BEFORE: It's time for the fourth dystopian future movie for the month - and yes, it's another film that got cut from last year's chain due to time constraints, I could have easy linked here from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, but I don't recall if I could have linked OUT of this, so maybe that's why it was cut? Who can even remember what happened last September. Anyway, I made those cut films a priority for January 2025, and I think I'm going to get to all of them.
Tom Hardy carries over from "The Drop", because they used footage of him from "Mad Max: Fury Road" during the end credits here, which the IMDB does not recognize as an "appearance" for some strange reason. I totally count archive footage, I use it as linking all the time between documentaries, so why should a fiction film be any different?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mad Max: Fury Road" (Movie #2,593)
THE PLOT: The origin story of renegade warrior Furiosa before her encounter and teamup with Mad Max.
AFTER: And this is the second movie this month giving us the entire background story for one character from the franchise, essentially this is the prequel to "Mad Max: Fury Road" but also another sequel to "Mad Max" at the same time. The series director, George Miller, had apparently mapped out extensive backgrounds for every character, but I guess there are only a few that you'd want to make a whole movie about. Perhaps one day they'll make a prequel that explains the Immortan Joe character, I for one would really like to find out what "Immortan" means, because it kind of just seems like some scriptwriter misspelled "Immortal" and then didn't want to admit that.
The ending here leads directly into "Fury Road", too, that's why there are clips of that movie during the credits of this one, to remind you what WILL happen after the events of this movie, in fact you've probably already seen that, unless you're approaching the series of films for the first time and you want to watch the films in the proper order. However, there's really no set timeline for this series, they could make more movies and probably not care about the exact chronology, or whether there are a few mistakes and the timelines don't line up perfectly, because nobody really cares all that much, they just want to see an action-packed movie with some great stunts in it.
These movies tend to be very exciting, they're kind of like if you took a biker gang movie and fused it with a monster truck rally, then those two things had a baby that was raised in the dystopian future where potatoes are currency, water is nearly non-existent, and blood is a handy source of protein and vitamins. Milk is still milk, but you probably don't want to know where it comes from, but really, you can milk any mammal.
We think of this future as one giant desert, that's really all we've been shown in the previous "Mad Max" movies, set in the Australian outback some time after World War III, or whatever event brought civilization back to the start, with humans living in tribes again, and not anywhere that looks like it ever was a city. Maybe the cities are all too polluted or radioactive or filled with mutants, because why else would you choose to live in the middle of freakin' nowhere? But somehow Furiosa was raised someplace very near a forest, not a wasteland at all. This idyllic place is kept secret, but one day some bikers show up there and kill a boar, and when they find Furiosa tampering with their choppers they head for the hills, bikes loaded up with fresh meat and this young girl.
Furiosa's mother follows them on a motorcycle of her own, and manages to kill several of them before they can present her daughter to Lord Dementus of the Biker Horde. They escape, but when Furiosa's mother realizes she has to stay behind so her daughter can escape, she tells Furiosa to ride away and not look back. BUT she looks back, so she gets to witness her mother being crucified for not revealing the location of the secret forest wonderland. Dementus essentially adopts the young girl, because he lost his own children before this, however he's not exactly the World's Greatest Dad, also you know, he killed Furiosa's mother, so he's kind of starting with a big disadvantage when trying to win her over.
Some time goes by, Dementus decides to attack this giant rock fortress, the Citadel - it's not really the secret forest he wanted, but they do have a lot of water and presumably some agriculture up on the penthouse level. (We've seen this Citadel before in "Fury Road", only that before hasn't happened yet, again this is a prequel.). The Citadel is run by Immortan Joe (the albino guy who wears that cool skeleton-like mask all the time) and his army of War Boys (we've also seen them before, wait I mean after) and when Dementus can't take over the Citadel, he sets his sights on Gastown, an oil refinery that trades with the Citadel, food for "guzzoline". Once Dementus controls the gas, he negotiates a better deal with the Citadel, really just raising the price of gas, what could be more normal than that? It's called inflation, powered by supply and demand.
