Furiosa – A Violent Premonition

It feels cliché to call visionary director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga “a revelation” but there was something revelatory about the experience – a thematically dark, aesthetically bright world that would be hell to live in but is paradise to visit for a couple of hours. Days later, sitting and typing, I am replaying sequences in my head, behind my closed eyelids, feeling like I am back in the cinema, watching Furiosa fail to escape her captors as a child only to later outlive and outwit them as an adult. There is triumph in the film, carried as it is by violence and madness. It is an engaging action film, an exhilarating epic, about the human drives for survival and exploitation, the dialectical relationship between collaboration and competition, and the danger a woman faces in a world run by sadistic, self-serving men.

Furiosa is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, one of two films I have seen three times in theaters, both in 2015, the one of the two whose quality I still stand by. My friend took me and I had a great time, so I took another friend, and we had a great time, so we invited some other people. This was in New Orleans in the sweltering summer of 2015, one which featured tremendous rainstorms and remarkable flooding. I mention all that because the Mad Max movies, especially these last two, are about climate catastrophe and the experiences of humanity in the wake of it. Amid genocide, global conflict, and elections inspiring despondence, the climate is still changing. Mad Max: Fury Road features a lightning sandstorm that I have not been able to get out of my mind since that day at the AMC theater in Harahan which, amid conversations about who destroyed the world and what it used to be like, make plain that the story of the setting is a warning for the present. Furiosa is more specifically character-driven while showcasing that same world. It is one of those projects that accentuates that prequels have value. An easy critique of the form builds on the idea that artists ought to, as Oscar Wilde put it, start the story as close to the end as you can. The story you’re telling is already the good stuff, why go in and backfill past allusions? There are many ways to do this that feel tedious and unsatisfactory, and we are replete with soulless, brainless products in the modern IP-wringing era of the new studio system. But there are some films and shows and books that explain things in a way that makes the original text they reference richer, fuller, and more vibrant by giving the audience a deeper connection to a character. Furiosa is one such film.

Furiosa takes place in post-apocalyptic Australia, in the desert Wasteland. Everywhere we see barbarism, easily recognizable as mankind reverting to baser instincts, using remnants of modern technology to rebuild society along the lines of a pre-Axial age reliant on scavenging 20^th century technology. There are self-important despots, makeshift armies of bandits and scavengers, strongholds built in caves, mountains, factories, and refineries, arbitrary despotic rule and nebulous necrotic social structure enforced by cruelty to subordinates. Since the mid-apocalypse or pre-apocalypse of the first movie, society has been fixated on automobiles and motorcycles, with a prominent place in the films for chase sequences and a prominent space in their stories for gasoline and car parts. The structure of this film feels more like the original Mad Max, where Fury Road had clear similarities with The Road Warrior. Here we have a tale of vengeance born from severing of the protagonist from their family and full of an evil motorcycle gang.

The film begins with Furiosa (Young Furiosa played by Alyla Brown) living in something like a hidden oasis, foraging with another young girl in a forest. They see bandits on motorcycles nearby, field dressing a deer. Furiosa disables one of their motorcycles but is captured – two women (Charlee Fraser as Furiosa’s mom, Mary Jabassa, and Elsa Pataky as Vuvalini general) chase after her, their small village alerted by Furiosa’s whistle. So begins her saga.

The film quickly establishes the nomadic scavenger nature of the people, both Furiosa’s villagers from “a place of abundance” and the bad. Everyone must be adaptable and rely on ingenuity; there are motorcycles affixed with car parts, outfitted so their fuel tanks and tires are easily replaceable. Furiosa’s mother is a crack sniper, dropping foes at great distance and with terrific mastery of short-term combat strategy and close-quarters combat. The stakes of survival, of keeping their home secret and eventually returning to it, are quickly established. Furiosa’s mother sacrifices herself so that Furiosa can return home, but she does not take the chance when she should have. She becomes the prized – and mercifully untouched – trophy of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a warlord with a chariot tied to three motorcycles, leading a tremendous horde of motorcyclists, comprised of gangs like the Mortifiers, led by the Octoboss (Goran Kleut). We see countless acts of psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, as cruelty and vengeance rule the wasteland. Eventually, Dementus meets Immortan Joe (played by Lachy Hulme replacing the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), strikes an uneasy barter, and the plot follows the shifting power dynamics among the major strongholds in the wasteland. Furiosa must avoid Immortan Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones reprising his role from the original) and falls in as a mechanic, hiding her gender and then proving her ability as a driver and shooter alongside Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the war rig for Immortan Joe and his Citadel.

