Prequels. They’re everywhere. Some provide something that deepens our love and understanding of the movie that isn’t chronological, but adds to the mythos. Some are less spectacular, or look like they must’ve happened after the film that we loved because everything is just … better. And then there are some prequels that look and feel substantial like the original film but which lack the … substance… of what made the first movie great. Are you thinking of subjects that fit into those categories? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Prometheus, Monsters University, Rogue One, X-Men: First Class, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The opportunities are endless.
Furiosa falls somewhere in between the first and the last category for me. We don’t get any Mad Max here, but we do get Charlize Theron’s heroine up to her neck in dust and masochistic male characters. As a girl, she’s orphaned when the evil warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, in over-the-top weirdness) kills her people, and she rejects the expectation that she’ll be a baby maker for some mad man. Then she encounters another evil warlord, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and his crazy children who want her to be, you guessed it, a baby maker. She rejects that, too.
Along the way, Furiosa falls in love, resets the standard for women in the desert, and does battle with an excessive number of completely insane bad guys in their wrestling match for water, power, and respect. Furiosa doesn’t care about what the men care about, and that makes her sane. In George Miller’s visually captivating fifth Mad Max film, Furiosa is the lone example of real goodness, even if she has some serious similarities with The Man With No Name. In a film that has more words than Fury Road, Anna Taylor Joy’s Furiosa is still the strong silent type. Maybe that’s better, because a bunch of the words uttered by these ridiculous men are absolutely unnecessary and nonsensical.
As much as I loved the first film in the recent installment, I wanted to love Furiosa, and I just didn’t feel the love. I felt kind of detached from what happened. Maybe that’s just my generalized prequel take. Honestly, Rogue One is the only prequel that I absolutely love. But how can you really be invested when you go into it already knowing who lives and who dies? (I have the same reaction to Titanic, too. But that’s for another day.)
Furiosa is an example of frontier justice, and the film around her looks incredibly cool. It just doesn’t pack the same punch as Fury Road, where the movement toward true freedom meant returning to face our demons rather than just running away from them.
