Of the many discussion points that have come out of this movie, the one I care most about is that Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack) now needs to be in every single movie going forward for the next 50 years
Genre: Action/Sci-fi/Epic
Premise: A young girl is taken from her people, grows up in a desolate desert city, and learns to become a great road warrior, an essential job in a post-apocalyptic world where everything of value that is transferred between towns will be attacked by outsiders.
About: Director George Miller loved the character of Furiosa so much that he immediately went about creating another movie for her after Fury Road. Ten years later, a new Mad Max movie is born. The plan was to do a Mad Max prequel for Tom Hardy’s character as well. But with Furiosa coming in at just 35 million over the 4-day holiday weekend, it looks like that movie, sadly, will never happen. Miller wrote Furiosa with longtime collaborator, and mainly actor, Nick Lathouris.
Writers: George Miller and Nick Lathouris
Details: 150 minutes!
Furiosa is going to go down in history as a symbol of change in the public’s consumption of theatrical movies. On Hollywood’s biggest movie weekend, it scored the lowest opening of that weekend in 30 years.
I find that unfortunate because Furiosa shouldn’t be the movie that represents theatrical box office’s fall. It should’ve been a movie like Transformers 9 or Fast & Furious 11. Cause those are the movies that have gotten us into this muck.
Furiosa is the kind of movie Hollywood SHOULD be making, which is bigger budget movies that actually have ideas and take risks. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a very good one. And it could’ve been iconic if not for a couple of factors working against it.
The main factor is expectation. You can’t put this movie after Fury Road. Fury Road was pure adrenaline. To follow that with a years-long character-driven epic is confusing. Whereas, if they put this movie FIRST and Fury Road SECOND, it would’ve been one of the best one-two combos ever. EVER.
For those who haven’t seen it, and apparently there are a lot of you, Furiosa is a complex movie that follows a little girl, Furiosa, who’s taken from a hidden “Eden” if you will, to become the de facto daughter of a rising menace in a post-apocalyptic desert world, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
Dementus wants to conquer the big swinging d**k in the region, Immortan Joe, so he can have his cool rock water town. When his initial efforts are thwarted, he goes about a years long plan of taking over Gas Town, where all the region’s gas is kept, and Bullet Town, where all the weaponry is made.
During this time, Young Furiosa gets transferred over to the care of Immortan Joe (in one of the few sloppy plot beats) and is able to escape the high society slavery there to live secretly amongst the townspeople, where she gets a reputation as a fearless go-getter.
This gets her a position as a truck-protector for whenever Immortan Joe needs to get gas or weapons from the two other towns. Through this process, she becomes close with Joe’s star driver, Praetorian Jack, and soon the two are riding together (and kissing together! – well, offscreen at least). Everything’s going fine until Furiosa’s nemesis, Dementus, makes an aggressive bid to take over everything, forcing Furiosa to square off against him in one final battle.
Furiosa is a script you could never write as a spec.
Which is both a strength and a weakness.
It’s a strength because the script is unlike anything you’ve seen from a studio in two decades. It’s basically a period piece masquerading as a sci-fi action movie. Years upon years pass in several different places within the script. It’s not just one time jump and we’re done. We move through time gradually, and Hollywood movies just don’t do that. Hollywood movies, and spec scripts for that matter, like urgency. They like their time to be contained because it makes everything feel like it needs to happen right now. Which adds a ton of energy to the story.
So that choice alone makes this script feel unique.
It’s a weakness because we’re never quite sure where we are in the story. A couple of times in this movie I kind of sat up and asked myself, “Where are we going here?” It wasn’t clear.
The reason it wasn’t clear was because George Miller would focus on one particular time period within this multi-time-period epic and not give us any goals, stakes, or urgency to work with. One section was just about building Furiosa’s relationship with Praetorian Jack. There wasn’t really a goal within the sequence, which was frustrating.
But once you figured out that this was an epic, you sat back and let it happen, instead of trying to control it. Which is when the movie really started showing its mettle. Cause I can’t remember an epic sci-fi movie that has done it better than this one. I remember certain writers trying. Christopher Nolan tried with Interstellar. But that movie comes nowhere close to this one in both quality and vision.