The film is full of the roar of engines, of dust storms real and artificial, and carries with it a decidedly epic storybook quality. It is broken into chapters with enigmatic title cards, and Dementus’s self-tattooed “History Man” (George Shevtsov) serves as occasional narrator in addition to sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the world, providing an informative and poetic description of the history of warfare near the film’s apex, connecting disparate sequences rather than creating a rupture in the story. It alludes to conflicts that have come to pass in the real world and some that only might. Anya-Taylor Joy’s Furiosa is not wordy, but her trademark expressive eyes, her tenacity in her many moments of action and few moments of speech, make her fun to follow. The combined powers of director George Miller, cinematographer Simon Duggan, and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel do much to hone intensity and urgency in the ways action plays out, especially combat. Further, I would say what dialogue there is in the film is tuned a bit tighter than in its predecessor, not that that one was so bad but that it was occasionally clunky in its bluntness. Not that we need a movie to be subtle, especially one such as this, but things felt like they flowed better, with the silly names and jargon taken as seriously as there, amid all their bleak implications.

Nonetheless, there is something scratching at the back of me about this film that cannot go unremarked upon. A small controversy bloomed before its release because of the use of “A.I.” to transpose Anya Taylor-Joy’s face onto Alyla Brown in much of the early-middle parts of the film, combining their faces and then gradually giving way to Anya Taylor-Joy. Setting aside my instinctive blanket condemnation of “A.I.” as a nebulous marketing term for a wide variety of technologies, I did find it odd to see “Metaphysic AI” in the credits. I don’t like that as a direction where art is heading, especially after long strikes preceding contract negotiations for WGA and SAG-AFTRA which noted concern about deployment of so-called artificial intelligence at the expense of entertainment workers, and I don’t think directors get a blanket past on critique or inquiry just based on liking their previous work. I will nonetheless say that special effect was quite effective; I spent much of the film wondering how they used makeup or camera tricks to make ATJ appear to be a younger person. Now we know, in part.

In any case, there is a lot of phenomenal effects work in the film. The chase scenes are great, especially one that involves people flying with propeller fans and parachutes. That was some of the coolest thing I had ever seen. The battle atop the war rig, its very creation… even some computer imagery that looked cheesy in the ads, like Furiosa’s robotic arm, looked great on the big screen. There’s nothing quite like the car-consuming lightning sandstorm from Fury Road, but this one feels even more practical just as its narrative is more personal. This film ends in a way that reminds the audience of that one, snapshots that lead right into it, though some uncertain amount of time has passed between this falling action and epilogue. That’s a difficult needle to thread or line to ride, reminding the audience of why they were drawn to this in the first place without overwhelming them. We get backstory on characters from that film besides the titular one but it never feels hackneyed or shoehorned. The same is true of the lone cameo of the original title character. Somehow it all comes together as its own thing, difficult as that is for prequels to do.

I am glad we still get movies like this, by which I mean big, expressive, experimental action epics. “Blockbuster” is too often applied before a film is even released and has earned the monicker, but for the artistic connotations the term conveys, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga delivers. There are few imitators, even as there may be vaguely adjacent works – Fallout, Twisted Metal, and so forth. Only environmentalist auteur George Miller can provide us with Mad Max. We will probably get no more stories of Furiosa, but this one will be worth revisiting for a long time.

Related: The Making of Distant Futures

The Making of Distant Futures – Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, and Post-Post Apocalypse in Dune, Star Wars, and Mad Max…

…or, Kevin’s In Love With Settings

This is the second of three essays I’m going to write inspired in part by the new Dune film. Maybe it’ll end up being the third because it’s the widest ranging topic. It’s about set up, but not pay off; it’s about implication, which I suppose was also a major thrust of the review essay. Here I want to talk about the interstellar civilizations of Dune and the Star Wars galaxy, as well as the post-nuclear destruction/environmental degradation of Mad Max.

