Let me preface this review by saying I apologize for taking so long to start writing movie reviews again. As you can see from the large date gap, it has been half a year since I last wrote anything. Cohost declared its end of service, and became paralyzed by the need to move. I've finally completed that move, and here we are. I did not stop watching movies, but there have been too many and I'll only pick the most important of those from the break to write about. So to begin with, here is Furiosa, selected for being the least important of the important ones, as a warmup.
In full disclosure, I watched this movie on an airplane, on the tiniest screen one can reasonably find to watch movies on. And given what I have to say about this film, it is fair to wonder if that is part of the problem. But I didn't do that for Fury Road, for which this serves as essentially a joint review, since they're pretty much the same movie.
These movies are very popular, both of them, even if they didn't do so well at the box office; they are critical darlings, as they say, and people used to rush to say Fury Road was the best action movie of all time, the best movie of the year, and similar outlandish things. I think the reason for this is that these movies are about spectacle, and The People LOVE spectacle. Marvel movies, for instance, are largely spectacle movies. Avatar was spectacle movie, and it shattered box office records even though no one liked its story or characters! What Fury Road did, and Furiosa by extension, is let people pretend that they were not watching it for the spectacle; it was a socially-acceptable outlet to announce your admiration for, and everyone politely agreed to pretend that it is because of the production value, or the setting, or the characters, or whatever they wished. But really, it's about the spectacle. The MCU, as I mentioned before, used to be on this level of social acceptability, before the latest set of flops; now you can't stay cool and say "yeah, I love the MCU." Its sin is probably that it lasted too long. Single movies, or pairs of movies, don't really have that issue. In fact, the fact that so few people went to see Furiosa was almost a point its in favor, because everyone claimed to love it but no one had seen the movie to argue, and it let people complain about how no one appreciated this work of genius.
If you're getting the impression that I was not so fond of it myself, you are correct. I think it's somewhat boring, I think the characters are a rehash of the last movie, and I don't think the Wasteland has much to say for itself, nor does it really even try to. And that's fine, I guess. I don't think it's a bad movie, I just don't really think it's a good one. You watch it when you want to see pointless action with big trucks and flames. And heresy though it may be to admit it, Fury Road was the same way, only slightly better. It was nothing special, just a perfectly serviceable action movie that everyone agreed to pretend was something more because they wanted an excuse to watch the action without having to feel like they were lowering themselves to the Action Genre, with its terrible reputation as a childish outlet for excess testosterone.
Perhaps I'm simply free of this because I've always respected the Action Movie, and still do, and watch them with no shame. There are many good ones! This isn't particularly one, it's just another episode in a large franchise that has become more devoted to the aesthetics than anything else. I'll stick to the original Mad Max, the best of the bunch, because it is the most grounded and has the most to say about what course a society might take as the last vestiges of civil society crumble. Maybe I just needed to see it on the Big Screen.
Score: 5/10
IMDb: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
PS: I will never buy Anya Taylor-Joy as a battle-hardened warrior. Sorry, I simply cannot do it. No one has ever looked less like they've spent their life being weathered by the desert and the fire. The child actor that played Even Younger Furiosa did a better job channeling Charlize Theron.
PPS: What other movies were important enough, during my absence, to warrant a future review? Well, I have my list, and yes, Hundreds of Beavers is on it, but if there's something in particular you want to see, let me know. But if we're being honest, I probably didn't watch your suggestion because I was too busy watching every Death Race movie, aka the Mad Max of America (land of freedom and incarceration).