One of the more interesting choices Miller made was to stay away from dialogue in regards to his main character. This is something I get into in my amazing dialogue book – this concept of showing as opposed to telling. And Furiosa is definitely a show-don’t-tell character. She rarely speaks.
There are two reasons to take this approach. Number one is that you don’t feel confident in your dialogue-writing ability. Which is fair. If you don’t feel great about your dialogue-writing, then write stories where your characters don’t talk much. It’s a legitimate strategy.
The other point is that delivering believable dialogue is notably challenging. I’ll give you a quick assignment to see what I mean. Go to Youtube and search for short movies. Not the best ones. Ones with 50,000 views or less. What you’ll find is that a lot of these short films actually look quite professional. However, the second one of the characters starts speaking, the suspension of disbelief is lifted and we’re aware of how fake everything feels. It’s because the dialogue is lousy. Which you can hide if characters don’t speak much. Even at the professional level.
Cause let’s be real: No writer has ever lived in a post-apocalyptic world before where guys ride around on giant stages in full hair-band makeup playing guitar. Any dialogue you try to create for that world risks sounding ridiculous.
This is why almost all of the dialogue in Furiosa is centered around big speeches (Dementus screaming up to Immortan Joe how he plans to take over his town). Big speeches are theatrical in nature, which hides the potential ridiculousness of what’s being said. Big speeches also often contain logic, which is less susceptible to sounding stupid. “You will adhere to our demands or we will attack you!” That’s a much less tricky line to pull off than something that contains emotion, such as, “You complete me.”
Which is why when we’re outside of these speeches, the characters rarely say much. And I think that’s by design due to what I just said.
But the thing that really surprised me about Furiosa was the character work. Ironically, not with Furoisa herself. Furiosa was solid. But the stand-out characters were Dementus and Praetorian Jack.
The thing you always have to worry about when you’re doing prequels is finding villains that are worthy of the villain precedent you set in the original movie. Literally nobody has figured that out yet. Which makes sense. If the villains in these prequels were so awesome, *they* would’ve been the big villain in the next movie.
As a result, a lot of these prequel villains are middle-management types. Orson Krennic in Rogue One, for example. Who was scared of that guy? Nobody.
Miller was actually in a tricky spot because, while he had a cool villain already in Immortan Joe, there was no way to make him the villain of the movie. Why? Because Immortan Joe had to live. He has to survive to make it to Fury Road. That means Furiosa can’t defeat him. She would have to lose to him. Which would’ve led to a weak ending.
So Miller created this other character named Dementus, giving Furiosa somebody she could defeat, making her victorious at the end. And because of the “period piece” format, Miller was really able to explore this character on a deep level.
He wasn’t your average villain. He’s kind of dumb. He’s a terrible organizer. Everything falls to sh*t that he tries to manage. But he’s aggressive and he’s determined. So he’s always moving forward. He’s always trying to get to the next level, which is what you want out of your villain AND your hero. Because that means, inevitably, the two are going to run into each other, which is exactly what happens.
The other standout here was Praetorian Jack and it’s SOOOOO depressing that this movie bombed because, if it didn’t, this guy would’ve had his own movie. He’s so cool! He’s basically the original Mad Max (Mel Gibson) but more in control. He’s like the guy who walks into the bar and every single guy inside wants to be friends with him. He’s just cool! There’s no other way to put it.
It’s hard to write one really good character. This movie had three of them: Furiosa, Dementus, Praetorian Jack.
And those characters were bolstered by that unique George Miller flair. Like George Lucas, he never just puts characters in front of the frame. He’s always got all this other stuff going on in the background. Like Dementus’s “mimicer.” There’s this guy who hangs around Dementus and mimics everything he says and does. It’s hilarious! It’s just like Rock Star Guy. You wonder how he comes up with these things.
This movie proved to me what I thought was impossible. That a prequel can be good and not just backstory.
I’m fine if you didn’t go out to the theater to see this. But for all that is good and holy, watch this when it comes out on digital. For people who love sci-fi? It’s one of the best movies in the genre ever made.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s amazing how easily you can make a character likable by showing how kind they are to your hero. The main reason we like Praetorian Jack is because he’s so kind to Furiosa. It’s simple but so very effective.
