Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hardly has dystopia appeared more forbidding or ever been as exhilarating as it is within the confines of the George Miller’s ‘Directors cut of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’. Over the past few decades Miller has been Bad Max turning a reasonable angry world we live in into awe inspiring hallucinatory images enough to inspire chills down one’s spine.

But then again, however strange, however, triggering the alternative universe may seem, his films had always had such a potent contact high that it was indeed very easy to, oooh, zonk out on the very emptiness of the sachin all of it. Apocalypse? Nice!

The thing is, it has started to feel less cool just because all these years since 1979, when the movie was released, the gap between Miller’s version of the war zone and this one has steadily decreased. Taken place ‘a few years from now’ the action of the first movie follows the character of Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), who works as a highway patrol officer and is still enjoying a regular life complete with a family to boot.

That things are going to get worse for Max’s character can be construed from the beginning as a shot of a sign for a Hall of Justice, an entry that evokes the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei. You may have flinched if you made that association, but whatever hesitations you had were fluently eradicated by those chases and crashes, the gunning engines, and mad laughter that followed.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga coined ‘The Furiosatution’, the article felt it as rude and disrespectful to the originator of this cycle and his fans. Here, from an editing perspective, ‘furiosa bending chicken’ (p2) deserves attention as it assumes an origin.

It is Miller’s fourth and the worst of the cycle in my immense consideration. This modern greatest and ultimate signpost of Perais grows as the neo-baroque the best forms and associations. In particulars Sara Jay (charmingly portrayed by Laura Kaczmarek), get the usual workload on Max рушитель.

Appropriately for its genre, “Furiosa” follows Furiosa through her life as a child who enjoys carefreeness, youth eventually leads her to freedom, captivity and, later on, limited rule – this time over a horde of marauders and subjugated warriors.

The film begins with 10-year-old Furiosa (Alyla Browne) scavenging in the woods near the mythical Green Place of Many Mothers. Her nostalgia is abruptly interrupted by a pack of filthy bikers as she is about to pluck a juicy peach which seems prickly but is metaphorically apple-like.

It does not take long before the former excited young woman is strapped to a dirt bike being chased by the mother who is forcing another woman on horseback, this does not end well for them, and no good defeats are anticipated in the power and body wars to follow.

The chase heightens even more when Miller starts interspersing close-ups with wide angle shots, the sound and fury of the kidnappers in their hellish vehicles providing a stark contrast to the silence of the desert.

Whilst the dry stretch of land in the scene reminds the viewers of the ‘Mad Max’ tales rearing back, the buttes and the fast moving steed are reminiscents of the old Westerns that have interspersed their mythos of this series.

Mad, well who hasn’t at one time in a strange way imagined striking Camille, often looked to be a resolve of some Joseph campbell or Holly watch in the bulldozing Fletcher. However, the moment Furiosa moves on to chomping at her captor’s fuel line, it becomes evident that this whittle captive is no white lady in trouble.

However, Furiosa’s journey becomes a dread acute deep within herself when she is brought in front of the tzard to the bikers, Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth in one of his most vamping roles since the Kremlins), a tacky show off who rules what seems to be a bunch of male gypsies.

This time Dementus is rather unconventional as he rides on a motorcycle chariot wearing a white fluffy robe, with a lecturer next to him. Not surprisingly, he is a very ridiculous person and both Miller and Hemsworth have no qualms about the appearances of the character.

More specifically, the way he came dressed is explainable – it goes with the vanity and (this time) the prosthetic nose of Dementus. One is forced to think if Miller didn’t get the idea for the character from some heroic Heston champion or an Arab sheikh from the 1959 movie “Ben-Hur”, which belongs to another, somewhat different desert drama.

Part of the energy emanating from the “Mad Max” movies is the way in which Miller takes and amplifies stories that are within societies, that get transferred across families, or tribes, or cultures and dwell some where in deep recesses of our brains and determine the paths even without explicit recognition.

However, and although Miller is a contemporary myth maker, he has an anchor – the work and the firestorm within the movies to an extent accurately represent the workings of the real world – perhaps it is also worthy of mentioning that he is a medical doctor. (He participated as a set physician in several Max movies.)