A trailer for a new Star Wars show called The Acolyte has been released. My initial reaction was mixed-to-negative. Most Star Wars live-action of the past decade has been bad, especially the last three years, except for Andor. To me, the trailer looked very much like telling the same story that’s already been told. The interview in The Hollywood Reporter with the showrunner Leslye Headland, who co-created Russian Doll, made me more excited. There were bemused negative reactions to the trailer from culture critics I respect, as well as the smothering fanboy backlash anyone could have predicted and about which I have written before. But either sample among the spectrum of critique – “it’s funny to do the same thing again” and “this is actually different and that’s why it’s bad” rely on engaging with the implications of the trailer’s premise as set against what’s been implied or explained as the sociocultural and sociopolitical structure of the world that already exists. We can hope to see changes in attitude to express social differences in different eras of the Republic, but we can’t reasonably expect different technology.

Star Wars is one of my favorite examples of the phenomenon I want to get into, about what hangs in the background of the setting of advanced societies, in part because I’ve just spent so much time with a galaxy far, far away. The podcast A More Civilized Age, and to some extent the podcast A People’s History of the Old Republic, as well as myriad essays written by other people about the prequels, are some of the things I’m engaging with here in addition to my own experience watching the movies, playing the games, reading the comics. The question is about the relative stagnation of technology across thousands of years not as a matter of lacking creativity from writers, directors, and so forth, but taken as an expression of the post-post apocalypse, the idea that the intergalactic civilization and every global civilization that exists within it, is living in the wake of barely-remembered or completely-forgotten collapses. The wide spread of galactic civilization means that there are different levels of technology in minute ways between spaces, but a lot of similarity as well, yet frequently a lack of advancement in everyday transportation or communication technology, as well as an incredible lack of record keeping.

The obvious real-life reason that the Old Republic approximately 4,000 years before the original films and the sequel trilogy set decades after the original films share broadly similar levels of technology is that you want to be able to maintain a continuity within the setting even when you are distinguishing it by using different planets, characters, factions. But, taking that alongside story notes like (1) that Luke and his Uncle Owen need a protocol droid to talk to their moisture vaporators (and Luke and the Rebellion needing astromech droids to talk to their starships) and (2) people across the galaxy seemingly forgetting thousands-year-old institutions like the Jedi under the Empire and the New Republic, a picture is painted of a society where people don’t understand how the things they rely on function, and societal and institutional memory is broken. These aren’t the most persistently explored analogies in Star Wars relevant to or resonant in our culture, but they are persistent, resonant, and besides that just flesh out an interesting galaxy far, far away. If you go back to Tim Lebbon’s Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void novel, tens of thousands of years even before the Old Republic, humanity and the alien species it spends time with are within a few hundred years of beginning settlement of the galaxy, and lightsabers hadn’t been invented yet, but space travel had been. The story goes to length to explain early Jedi as institutionally morally corrupt from the outset, though their code is different than their spiritual descendants. Regardless of that, even there is implication of the known galaxy being the product of an intergalactic colonization effort as of yet unexplored in canon.[1]

Meanwhile, with Dune and Mad Max, the gaps in understanding are less implied and more textual. Dune is set tens of thousands of years in the future; Mad Max at some nebulous point in the next century. Dune is premised on a global human rejection of “thinking machines” (advanced computers and robots) that culminated in the “Butlerian Jihad” when such machines were destroyed, and mental conditioning (and eugenics) advanced to the point where people have psychic powers, can use drugs to mentally fold time for space travel, and some act as “human computers” (AKA “mentats”) in a baroque neo-feudal intergalactic imperial-religious-technocratic triumvirate inspired by mid-20^th century global capitalism. There has been less forgetting and on the part of the characters in the story and more just a gap in our knowledge – Frank Herbert’s Dune is written in parts like a history book and includes in its glossary appendix (one of five appendices) a definition of religious text, the “Orange Catholic Bible” which “contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism, and Buddislamic traditions.” I.e., in the ancient past of Dune, many of our religions of today had already hybridized with each other.[2]

