>>335479>>335375>>335425>>335434Furiosa Exhausts Feminism and Comic-Book CultureThe Mad Max saga wears itself out.by Armond White
In the live-action comic-book movie Furiosa, Australian filmmaker George Miller extends his Mad Max franchise that first made an international star of Mel Gibson. Out of nowhere, in 1979, Miller had combined the crude biker-movie genre with futuristic sci-fi, notable only for his real kinetic skill utilized in bizarre, jokey, midnight-movie violence.
Billed as part of "The Mad Max Saga," Furiosa fashions Miller's formula to meet the market for both the #MeToo era and overlong streaming content (it's told in six episodes). Miller applies apocalyptic and dystopian overkill to feminist anger - the rage Charlize Theron embodied as the orphaned Imperator Furiosa in Fury Road (2015) and portrayed now by Anya Taylor-Joy in this origin story.
Furiosa shows how a young girl, kidnapped from an Edenic "land of abundance" (The Green Place of Many Mothers), becomes part of a degenerate biker gang commanded by Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a long-haired warlord rampaging throughout the Wasteland. Miller unspools this cartoonish end-times mythology with whirligig aplomb that goes on and on - as monotonous as Denis Villeneuve's Dune but livelier, with mobile camera angles, ever-widening aerial exteriors, and huge crowds dodging flame-throwers. Furiosa and Dementus lead Miller's relay-race of death-defying stunts.
Yet, for all this busy-ness, Furiosa has no emotional power. Despite Miller's directorial signature (those teeter-totter perspectives, distant horizons, and clarion revved-up motor noises), none of the pandemonium matters; his quirky wizardry is remarkably impersonal.
Miller cannot employ mythology the way Zack Snyder does, but comes close to mocking it. His construct of a post-civilization fable conveys a weird Down Under exoticism that, since such movies as Walkabout, Outback, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and The True History of the Kelly Gang is probably linked to Australia's penal-colony inferiority complex. This gallows humor amounts to a national private joke - perhaps never intended to be taken seriously (not with characters named Dementus, Scrotus, and Rictus Erectus) except by comic-book fanatics emboldened by cinematic representation.
But then what is Furiosa on about? After these relentless battle episodes, her post-traumatic rant about "justice and revenge" is pointless. Given this saga's many ethno-psychotic details (freaky, toxic, white men; hydrocephalic, feral children; tribes based on S&M hardware and enigmatic pagan talismans), none of these aberrations bear upon Furiosa and Dementus's final face-off when they reveal their inner drives.
Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth don't have the acting chops of Gibson and Theron, but the real problem is Miller's failure to endow his protagonists with Snyder's spiritual motivation and sexual instincts. Furiosa's defeminized countenance and Roman-nosed Dementus's infantilizing teddy bear (a totem they both exchange) contrast simplistically. (There was more humor and tension between Gibson and Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome, Miller's best Mad Max movie.)
Furiosa's high point features a gleaming 16-wheeler truck - a gear-head war machine that Miller stages like the locomotive climax of a silent movie - and an homage to his own Road Warrior, from 1982. Miller concludes with a narrator's litany of wars throughout world history, citing "righteous perversities and witty mutilations," but this is more wayward mythology as in Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing. The final image of a tree that grows out of Dementus's crotch from a seed planted by Furiosa is another midnight-movie symbol that requires a narcotic hallucinogen for justification. Otherwise, ultimately, it's exhausting nonsense. Miller cannot resolve Furiosa's fury because he lacks the mythological foundation to define either masculinity or femininity.