Furiosa

 So, I think I need to give George Miller credit once again. What seems like a bad idea - a spin-off prequel to a legacy sequel - wound up being a genuinely good and entertaining movie.

When I first saw the teaser trailers for Fury Road back in 2015 (or possibly even late 2014) I didn't understand why one of my friends was so hyped about it. I hadn't seen any of the Mad Max movies (the at-that-point last of them, Beyond Thunderdome, came out a year before I was born, and thus thirty years before Fury Road) and so it felt like just another example of Hollywood digging up some property that would appeal to Gen Xers feeling nostalgic (notably two of the trailers before Furiosa was for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Twisters, which feel very much like  "these don't need to happen" kind of movies).

But, Fury Road was amazing, and got better with a rewatch.

Ever since the Star Wars prequels, I've been very skeptical of the idea of prequels. And inherently, there are going to be some aspects of the format that send up warning lights.

But I think Furiosa avoids many of the pitfalls - it doesn't concern itself with explaining every little detail about Fury Road. Immortan Joe is already a wasteland warlord with an army of zealous War Boys who are willing to destroy themselves to prove worthy of him, and while he and his allied kingdom of the Bullet Farm and Gastown are central to the plot, the winking nods are minimal, and new characters are introduced that fit pretty seamlessly into the implied backstory for Furiosa from the original movie.

Anya-Taylor Joy, admittedly, has to do a tough job, which is to bring something new to the character while also creating a believable continuity with Charlize Theron's portrayal. I think she does fine, if not mind-blowing work here. Furiosa is tough as nails from the start, and I think I might need to digest the movie a bit more to really map out her character arc.

While these movies are full of violence and heroes who sometimes do pretty ruthless things, the ongoing theme seems to be the need to make a place for compassion. Furiosa finds someone even when she is swept into Immortan Joe's forces who shows her some kindness and respect, and while his lack of presence in Fury Road gives a pretty strong hint that he won't make it to the end of the movie, Praetorian Jack (played by Tom Burke) helps her to create a place of selflessness and compassion that will ultimately lead her to the liberation of the women in Fury Road. Somewhere, somehow, you need to find a person to trust, and to be vulnerable with. The relationship is not explicitly romantic, but there's definitely love.

The show-stealing performance, though, belongs to Chris Hemsworth, playing the movie's headlining wasteland warlord, Dementus. Hemsworth gets to be Australian for once, and plays a monster of the wastes who dabbles in religious iconography (he's first introduced wearing a robe made out of a parachute that makes him look like Jesus) but is ultimately also kind of an ill-adapted leader for these times. When he hears of the Citadel (from a Warboy with a bolt in his skull who thinks that he's died gone to Valhalla,) his on-a-whim attempt to conquer it by force is such an unmitigated disaster that it's no surprise he won't be a problem still by the time of Fury Road.

To borrow D&D terms, while Immortan Joe is lawful evil, building an empire that does, you know, function and work, just in a horrible, oppressive way, Dementus is chaotic evil, ill-suited to forethought and the ramifications of his actions. He's unpredictable - he manages to succeed in infiltrating Gastown by having his men just kill his own allies - but in the long term, his choices leave him with problems he doesn't know how to solve.

Still, what's interesting about Dementus is that, unlike Immortan Joe - whom one sort of gets the impression was always bad - we get some indication that Dementus might not have been such a monster before his family was killed. We don't know how it happened, but he mentions having had children, and keeps one of their toys, a little teddy-bear, on him at all times.

And thus, his relationship with Furiosa is twisted - while she has never forgotten her own mother, even after she is taken by Dementus and her mother killed - he seems to retain this weird paternal affection for her, engaging in some kind of emotional transference. Ultimately, this gives him the desire to instill his worldview in Furiosa, to abandon all hope and embrace the brutality and cruelty of the wastes. He wants to see that validated by giving it to her.

What I find very heartening is that Furiosa as a movie is structurally very different from Fury Road. It would have been easy to simply give her some other feature-length action sequence, but this movie takes more time to sit in the quiet times, and to see her grow from a child into the Imperator that she in in Fury Road. By giving her a quest for vengeance against Dementus, there's a compelling, ongoing plot that makes the movie feel substantial without making it feel like her arc is fully complete (and thus making room for the other movie).

I don't know if this movie gets quite as many points for innovation - there are definitely some awesome, jaw-dropper moments of action, but perhaps not as many as in Fury Road. But I think if we're giving Fury Road an A, this is getting an A- or a B+ at the worst.