Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Director ~ George Miller

Writers ~ George Miller, Nick Lathouris

2024, Australia-US

Stars ~ Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke

 

Firstly, the pace is different. Where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ was all revving up and then full speed ahead, Furiosa’s tale is a bildungsroman and makes many drive-bys and pitstops over time to chronicle her stolen childhood. Her nemesis Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is coded as still hanging onto his own lost childhood by the stuffed bear he carries, the one that he tries to pass onto her but young Furiosa (Alyla Brown) rejects. Keep note of that.

It's pretty with its wastelands, takes time with its tale rather than stunts, although when the stunts come there is no disappointment. There are lots of expendable War Boys and gang punks, noise that hardly abates, a bad guy full of bluster in Dementus (Chris Helmsworth) but who’s not particularly good at the politics once he’s won a kingdom. He’s no Immortan Joe (Lachy Hume). The facing-off between the bad guys is a high point.  Hemsworth is having a grand old time, riding his bike chariot and putting in a prime performance. The segue from young to adult Furiosa, from Alyla Browne to Anya Taylor-Joy is effortless, and the latter puts in a striking wordless performance; those eyes do a lot of work. The only male saviour gesture here for Furiosa is by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke – gruff and secretly humane in the manner of Max), and he’s just getting by too, but otherwise she is out there making her own code of morals and survival.

Which means that ‘Furiosa’ is even more interested in the characters behind the whacky names than previously. Or rather, never has Miller been quite so confident at giving the bizarre their trauma and credence. It’s always been there, but with ‘Fury Road’s Nux he hit a rich stream that he continues to mine here. Where the original film promised much that the sequel delivered on, with ‘Fury Road’ Miller got right the incisive study of a post-apocalyptic crazy culture study that he didn’t quite manage with ‘Beyond Thunderdome’. As Tatsam Mukherjee writes, George Miller “gives us another film filled to the brim with his fears and doubts about the world, and shrouds it in a blockbuster.”

Where there’s a typical given shallowness to the genre, rarely does an action flick possess such genuine despair and outrage and thrill at the same time. There seems to be some kickback because it did not profit as well on its opening weekend as ‘Fury Road’, or because Ana Taylor-Joy is the lead, or because it’s not as good as ‘Fury Road’ or something. As if something of this calibre comes along all the time. As if we regularly get a moment like the War Rig (and he’s directed three of these!). If it is lesser than ‘Fury Road’, it is surely a little due to familiarity and to heightened expectation. In fact, ‘Furiosa’ is commendably different in tone, being a fully-fledged coming-of-age-in-a-post-apocalypse story, although the difference is a disappointment to some.

Dementus and Furiosa spell out the themes quite clearly in their final face-off, as if the whole franchise is stopping to examine the consequences of its multiple pile ups. Like ‘Fury Road’s tirade against tyrants and patriarchy, there is more to ‘Furiosa’ under the hood. Any film that features, let alone begins with a female taking fruit from a tree is going to make me sigh, but by the ending the symbolism achieves layers that carries on the anti-patriarchal line of ‘Fury Road’, allowing for a non-subtle but nevertheless subversive underlay. - Are you sure that we were the sinners? Let me relocate the tree and the blame in its rightful place; and don’t forget that this hellhole is a bunch of male-dominated petrolheads brmming around being degenerate and stealing childhoods. - The symbolism may be broad, but it accumulates to a sophistication; this is more than just sound and fury. 

It’s a slab of definitive action cinema, but in saving all its eloquence and reflection for its showdown – indeed, the most articulate and self-reflective of the whole series, and one that must have been the big enticement for Helmsworth – ‘Furiosa’ ends with a little commentary on the whole bombast, reminding us that the whole thing started with the agonising madness of grief and loss.

And of course the stunts are jaw-dropping.

