I can still remember the day I saw Mad Max: Fury Road for the first time.
It was a weekend, and my dad asked me if I wanted to go see it with him in theaters.
I knew of the Mad Max films, but I had never seen any of them.
Still, I had nothing to do that day, so I went with him…and was rewarded with one of the greatest action movies of all time.
Fury Road is a complete adrenaline rush of a film that rarely lets up, and I have returned to it time after time over the years, while I waited for a sequel.
Well, nearly a decade later, we finally have not a sequel but a prequel: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Once again directed by George Miller, the film details the life of Furiosa, before the events of Fury Road.
After being kidnapped from the Green Place as a child, and seeing her mother murdered by the warlord Dementus, Furiosa begins a decades long journey of revenge, while planning to find her way home.
Anya Taylor-Joy is excellent as Furiosa, delivering a lot of range with very little dialogue.
When she does speak, however, her voice is so similar to Charlize Theron’s original version of the character that I actually thought they had got her to dub over some lines.
Just as good is Alyla Browne, who plays the child Furiosa, and has a much larger presence in the film than I thought she would.
The real scene stealer, though, is Chris Hemsworth as Dementus.
This is, without a doubt, my favorite performance of his.
He clearly had a blast playing this character, prosthetic nose and all, delivering an antagonist who is both entertaining, monstrous, and occasionally sympathetic.
So, the movie gets the characters right, but what about the action?
This is a prequel to Fury Road, after all, so the action is part of the package.
Well, the first thing to understand is that Furiosa is structured very differently from Fury Road.
Whereas Fury Road’s simple story is set around one big chase scene, Furiosa is a complicated revenge story with a lot of moving parts.
When we do get the action, though, it mostly lives up to the impact of Fury Road.
I say mostly because Furiosa uses way more CGI than Fury Road did.
The CGI was actually my biggest concern going into the movie because the trailers had made it all look too clean compared to Fury Road’s gritty practical effects.
Unfortunately, there were a few times this CGI took me out of the movie, but it by no means killed the experience.
Besides, the making of Fury Road is pretty notorious for how hellish it was for the cast and crew, so I do understand why they chose the easier approach of CGI rather than practical.
In the end, the CGI is really my only big issues with the movie.
Otherwise, Furiosa is a gripping revenge tale with textbook Mad Max craziness.
I still believe Fury Road is the better movie by a mile, but I knew this would be the case going in since, again, I consider it to one of the greatest action movies of all time.
Furiosa is another enjoyable entry in the franchise, and I would advise everyone to go see it to get the film’s numbers up, since it unfortunately seems to be bombing.
It would be a shame if we did not get another Mad Max movie because of this.
After all, we need more of Mad Max’s crazy to distract us from the craziness of our everyday world.
THE REVIEW MONSTER 