Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, Miller)

Well, awesome, first of all. Total fucking gongshow creativity and ingenuity here, it's such a thrill to be back in the hands of the maestro after nearly a decade. My relationship to movies--and my orientation toward the world into which movies are birthed--has changed a lot in those nine years, so it's nice to be reminded that I can still be swept away by filmmakers who push at the boundaries of the possible, who gnaw at complacency and stylistic compartmentalization and throw it all out there on the line^[1]. The full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek would say. I think this is why Miller fared so well in the transition to digital: he's eager to utilize technology to see where it can transport us, how it can bolster his vision.

Few films speak to our current sociocultural moment the way Furiosa does: a world ravaged by fire and filled with blasphemy, frightening opportunism, and deep wallowing despair. For all the pandemonium and ferocity here, there are little pinpricks of wriggling, wormy humanity to puncture them. Small moments, like the occasion of Young Furiosa (played with wide-eyed intensity by Alyla Browne who gets a remarkable chunk of screen time) being nearly dragged to her doom, said doom silently communicated by the greedy and wicked eyes of an old lady.

Or shots of Dementus, played with hellacious merriment by Chris Hemsworth, dropping the act on occasion to stare into the camera as if it were the barrel of a gun. There's Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa, of course, seething and shooting to match the very best in movie history--she is a bona fide action hero. The War Rig defense sequence here certainly rivals what we get in Fury Road, maybe even eclipses it; I'd have to revisit to make sure.

There's so much here that will reveal itself on inevitble and plentiful repeat viewings, but what stands tall upon a first is that the apocalypse is not a dour, staid fizzle. It is an explosion of silliness, violence, spectacular fission--only by dismantling unjust systems in total is it possible to build a just world. The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus is genuinely chilling, and the pathos Miller evinces is powerful and resonant. Woman shall inheret the earth, Fury Road would (chronologically) go on to proclaim, but planting a peach tree inside a vile man's eurethra is a nice first step.

P.S. - Not for nothing, and not that it needs to, but this comes way closer to the spirit of Fallout than the actual Fallout show does.