Zardoz

John Boorman, GB, 1974

I have a life-long relationship with ‘Zardoz’. When I was a kid, I read a lot of splendid science fiction (before I read a lot of junk horror) and ‘Zardoz’ seemed, to me, to simulate what I was reading (just like ‘Westworld’, ‘Soylent Green’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, 'Phase IV' and, um, ‘Logan’s Run’, etc.). It was full of big ideas, a little tacky, a little mad: the central idea was a rogue rebel let loose in an alien world and that was a perennial narrative of the genre. Still is, as we all wanna be rogue rebels (it’s one of the principal selling points of advertising). I liked it. So then I was surprised when I next saw it: I was barely on my teens and at the Glastonbury music festival, spending all my time in the film marquee, of course. This was the early eighties and it was still called a CND festival. I saw ‘The Blues Brothers’ there; someone played the bongos throughout a screening of ‘Woodstock’; and then I saw ‘An American Werewolf in London’ during which … well, that’s a story for another time. But they also showed ‘Zardoz’, which I had seen before on TV: remember, this was hardly the VHS era and it was still a major venture to try a track down a repeat viewing of that film you liked on the three channels on TV. Anyway, I was happily watching the film when its ‘Wizard of Oz’ revelation came…. and the audience laughed. A laughter of ridicule, of “really?” I was perplexed. It was my first taste of realising that others might find ridiculous the things I took for granted. I couldn’t fathom why they found this amusing. Of course, since then, I realise that ‘Zardoz’ has a certain reputation for being silly, pretentious, laughable, a failure. Mark Kermode, for example, writes that “I think Zardoz is a terrible film – a fascinating failure perhaps, but rubbish nonetheless.” 

I don’t feel this. You see, I still feel it’s a full of big ideas, a little hemmed in by its Seventies feel – which I now see as campness – bizarre and a little mad. And I approve. I still feel it resembles some of the pulp I was reading, and once I became acquainted with ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine and Marvel’s short-lived comic ‘Epic Illustrated’ I thought it resembled the stories in them too. They explored worlds that were immersive and were often hinged on the bizarre. I like absurdism if it’s working – making absurdism work is a trait I admire (another reason I am a horror fan) – and I have long since realised that I regularly have a blind spot to what others might find preposterous. It’s too pulpy to be serious and too serious to be pure pulp. In this sense, it is an oddity.

So, yeah: Sean Connery wears a nappy. Which I never had a problem with as I saw it as a loincloth and this seemed to me a simple, primitive kind of clothing which made sense in context. But it’s become a prime tagline for the film’s detractors. And the other one? When the God Zardoz says that “The gun is good. The penis is Evil.” Indeed, it seems a comedic line when isolated, but I don’t think this is unintentional. Isn’t this a political philosophy that we have seen dictating modern principles for a long, long time, boiled down its essence? It reminds me of Immortan Joe’s spouting similarly outrageous and destructive propaganda in ‘Mad Mad: Fury Road’ when he tells the masses not to become addicted to water. We hear leaders spout such frightening and illogical agenda all the time. But it’s true that the somewhat stilted dialogue at the start deteriorates into characters relating the obvious by the end. The strength of the film is not in what the characters say, even when they are speaking arch-poetry or genuine TS  Eliot and Neitzsche. The strengths are in the world-building and visuals.

And the floating head of Zardoz is an unforgettable image: a God that vomits guns and violence to followers. It’s not subtle but its effective symbolism. Just one of many vivid images Boorman offers. As Tom Milne says: “But visually the film remains a sparkling display of fireworks, brilliantly shot and directed.” And Zed (Sean Connery) stows away in this head and crosses to the Vortex, a New Agey villagey idyll whose residents are immortal and possessed of great psychic abilities. He explores and tours this world, then is encouraged to be its downfall. These eternals, of course, want death. 

There is a subtext underlying all the feminine authority, which is dominant here, that is negative – for example, as part of his rebellious nature and seemingly sidestepping any advancement made in gender concepts, the character of Friend says he hates women. The Vortex is a world built on lies but its gated community manipulating the apparent inferiors outside goes a little beyond class war: intellectuality and elitism is seen as cold, unfeeling and as incomplete. And the implication seems to be that voting and democracy is also stifling, as ideas of civilisation that omit innate emotion. Zed’s brute-force liberates the Vortex community even as his education leads him away from naked brutality. One could argue that Zed becomes a balance of primitive and intellectual motivations by the end – and he points this out by saying he is what not what he once was – but the film does not venture into this. From the outset, Zed is a mutant capable of scheming and suppressing his baser reactions in the service of a greater plan. 

The convolutions of the plot concerning Zed doesn’t really merit close scrutiny, as Oancitizen’s summary clearly outlines: 

"So his plan was... herd a bunch of working class Brits into, breeding someone genetically able to think on the Eternals level; lead him to a library. Hope, that he taught himself how to read properly. Hope, that he came across the one specific book that inspired the whole Zardoz shtick. Hope, that he would stow-away on the Zardoz head and shoot him. Then hope, that the head would crash back inside the vortex. Hope, that the other Eternals didn't kill him immediately, and teach them all that they know; in the hopes that he would figure out how to destroy the tabernacle and therefore all the Eternals. In other words, the exact kind of plan you expect for a man who draws on his goatee."

