She just worked her way into the best position to stow away so that she could escape when out on a raid, no? I thought her journey made sense each step of the way.
Exactly. Four goals in succession. The first was merely escape. Her second was a vocation (and love). Then revenge. And lastly, a crusade. Having the same goal from start to finish would have been boring.
I didn’t find it incoherent or hard to follow plot wise at all and thought it was pretty straight forward. No flashbacks or flashforwards. And I found it, especially on a second viewing, to be packed with action almost more so than Fury Road with the introduction of a lot more set pieces. It’s a great companion piece to Fury Road and I almost think people who see Furiosa first and then Fury Road might find Fury Road short on plot.
That was one of the main complaints of Fury Road when it came out. I agree it’s short on plot, but think it’s a strength rather than a weakness. Felt like a timeless epic in that sense.
I’ve seen the film twice now. I didn’t find it to be hard to follow or confusing at all.
What didn’t you understand about the story?
I’m with you. I liked elements of the movie, but somehow it didn’t really gel into a cohesive whole. Maybe it was because the main character was too much of a cypher - I never really felt that much humanity from her. Anya Taylor-Joy is a fine actress, but she lacks the raw charisma Charlize Theron brought to the role. Theron made me care about her character; Taylor-Joy didn’t. And without a sympathetic anchor at the core of the film, it was just two and a half hours of horrible people being horrible to each other.
I need to sleep on this, really make sure I’m correctly articulating what didn’t work for me and what I didn’t understand. I’ll come back to it later.
I think Fury Road is one of best movies ever made. It’s not just a great action movie, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling, and most of that storytelling is told exclusively through action and body language. I’d put it up there with The Raid: Redemption and Alien in terms of thin plot + great storytelling. I learned so much from watching that movie. I wish I could do what Miller did, on paper. But on top of all of that, what motivated me is how noble the cause was and how transcendent it was to see a badass man and a badass woman working together, as equals. Has it ever been done like that before? Because if it has I need to add those movies to my watch list.
(I have little to no experience with other Mad Max films. I think I saw the first one and didn’t like it, but that would have been decades ago.)
Funny, my friend, who loves bad ass women but is squeamish about gore, thought it wasn’t nearly as gory as she feared. It was violent, but a lot of the blood was covered by clouds of dust, like that dude that got pulled apart. There was the arm, but she thought that was bad ass on Furiosa’s part. And the end, but he deserved it.
I saw it for the third time Sunday. Maybe I wouldn’t have if the group wasn’t going, but they were so I did and I saw things I missed the first two times.
I liked the movie a lot, but I agree that the pacing / flow was a bit weird. I read about how Furiosa went through a phase where it was being developed into a 5-episode animated series - I think a lot of that is still in its DNA.
That actually makes so much sense now that I think about it. It was more episodic than having a single unifying story goal.
I talked to my husband about this movie, and his impressions of it. Mostly I got him to clarify what was actually happening (which he followed most of) and there was so much I just completely missed the boat on. I found the dialog hard to hear so I missed a lot of “this is why we’re doing X” conversations. I have been having some issues with starting a new stimulant medication which means I’m both not getting any sleep and not feeling tired so I guess I’m still more wired & tired than I realized.
My tentative revision is that the plot probably was more coherent than I realized, however I was really not on board for the movie at all until the Stowaway segment. I understood everything going on perfectly until that point, so we cannot attribute my dislike of the beginning to not understanding it. I think there were many missed opportunities to establish character and make me care about Furiosa that just didn’t happen. My husband felt the same way, and I talked to others with similar misgivings. My husband also agreed with me that something was uneven about the pacing and some things were shown and elaborated on that didn’t really need to be elaborated on to serve the story.
So my tentative revision is to give it a B, assuming that some of my issues are related to sleep deprivation or just being denser than the average person. However I really would need to see it a second time to more critically evaluate its structure. I spent two years exclusively studying story structure so I have very specific ideas about how stories work or don’t work. But the most wild deviations from standard structure can be set aside when you’re emotionally invested in a great character.
I agree that the plot was coherent but a bit fragmented. You could sum up Fury Road in a short sentence, you couldn’t really do that with this movie. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it was way different than FR.
Random thoughts:
Anya Taylor-Joy did an amazing job. Also she has eyes the size of my neighborhood.
Hemsworth was utterly unrecognizable. I kept looking at the character, trying to see Thor under all that. Nope.
I thought Praetorian Jack’s character didn’t really fit this world – not heavy metal enough. Looked like a guy you’d see in a bomber jacket in the airport. Other than that, the actor did a good job with it.
I was impressed how sharp Immortan was with negotiating/tactical here. Unlike in FR where he’s an angry dumbass.
I was startled when Dementus seemingly lost control of Gastown, but I guess that was a smokescreen/distraction so he could attack the Bullet Farm?
Wow, Rictus is a pedophile? Glad we didn’t get a chance to explore that more, ew. Also, Furiosa gets away from him and disappears into a fake boy character, and nobody wonders what happened to that little girl?
When Furiosa gets away from Rictus, there’s a stop motion scene with a branch growing from the cliff with her fake hair-cap on it. I thought that was the seed she kept in her hair growing. Nope, that shows up later. Huh.
What happened to Scrotus? Clearly this character was the heart and soul of this world, and he disappears and isn’t in FR! The hell? /s
Come to think of it - what was the point of the Bullet Farm fight?
Two scenarios:
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Jack gets stuck inside the gates, drives way the fuck all over with the Chrome Rig, eventually makes his way up to the gates after the rig is destroyed, he and Furiosa jump into the pursuit car.
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Jack gets stuck inside the gate, abandons the rig, casually & w style strolls over & walks outside the gate. He and Furiosa jump into the pursuit car.
I mean, obviously the point was to enrage Dementus so he’d pursue those two which would end the film (eventually). Really weak plotting IMO.
Doesn’t Max do for him in the final scene of the video game?
Oh no, I think they did a good job of showing Dementus was barely holding onto power and could only stay in control through constant escalation, the moment things settled down he slowly started to unravel. I think Immortan Joe got that too.
I had trouble with that too. They would have turned the place upside down trying to find her, and if she did something really clever to not be found, I’d have liked to see that.
Yes, they seemed to have skipped over Immortan Joe’s reaction to her being found after being MIA for over a decade.
The chain of events seems to be acquired by Joe in a trade, stored in the vault with the wives, escapes by cutting her hair off, hides as a warboy, gets promoted as a warboy and helps build the new war-rig, stows away on war-rig, reveals herself to Jack, joins Jack’s team.
Never got Joe’s “where the hell have you been for the last 10 years?”
For the film’s main bad guy, Dementus was kind of pathetic. I know that was kind of the point, but still. It would have been nice if Furiosa had realized that the target of her revenge was pretty much a loser.
OK, so what happened to that meeting Dementus was proposing “in three days!” as Gastown collapsed around him? That never happened, but raiding the Bullet Farm did. I think there was some kind of smokescreen involved and the gastown chaos was basically a performance to throw Immortan’s troops off the scent.
Right, because he had to escalate things in order to stay in power. He and his people were raiders, they can’t just settle down and rule a town. They did use a fake attack in order to lure the defenders out, but it did not work and it had nothing to do with the very real collapse of gastown.
But he did settle down and rule a town. He ruled Gastown for 15 years.