Why did George Miller decide to make a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road?
Particularly him, a director who doesn’t seem anxious to tell stories filled with plot monsters or exposition for a lore-craving audience, but rather stories like the ones we interpret every time we look at a painting.
Fury Road is one of the 5 or 6 best movies of the 21st century precisely because it tells one of the most powerful stories about feminism and environmentalism without having to over-explain or over-describe why did society collapse, and how do we start to rebuild it.
So, why George?
(it’s safe to say that I was a bit nervous about the motives to retread the plot of such a perfect film)
Having now experienced Furiosa, I can positively say that I was a dummy for doubting master Miller. Of course! His main motivations for going back to this plot did not come from the how did she lose her arm, or the how did she find herself being Imperator to Immortan Joe. But rather the why did she lose the arm, and the why is she Imperator in Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not a watershed moment for cinema like Fury Road was (by definition, very few movies are). Yet, it’s still a masterpiece. A different masterpiece. An incredible masterpiece, nonetheless.
It is structurally and thematically different, which surprised me. Particularly the change in themes. And that, not only legitimizes the development of this prequel, as it is also the main reason to go and see the movie.
Knowing that the final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus was one of the first images that came up to Miller’s mind when he was storyboarding Fury Road (yes, Fury Road, not Furiosa) 25 years ago, it makes sense that he was longing to put to film the themes in that dialogue one day.
That scene, despite being key in the auditions for the 2015 movie (the potential main actors did line reads from non-named characters ‘F’ and ‘D’, since there was no script for Fury Road at the time), it is not about feminism and environmentalism. It is about what necessitates those philosophies.
And that’s what Furiosa, the movie, is all about.
A visual tale of transformation, where caged aspiration will inevitably collide with what is happening around you, and will influence your actions in the real world. That scene, and the movie as a whole, is mythmaking around the difference between belief and will.
Despite having been written more than 20 years ago, Dementus is very timely to what constitutes the rise of fascism. What’s in it to figures like these to desire to be in charge, to be at the centre of power? Is it resources, ego, a hole in the centre of their soul, or maybe the combination of it all?
This is where the lost arm of Furiosa and the ugly nose of Dementus come into play. In conversation with other myths of awfulness from their past, they are out there in the desert, trying to feel something, or, if no longer that, trying to live up to those stories they tell themselves about their selves. Vanish into their own imagination, because there are things in the real world that they don’t want to deal with, or don’t know how to solve.
(that’s why the physical is so important in George Miller’s filmography)
And this is where the crux of the movie comes as a challenge to everybody: characters and audiences. Because, if you feel less than, what type of philosophy greater than yourself are you going to embrace to feel more than? Hate or hope?
It’s in these moments that societies fall even more, or start to recover.
For people like Dementus, and the ones that follow the philosophy of nihilism, it’s all about power, big persona, and only thinking of others like it’s a race/competition and wanting to win/dominate. These personas, despite leading to hurt, destruction and death, are paradoxically very captivating – wow, that’s a big rig, can I have it?!
(at what cost?)
Or, you follow the philosophy of the next chronological movie, Fury Road…
Honestly, these two films are fine art.
Images worthy of museum. Moving frames of men putting machines and power above their own humanity and the real life that surrounds them. How this cult of the progressing energy of machines will doom us if we lose sight of our place in the natural world, and the place of our future children in it. What could evolve us as a species can also devolve us very rapidly if we turn society into a race for the power at the end of portentous / charismatic / creative destruction.
That being said, a haunted society that was not able to protect its children, a squandered Earth that seems impossible to live in or to heal back to life, and yet, these are not pessimistic movies.
Furiosa is even more contemplative about loss and grief, and explores revenge through a more cathartic lens – two aspects of the narrative structure chosen for this film that made me really fall in love with it –, but it is, once again, the type of action filmmaking that makes this saga one of optimism.
George Miller is a master at that because his technique is completely coherent with his message. There are the shots of portentous / charismatic / creative action, battling for all those spaces, geographies and resources, and then there are action shots in a different visual language, a more singular one, more physical, practical, where a human is trying to do a good deed, and that specific experience of the person cinematically captured and transmitted via the physical expression is what gives agency to these movies’ optimism for healing this wasteland of nihilism.
Yes, both action styles are epic. But, it’s from the skill and inventiveness of putting these two visual languages debating each other and, through that, exploring their different narrative significances that a master filmmaker can take story and worldbuilding and make them cohere to express a message of slow positive change in the grandest possible scale.
Painterly storytelling of the highest craft, with inspiring emotional depth, because its progressive ideas have been reflected and tested inside the painter’s head for many maturing years.
Best performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth’s acting journeys up to this point, and will be tough to top them.
Opinion Seed 