Alternatively, the Mad Max sequels posits a world of barbarism, where civilization is struggling to recreate itself in an ignorant and violent fashion, another sort of struggling emergence of kingdoms and slavery congregating around resources like what remains of oil. The aesthetic of the films (except the original, where the world is amid collapse but not as sand-swept), and the 2015 video game, is the sandy wastes of post-apocalyptic Australia whose environmentalist themes come through in the depleted, barren, starving world. In the original Mad Max, the setting alerts the audience that this is “not far from now;” the second film, The Road Warrior, opens depicting nuclear war as the set up. The videogame is less clear about that, but its setting echoes the film that came out the same year, Mad Max: Fury Road, one where poisoned humans live in caves, bred as warriors to pillage and plunder for charismatic psychopaths and zealots that have concentrated resources (like water, fuel, and bullets) under them; the whole world we see, all technology and clothing, is salvaged and refitted.

I reference the videogame because it is so deeply interested in you as Mad Max interacting with the denizens of the waste that have recreated little societies, often built around raids, slavery, and ornamentation which invokes combinations of ritualistic body art and pain worship. It’s a road-and-vehicle based society from the outset of the first film, which is visually focused on prairies and small towns, and onward into the desert pseudo-civilization of the post-apocalypse. Over the course of the movies, we see humanity move further from the vestiges of civil society, in both physical and metaphysical institutions, as the protagonist becomes a wandering pseudo-mythical character, a traveling fable of vengeance and survival in a world gone mad, holding on to what little remains of his own sanity after the murder of his wife and child.

In a way, I feel like these three settings (or settings with similar premises) could work on a singular space-time continuum, not because I think they *need to*[3] or it would make it better but because I think the procession from one form of this society to another is fascinating. Let’s say a couple of decades sees the mass destruction of computing technology across the world. The subsequent chaos leads to depopulation and war.[4] The resulting society rebuilds itself along different structural lines, eventually finding its way to the stars. The reintroduction of thinking machines into this galaxy-spanning civilization leads to overreliance on them again. Eventually humanity is separated from memory, and depending on humanoid and animal-like robots to interact with the machines they need for their everyday tasks and jobs.

Dune is on the mind because it’s never far from it, but also Denis Villeneuve’s second of three proposed Dune films has come out, to some commercial success and critical acclaim (though WB is now undercutting its Dolby Digital and IMAX screens for a Ghostbuster’s movie). It put me in mind to think about adaptation and interpretation, and I’ll link to that piece once it’s finished. But, in any case, I must sadly admit that I love lore and worldbuilding. Not at the expense of story, but I love when the world is assembled in an interesting way for characters to move through and interact with; the economy with which this is done in books like The Stars My Destination. The adaptation point – even if I hate how attached some early criticisms of Villeneuve’s aesthetic were to lionizing what Lynch actually did and what Jodoworsky dreamed of doing, the things that were kept in and left out and people’s outsized reactions to them all speak to the world Frank Herbert created.

His space fantasy far-future feudal intergalactic society is a strange place. People walk into traps with their eyes open because honor demands it of them, yes, but that’s far from the most spectacular or unique part and the thing about implications is that having them spelled in new explanatory stories is seldom satisfying. What we have in all the implications within a setting are hints and teases. When we see people being bled alive upside down for their blood to be used to ornament the Sardaukar, we learn about the brutality of Sardaukar without having it explained that they’ve been trained on a prison planet. It’s nonetheless very interesting to think about how they came to be so tirelessly devoted to the Padishah Emperors (which I guess is why Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson wrote about it), how their society was so organized.  There are the gigantic, maybe world-sized spaceships that smaller spaceships and shuttles travel inside of and through, and the massive militaries on Giedi Prime and Caladan; the sprawl of humanity across the stars and the recreation of civilization. It’s fun to live in these spaces, and to consider all the space in between from one point to another, even if it’s not always well-executed when it’s explicated.

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[1] The book, and the comic series it was loosely connected to, all came out between 2012 and 2014, and then was rendered non-canonical by Disney.

[2] I’m pretty sure there’s also mention of the first use of atomic weapons being an escalation of a trade war between House Washington and House Osaka, but I can’t find it in my physical copy or the version scanned onto the Internet Archive.

[3] I’ve only just heard of Earth-27 and it’s not quite what I’m going for.

[4] This is kind of the set-up for the Twisted Metal show.