Yeah, well, when you put it like that…. But the whackiness is part of it all: such a plot makes sense in context. Or rather, in context you can forego logical improbabilities. Far more problematic is surely Zed’s inclination for rape, although it is understood that he has been conditioned this way. If he is bred to match the Eternals, would this not cause him to consider the question of rape (especially if he has read all in a library that surely has its share of female and feminist authors)? 

But I am more with Ben Wheatley on this: ‘Zardoz’ is all-immersive, its devotion to creating another world full-hearted and, along with the direction, helps to mitigate any shortcomings through budgetary restrictions. All the colourful period trimmings are grounded in the exposition that this is all in the service of a plan for space-travel. Even the much ridiculed costumes speak of how the Eternals are meant to have a more hands-on agenda to community (making their own). That the Vortex appears to be a picturesque lake; that there are psychic mind-games played out under colourful bed-sheets; multiple prism and mirror effects and reverse play-back all thrown into a psychedelic mix – they all speak of limits of budget and the compensation of imagination. It may be overstuffed but that is not a bad thing.

No, they don’t quite make films like this anymore: in fact it’s uniqueness means that they hardly ever did. It is authentic. And the fact that John Boorman went to this after ‘Deliverance’ is quite remarkable (although some of the existentialist concerns of ‘Zardoz’ is alluded to in ‘Deliverance’). When so much of contemporary science-fiction is just other genres with space helmets, it is when you look at something like ‘Zardoz’ that it is clear how short-sighted most genre cinema is.

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller, 2014, Australia-USA

I’m inclined to believe that most if not nearly every modern trailer makes a film look bad: they resort to a list of clichés instead of capturing a flavour and the constant fading to black is a tic that really makes me twitch… CGI usually looks worse in a trailer too, flaying about out of context. I confess I wasn’t exactly eager after the first trailer for ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’.  “From mastermind George Miller” it said. Oh?  I countered, raising an eyebrow. Keep in mind that I think “Mad Max: The Road Warrior” is one of the best action films in the genre and its influence should not be underestimated (there were a lot of films where the gangs seemed dressed for the bondage club after a little post-apocalyptic delinquency). But the “Fury Road” trailer was full of people apparently driving through fireballs, etc, and that threw up for me the same red flag that warned me off, say, “Pompeii”. That is: it looked like it might be another CGI-fronted effects picture that didn’t care much for the basics of physics; and the original “Mad Max” films were nothing but full of dirt and grime and sand and injury, however silly and unrealistic things got. Also, initially I thought they had made Max a woman now. In fact Charlize Theron. Then I heard Tom Hardy was playing The Road Warrior, and as I was always a great fan of “Mad Max 2” and am a fan of Hardy, I went to see “Fury Road”, but with cautious expectations.

Of course, many people were legitimately excited by the trailer for “Fury Road” - I was in the grumpy minority - but even that cannot prepare you for the film. The opening is laden with a voice-over just to explain a few things and is soon followed by quick-quick editing, both choices that puts my guard up, but once the film has Max in the clutches of the unhealthily white war boys and, meanwhile, has the brides of the tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keayes-Byrne) make an escape bid, things start to settle down. By which I mean if that small synopsis sounds busy, that is because the whole film is packed full. The plot is slender but as soon as Max is strapped to the front of war boy Nux’s (Nicholas Hoult) car, chasing after Furiosa (Theron) across the desert, the screen and details are so hectic that many will only become evident on repeat viewings.

For example, the war boys: diseased and delusional, poisoned by Immortan Joe’s suffocating and self-serving view of the world; they are a stunted population suffering from Joe’s patriarchy. They are both mentally and physically scarred and seem to want only to go out in a blaze of glory to meet better lifetimes in Valhalla: it is hard not to see an affinity with the suicide bombers that grace headlines. Beware fundamentalism.

Women are either milk-makers or baby-machines, it seems, giving the film perhaps the first of its alarming images with a row of large apathetic women hooked up to milking mechanisms. They are barely humans at all, not in the eyes of the society that Immortan Joe has propagated. And he holds the precious resource of water whilst trying to tell the population not to become addicted to it. This one man would seemingly hold all the power and keeps the people and his children so deprived (of resources and education, etc) that there seems no one to question it. Immortan Joe has made the world to his bidding and everyone around him is kept weakened in some way so they would not think beyond this world. It seems the desperate people know no better. Except the brides, who do receive some education to make them better breeders, but this also leads them to want more – and it should not be missed that Furiosa used to be a bride. In fact, intelligence seems to be mostly housed in the female protagonists.

