Why "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" doesn't work.
We do it my way. Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours.
1. A 'Mad Max' story without Mad Max just doesn't work.It's a series built around a mysterious Warrior of the Wasteland. In 'Fury Road,' Furiosa is the protagonist, and her actions are what drive the story. However, Max is still the main character, and without his arc, going from lone wolf warrior out to take care of himself to selfless hero of the apocalypse that allows Furiosa and the Brides to make it to the Green Place back to the Citadel. It's that character arc - lone wolf to hero - that drives all the Mad Max movies.
2. Chris Hemsworth is a very good actor, which makes him a very bad Mad Max villain. The best MM baddies - even Tina Turner - are played to exactly one note, usually cartoonish and terrifying. The henchmen are allowed shading, but the best bad guys in the franchise are on the level of pro wrestlers. Hemsworth is a caricature of swaggering goofball masculinity one moment, total unrepentant badass the next. And then in his final scene, he's suddenly playing it like an '80s action hero. He tried too hard, IMO, to add dimension to a character that called for non.
3. I didn't walk away from 'Fury Road' with any questions at all about Furiosa’s backstory. And much like the Star Wars prequels, the fun of the movie was filling in the blanks myself about what her childhood was like, where she got her robot arm, etc. Instead of world-building, Miller et. al just filled out a checklist of plot points that explain what happened to the character without adding anything as badass or crazy as what I could have imagined.
4. Very little by way of high octane car chase action. And the first time we get a car chase, it's all a little muddy. Why is Furiosa stowing away? We find out eventually, but the legendary Mad Max car chase scenes - even the abbreviated train chase at the end of 'Thunderdome' - are built on the model John Ford established in 'Stagecoach'. By the time we get to the stagecoach chase scene (and if you haven't seen it, shame on you. One of the all time greats), we've met all the main characters, we know what they have at stake, and we know what the bad guys are after and why.
If you watch ‘The Road Warrior’ or ‘Fury Road’ with the sound off, you can follow the story just as easily. Both could have been silent movies. But in this movie
5. Just like in ‘Thunderdome’, Miller is more interested in the lore of the world and explaining how it works than in creating an action vehicle featuring cartoonish goons chasing a warrior who’s just trying to remember what it is to be human.
6. Bad CGI “enhancing” action scenes, especially in the beginning, that ends up making it look worse. For a specific scene example, watch where young Furiosa gets grabbed by a whip Indiana Jones style. In ‘Fury Road,’ CGI was added to the car chase scenes to enhance them, adding dangerous fire and explosions while still maintaining the feel of practical stunt effects. Using computer effects to substitute for a stunt just feels like cheating.
7. Way too long. ‘Fury Road’ was too long, but I can’t tell you what 30 minutes I would cut while making the movie better. With ‘Furiosa,’ Miller could have easily cut the Bullet Farm scene, for instance. The foreshadowing scene with The Brides. Lots of scenes could have easily been trimmed of their fat.
8. Mad Max works best tapping into our fears about the world around us. The first movie was released at the end of the ‘70s, when the breakdown of the cities felt like civilization had slipped away. Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome address our fears of nuclear annihilation at a time when we had just left a worldwide gas shortage. In Fury Road the implication was that there had been a catastrophic global climate shift. And Furiosa addresses our fears of populist fascist bullies, maybe, in a couple of scenes. But that’s about as far as it goes.