Does “Furiosa” live up to “Mad Max: Fury Road” ?

It is with an excitement tinged with fear that we were waiting for this prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road; that is, with the indomitable hope that we would relive the astonishment experienced in 2015 in front of what history should remember – at the very least – as the decade’s blockbuster, while at the same time with the lucidity necessary to recognize that such revelations are not meant to happen twice. Furiosa could not be another Fury Road; it therefore had to be something else. The films stands out more specifically because of its amount of dialogue – Charlize Theron had a total of 80 lines in a film where she wasn’t even the official main character, Anya Taylor-Joy only has 30 in her own spin off; the saga makes John Wick look like a chatterbox – or because of its comical relief that is taken to some sense of buffoonery: Chris Hemsworth as a guru bandit, a bad guy whose detachment and irony evoke the Thor films directed by Waititi.

But, most notably, the film proceeds to an unfolding through the use of a conception and writing of narrative and space, which are one and the same here, that is both extremely allusive and pared-down – a piece of desert, a journey there and back – and relates back to a practically mapped out and historicized universe, spanning fifteen to twenty years of political chronicling of the tribal wars on the Wasteland. In order to recreate the passage from Mad Max 2 to Beyond the Thunderdome, the film is a sharp, nearly theoretical western, whose action is united and crystal clear (defending a refinery / escaping the Citadel), followed by a peplum which flourishes with a broken order and a sense of messianic coming of age. The video game created by Avalanche Studios and developed concurrently to Fury Road seems to have gone through similar stages: Furiosa looks like an open world game – or, more literally, like a sandbox game. Its successive infiltrations and takings of strongholds work around playing dynamics; so do the many scenes of looting – Miller systematically takes the time to film his characters as they get ammunition or gear on corpses or in vehicles – the film is a run, that is a filmed game. 

But why, then, in essence, was it necessary to return to the Wasteland? Not so much to reinforce the obstinately unidimensional character of Furiosa – who remains, throughout the whole film, a closed door – as to take back and further the promethean saga opened with Fury Road. That is, some sort of train movie without trains, in which the convoy of truck and muscle cars remains always linked together, as a gigantic series of trolleys, incapable to stop or to derail from its straight  axis which seems without an end – or if there is one, it is easy enough to forget. The flamboyant main chase whose astounding filming conditions had invaded the press even before the festival (78 days of filming, 15 minutes of pyrotechnics – hey, how big’s yours?) and its swarm of not-so-little sisters are the main reasons for existing of the film, which is much more interested in the dance of events than in the passions of women and men; or, more precisely, whose intent is to transcend the second through the first.

This is the most important lesson of a mute sort of burlesque which the filmmaker seems to revel in more than ever through the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy: silent puppet, invincible doll, moved by a fixed idea that could turn her inhuman if it weren’t for the melancholic irony which veils her gaze; in short, furiously Keaton-ish when she stands in the middle of the moving apocalypse of this new “General”, of which she is the mechanic. One year after Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, by James McQuarrie, the motif of the train, inherently consubstantial to that of cinema, still remains an obsession within the field of such demiurge blockbusters that are intent on piercing the veil, and the screen, again and again, of the Indian salon, in order to reach for an unknown destination that here does not seem to be anything else than the end of time.