All this comes across as a scathing satire on the kind of world that the wealthy patriarchs of today would imagine: for example, the CEO of Nestle opining that water should be privatised; or that a baby will be carved from a woman’s body in case it might live and be healthy seems the logical end to pro-life activism, to stories such as this. The comic of 'Mad Max: Fury Road - Furiosa' implies other sexual deviance for Immortan Joe (all those war boys) but this is an unneeded tweak to the story which would be just as strong with Joe simply being a woman-hating patriarch.

That is to say that the complexity and ramifications lay within the details of the film rather than its narrative, which is a typical chase scene through a hellish post-apocalyptic world. Where it succeeds is in a vision that equality will come through the direst conditions, eventually. There are hints that the women have been left no choice but to blame men for a world in ruins, but the male-hating is not consummate: is not a smidgeon of sympathy that converts Nux, showing that women have not lost that capacity (and Hoult's vulnerability has never been put to better use)? It is simply in this vision, women will not wait for men to save them, do not even consider it and cannot afford to. Theron will do what is necessary in an action film without resorting to machismo posturing and quips. Miller consulted female perspectives from such as playwright Eve Ensler to help ground it’s feminist credentials, and certainly some “Men’s Activist” groups have called for the film to be boycotted, which implies the film is doing something right. Miller uses the language of the Action Genre to show how narrow and male-centric it has been; it comes across as fighting the genre from within. It is no mistake that I mistakenly if briefly thought from the trailer that they had changed the gender of Max.

Speaking of which: into this merciless world comes Mad Max. Ever since the first film, Max had been more a facilitator of other people’s dramas: he turns up in some ongoing scenario, just trying to get by, and finds that his action skills come in handy in helping out. He tries to be amoral, because audiences love that anti-hero angle, but this doesn’t last so long. He’ll try to be mercenary but in the end he always helps the underdog. The opening pace of ‘Fury Road’ is frenetic, but this is misleading: it’s just to put Max to where he needs to be so that he’ll on the front of Nux’s car when Furiosa makes her escape bid. There was square-jawed blankness to Mel Gibson onto which a sort of “madness” could be imposed, but Tom Hardy can convey emotion and inner turmoil with the faintest facial tics so he is perhaps seems a more vulnerable Max as a consequence: not so much “Mad” as troubled. No matter: this isn’t really his story, but you get the idea that Max knows this, that he’s just trying to get by and hold himself together. Nux’s story gains more flesh and is more intriguing, changing from wannabe-suicide-assassin and rejected damaged son to finding a genuine place amongst the escapees. His is self-sacrifice for another, not martyrdom for a twisted cause.

Yes, there is all this and you would be foolish to ignore these details – or, for example, how casual the film present Furiosa’s prosethic arm, a unfussy approach that is surely progressive in how little attention it presents this as a “disability” or a character trait. There are mis-steps, the most discussed being the shot of the brides hosing themselves down beside a tanker, which is as Andy Nayman says “at once parodic and pandering.” But here, again, the moment is slightly complicated from looking like a lad’s mag photoshoot by one of the women being pregnant (which, by the way, won’t stop her from being an action star either). It’s true that for all its feminist credentials, the film can’t quite stop gawping at these pretty women – but maybe that has some point: of course Immortan Joe would choose the most attractive. Nevertheless, the film doesn’t quite overcome some objectification where the brides are concerned. Along with this I still have some reservations about the opening narration (unnecessary) and the flashbacks that are meant to show Max’s Madness, despite looking like they’ve been inspired by some James Wan idea of a nightmarish vision, all music-video quick editing and ghostly faces etc. I could also do without the yelling-your-agony-in-the-sunset-atop-a-dune and the nods-of-understanding-across-a-crowd clichés, but these are minor glitches, swallowed up and overcome by the whole.

I enjoyed it more the second time round, knowing what I was looking for.

What you will be watching mostly are the stunning visuals and John Searle’s cinematography. You’ll be trying to work out the vehicle designs, which include cars-welded-to-cars and cheeky spikey swipes from ‘The Cars that Ate Paris’. Yes, the look of it and the action sequences are delirious, beautiful, crazed, spectacular and host of other superlatives. And the stunt work is incredible (just look at the stunt crew on IMDB to get some idea of what a massive undertaking you’re witnessing). How wrong I was in the impression I got from the trailer: the CGI here aids and abets genuine jaw-dropping stunt-work. The ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ flaws and achievements are as obvious and loud as the metal guitarist that fronts one vehicle, gleefully and manically bouncing around, motivating this remarkable spectacle. But it’s the satire and the targets of its ire, the themes and details that glue the stunts together that really add resonance and will surely make this one to return to and something of a instant classic.