Furiosa

Now we have established that I am not a huge fan of action movies. I think they generally have no plot, no emotional depth and they hold some of the shallowest acting performances. The obvious exception to this is Mad Max: Fury Road. The only action movie I’ve seen where the action actually helps tell the story. It also really isn’t a Mad Max story, it was very much Furiosa’s story which is why I thought the new Furiosa movie was a bit unnecessary. All that said Anya Taylor Joy was an impeccable casting choice so I chose to give it a chance.

I will say right off the bat that 2 and a half hours for this is too long. WAY too long. Especially considering that we already knew a lot of her backstory. Fury Road did a good job of telling us who she was. There is nothing I hate more than needless cash grabs off a popular IP. If a movie isn’t NEEDED, if the story doesn’t HAVE to be told, then it simply shouldn’t be.

I think that this was a good role for Chris Hemsworth, he’s never really played the evil guy before and he got to flex some different actor muscles for this one.

The visuals are definitely in line with Fury Road, it feels very consistent to the franchise. What it's missing is the actual storytelling. Fury Road had very little dialogue, it told it's story almost completely through action and visuals and that is one of the reasons why it is so brilliant. Furiosa failed to do this on every level. Now I can hear fans of the movie now….”Well it's it's own movie, you can’t compare the two”. Well actually I can and by making a film called Furiosa, The Mad Max Saga the filmmakers are begging me to compare.

I also never want to hear anyone refer to a movie that made a profit as a “flop” ever again, if it made a profit it was by definition successful. We also need to stop measuring the quality of a film by how much money it made because those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Especially in a world where going out to the movies is too expensive for people. Movie theaters are actively dying and it has nothing to do with the quality of films being released.

So the entire first third of the film had very little to do with Furiosa. It focused far more on Chris Hemsworth’s character than it needed to. I understand the concept of showing what her influences were as a young child. I just think that would have been more relevant if we were at least seeing these things from her perspective. Instead, the film was happening as normal, with Furiosa just off to the side. It didn’t start being about her until an hour in.

Overall, I think it was an okay mnormal,ovie. It was fully unnecessary. We really didn’t find out anything super new about her character. And the new information that was there was simply not delivered well. I think if we had seen the things with Dementus through the bars of her cage and from her perspective it would have been more connected. I’m gonna put it toward the middle of the pack. Nothing about it was bad, but nothing about it was great either. I think the first mistake was trying to recapture the magic of Fury Road. Fury Road is truly one of the greatest action movies of all time, therefore this movie could only pale in comparison. And that is the problem with milking IPs. You are setting spin off up for failure. 7/10 at best.