That background is, I think, helpful in understanding how such a focus on the human body, all the more in the extravagant stunts that have come to characterize the series, and the pleasure of revealing the gears inside bodies, machines and environments, and systems — how they function — can be achieved.

The internal conflicts of the protagonist Deo are analyzed in which she personally struggles with the character turned into an antagonist once she reached the Citadel, the place with fortified walls she was running away from in Fury Road.

At the Citadel, she leads the captured docile women who are locked away with other young handmaidens whose only purpose is to give birth to children for Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the tyrant of the Citadel.

Also, it is in the Citadel that childish Furiosa, still played by Browne, meets one of Immortan Joe’s children’s interests — a brutish man, and all her stock the story changes from one axis into a very shocking one. Miller, smartly, doesn’t overplay this section — and Furiosa evades this creep — but it’s still a shock.

The shock remains, and the twist in the story comes much worse. In a fight for her life, Furiosa hides her appearance from her would abuser and takes a position of a slave at the Citadel. She vanishes in the masses, and when the flashes come back months or years later, Taylor-Joy has been cast in such an unstoppable water – and enthusiastic – tea of a soup.

However, that’s not all, not by a long range some other things: Furiosa is adopting the cleanshaven style and is taught by driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke pesky sex pest of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir). The two of them and waves of other people travel to such places as the Bullet Farm and a familiar Miller – as always working rather with pyrotechnics than craftsmanship – starts assembling pieces including Immortan Joe and Dementus.

It definitely takes time to accept Taylor-Joy as Furiosa, in part because there is an irremovable dashed spine of sadness in the violent rage of the character that Theron created. In “Fury Road” Theron also seemed like someone who can literally bust everyone’s butt.

She almost busted the butt of Max, metaphorically at least, in which she became a new totem which the series revolved around. Taylor-Joy has not (as yet) developed the kind of physical expressiveness that her predecessor possessed, but attentive watchers of them will know that she too was trained in ballet and moves lovely in a way that looks like an effortless dexterity that enables one to escape any form of trouble. Although Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa looks like she is too lean and petite for the apocalypse or the Armageddon, but of course that sense of vulnerability works in the narrative.

There is something superficial in the assumption that it was this characteristic of Miller’s new actress which made him cast Andrea Taylor-Joy as new Furiosa. They are each so huge, but they are also arresting. They take your attention away.

And the most when the actress looks up, sagging her neck. This is probably how it was meant to be. It is an angle that brings out more of her eyeball which is most bright against the stoic dark settings of the citadel.

(This also explains why its referred to as the Kubrick Stare, it was Jack Nicholson who made such a method hateful in ‘The Shinning’.) Whatever the effect has, can be very difficult to contain and may cause ambiguity about the character and what type of heroine she will turn out to be.

This is in part a mindset since Furiosa has shown similar tendencies of Mad Max himself, the very warrior she is sworn to avenge. When inside the Citadel, she is quite sure that surface vulnerability is adequate. It is however deepened by the winter struggle.

She is isolated, alone, possibly in soul, and every other aspects prior to the emergence of Praetorian Jack (not that there are children). It is her painful weight and expecting the same as the narrative and the action progress radical shift in ‘Furiosa’ emotionally that would in turns cause the violent dynamic film to be so gloomy.

A scene by scene analysis demonstrates that while “Furiosa” enhances the audience of “Fury Road” to some degrees, it is the original that fully satisfies viewers. It is easy to describe action strategy where members of one party flee along the road away from the impending doom but what about the other situation?

Those are completely different narratives, and it is one thing to see someone quickly leave a place when the warriors are high tailing it out of dodge on a moving road with no destination. It’s something else entirely to see a female’s fight for life in an era that devours the young and everyone else. For someone who has been following Miller’s works, it’s difficult to imagine this too would change.

He will make it, Millar films are about the imminent end of life as we know it and he continues to whisk people. It is quite a lot of fun to see the characters of the screen fighting for the oil, waters and women but though I have treated him in the past to be a brilliant film maker as I have said in the past with “Furosa” I now know he is also a prophet of doom.

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