s Imperator, with her gang of angelic-beautiful wives escaping from the ogre tyrant-husband and his army of hooligans and oafs, among the tens of others, are cardboard characters, if their names hadn’t already made that clear enough (Immortan Joe has two sons, one’s the blah ugly Scrotus, the other’s the dimwit pedophilic truck-lifter Erectus, and their enemy here is by the name of Dementus). But here in this prequel, it’s a euphemism to even call these characters. At one point, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa was presented with a dilemma between saving Tom Burke, trapped alone on the other side of the gate with enemies approaching, and taking off for her long-missed homeland. For spectacle’s and moral’s sakes, the film has her choose the former, so it wasn’t much of a dilemma to begin with. We become confused animals agitated in the heat of the action, so the realization that there’s too little to support whatever the chemistry was between her and Burke and what made her want to stay and save him came to a lot of us a little too late. What little there is that Taylor-Joy brought to her character that Theron didn’t was her round and perpetually watery-eyed stares, which could have probably added another layer to her debonair mien. But she didn’t know what to do with it when she first laid eyes on Burke or when she met Dementus at Gastown for the first time in years. You can’t tell any subtle difference in mood or affect from one gaze to another, as you could with Zendaya in Challengers and Dune: Part Two. We can’t even approximate what she’s feeling, other than to project our own or say: she looked cool.
Chris Hemsworth always had an unhinged side, and it’s hinted at too glaringly in his Marvel performances, held back only by the PG-13 requirements (though that didn’t stop Waititi from putting on a show where he’s presented nude in front of Zeus). Here, he’s an unleashed bulldog, and when he’s covered in red fumes, supposedly blood, he opens his arms with a sociopathic glory written all over him. However, his Dementus is even more a hollow shell of a character than Taylor-Joy’s.
We’re not quite sure what motivates him, whether in sadistically murdering Furiosa’s mother while forcing the poor girl to witness it, or humiliating Immortan Joe and his hoodlums (and himself) in negotiations, or just a general desire for conquest and control (if he had wanted to stalk Furiosa and her mother to get to the Green Place, why did he abandon that goal a little later when he captured them?). If the teddy bear, supposedly once his daughter’s, was supposed to have us take a peek past his roughneck appearances and into his psyche, maybe even to empathize with him or the version of him that could have been, we certainly don’t feel like it, if not gliding past it without noticing: there is no “undercurrent,” so why bother looking even if someone tells you to?
And the same sort of confusion generalizes to the lesser characters. In Fury Road, the plot was carefully contrived to give each player their chance to shine, and despite the relentless suspense and action Miller and his writers made different characters useful in the process, so the action itself becomes the way through which they’re explored: the wives weren’t wasted as eye candies, and their different personalities came through, and so did the different villains, like the “Bullet Farmer” who had a biblical tantrum after he was blinded by a sniper shot or the fat “People Eater” whose sadistic face we see each time after he runs over someone we root for.
Here, the child actor who played the younger Furiosa in the beginning episodes, Alyla Browne, shows promise but still couldn’t divert us from the girl’s confounding decision to save her unrecoverable mother by walking to her (couldn’t she have run and was recaptured, or tried to save her mother by stealth and discovered?), or elucidate her feelings when she saw a sex slave giving birth to a deformed child, to Immortan Joe’s dismay; Tom Burke and Furiosa’s mother were used as plot devices and character development tools for the heroine; Nathan Jones, who, as Erectus, was a laughing stock in Fury Road, was barely given anything to do or work on; the war boys were barely existent except in a show-off scene; and we have no memories or impressions of any of the Vuvalinies or their ways of living. Nor were there any themes like in Fury Road, except vague sketches of ideas already expounded upon (some may have suspected this of expanding upon the eco-feminism of Fury Road, for example).
It speaks to how gripping and intense the action scenes were, especially the prolonged chase sequences, that many of these flaws were left unnoticed, but even these are too reminiscent of what the audience already knows from other Mad Max movies. And the jarringly episodic narrative structure kills that streak of excitement that levitated the entirety of Fury Road. It surely seemed too turgid and unrealistic a goal to replicate the vacillating mix of suspenseful anxiety and bombastic intensity, or the sheer-heart-attack economy of Fury Road, but it could have probably brought over some of the charm.
The action in Fury Road, for instance, is often interlaced with slapstick comedy, with impeccably neurotic timing, when Max swings around like a chimpanzee as he was trying to escape or when he was pulled down by the chains when fighting with Theron, or when Nux chases them like a madman nodding back to a bird skull bobblehead. But there’s none of that here. Worst of all, there was this new preachiness in the narration and the stiff-mannered dialogues, especially at the end: besides the wonderful revenge-fantastical bit about Dementus’ fate, the ending conversation between him and Furiosa almost seems surreal, as if she turned the clock backward and mentally de-aged, and now nagging and pestering with a straight face for what seemed obvious to everyone as a foregone conclusion.
Maybe moviegoers hold a grudge against “more of the same” for principled reasons after all because, while exciting and stylish as it is, Furiosa offers so little new to the world of Mad Max that I don’t think you could say the same with any other mainline Mad Max entry. And the plot holes: just however the hell did Dementus and his motorcycle gang not notice Furiosa tears off her arm and escapes when they have her completely surrounded? And you wouldn’t know it from reactions from the press and Letterboxd, because there’s now such an extraordinary shortage of excitement and inventiveness in cinema that anything, be it the Barbenheimers or the I Saw the TV Glowses, or this, could seem like they’re made from another world.
*When Elsa Pataky was reintroduced as a scarfaced psychopath, having just finished the scene with the murder of young Furiosa’s mother, faded to black as a knife was nearing her face, and having recalled an earlier scene in which Pataky played a Vuvalini leader conversing with Furiosa’s mother, I had a “3 Women” moment.
★★★½☆
