WATCH: Review of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” UPDATED 5/26/24
The long awaited follow-up to 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” has plenty of sand and fury but stalls out compared to its predecessor.
UPDATED 5-26-2024: Unbelievably, I realized this: the actress’ name is ANYA Taylor-Joy, not “Anna” Taylor-Joy as I repeatedly called her throughout this video.
This is the sort of mistake I truly HATE making because it’s just careless and it’s disrespectful. I apologize for the error and I definitely won’t make it again with her name and hopefully anyone else’s, either.
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Review for “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is up:
Afterthoughts:
For those keeping count, this is now the third post-apocalypse film we’ve seen in 2024, following “Civil War” in March and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” earlier in May. Can’t imagine why all these bleak visions of humanity’s apparently doomed future might be resonating with movie audiences these days…
This is one of those things I don’t know is actually true, but it feels true — I think there’s more actual sand (as opposed to “sand” added via VFX in post) in “Furiosa” than there was in “Dune: Part II.” Could be way off base, but I’m just saying.
One thing I wanted to keep in the video but it pushed the running time over five minutes (which, FYI, is the longest video I can use my captioning app with) was a little recognition for “Fist of the North Star”, the Shonen Jump manga from the 1980s that spawned a franchise of anime TV shows and features as well as toys and video games. “Fist”, of course, owes a TON of its imagery to “Mad Max”—in fact, the best way to sum up “Fist” is “Imagine the savior of the Mad Max wasteland is a guy who’s a cross between Bruce Lee and Elvis and can make people’s bodies explode with a single strike.”
My friend and former colleague T.M. Powell (a huge “Mad Max” fan) said as we were walking into the screening for “Furiosa” that he wondered how much we would miss the character of Max since this would be the first entry in the film series without him in the lead. I didn’t get to ask him about it after the movie was over, but for my part, I didn’t miss “the Road Warrior” all that much. The film has issues, but his absence isn’t one of them.