But as part of the deal, Furiosa gets traded to Immortan Joe, who wants to add her to his stable of wives - and he also gets the Horde's doctor, the Organic Mechanic. Sorry, did I say that potatoes were currency in this future? I guess it's potatoes AND people, so in the future culture they kind of looped around back to slavery again, because, well, why not, nobody's saying they CAN'T have slaves, all those people who might have a problem with that are dead. Furiosa manages to escape from Immortan Joe's son, who was about to get a little too rapey, and she hides in plain sight at the Citadel for years, disguised as a male worker. She later finds work helping to build the War Rig, it's a weapon-loaded truck that can cross the desert and take you to Gastown or Bullet Farm or anywhere, really, except that's it for anywheres and the rest of the continent is one big nowhere.
Joe sends the War Rig out and Furiosa tags along by hiding underneath it, which would only be a problem if the truck gets attacked by raiders when crossing the Wastelands. Which of course it will be, that happens in every single Mad Max movie. A lot of War Boys die defending the truck, but so what, they have literally hundred of those young men, and they're not afraid to die, but it's a good thing Furiosa tagged along so she could help kill all the raiders and also gain the trust of Praetorian Jack, who eventually realizes that he should train this woman and this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, at least until one of them kills the other in their sleep.
Meanwhile, Dementus learns that it's harder to manage an oil refinery than he thought, though it might have something to do with his name, he's either demented or has dementia (or maybe both), and so the place is kind of going under, plus his horde never cleans the restrooms so the place starts getting like really bad reviews on Yelp. Immortan Joe wants to attack Gastown, but first he needs Furiosa and Jack to drive out to the Bullet Farm and bring back a load of weapons and ammunition. But do they keep using the same truck for everything? Wouldn't their vegetables and milk end up tasting like gunpowder or dynamite or something? Are there no food safety standards in place in the future?
But when they arrive at Bullet Farm in the War Rig, they learn that Dementus has just taken over THAT facility as well - so he's locked up some kind of monopoly on goods and services in the Outback, and at Gastown he put up one of those "No fuel for the next 500 miles" sign, so maybe business will improve. Damn, why is everything in the Outback so far away from everything else? Why is it a three-day drive at top-speed to get ANYWHERE in the future? Oh, right, because apocalypse. Eventually all the errands are done, but now Dementus has captured Jack and Furiosa, he has Jack killed by dragging for the entertainment of it all, and he chains her to a car so she can't escape without chopping off her own arm, so guess what she does...
Somehow Furiosa manages to make it back to the Citadel, and Dementus follows with all his troops, so now that the errands are all done, the real war can begin. Furiosa joins the battle after shaving her head (really, the only way filmmakers can think up to show that a woman's getting tougher and means business now) and she goes after the escaping Dementus, but he and his close servants pull the old "Hey, let's split up so she won't know who to follow..." trick. Furiosa has the time and energy to follow all three, though, and so eventually she tracks down the man who killed her mother, and, well, what she does to him isn't pretty at all, killing would be too good for him, instead she wants him to endure years of pain and suffering. Well, as long as she gets some sense of closure, if not, that would just eat at her for the rest of her life.
So Chris Hemsworth wears an outrageous fake nose here and an even more outrageous (natural?) accent. And Anya Taylor-Joy's character grows up to look like bald Charlize Theron? Eh, OK, whatever, I'll allow it.
Also starring Anya Taylor-Joy (last heard in "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Tom Burke (last seen in "The Wonder"), Alyla Browne (last seen in "Three Thousand Years of Longing"), Lachy Hulme (ditto), George Shevtsov (ditto), David Collins (ditto), Quaden Bayles (ditto), Peter Stephens (ditto), Anna Adams (ditto), Danny Lim (ditto), John Howard (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Robert Jones (ditto), Lee Perry (ditto), Richard Norton (ditto), Ripley Voeten (ditto), Ben Smith-Petersen (ditto), Jon Iles (ditto), Angus Sampson (last seen in "Next Goal Wins"), Charlee Fraser, Elsa Pataky (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Nathan Jones (last seen in "Conan the Barbarian"), Josh Helman (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), David Field (last seen in "The Rover"), Rahel Romahn, Goran D. Kleut (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Ian Roberts (ditto), Josh Randall (ditto), C.J. Bloomfield, Matuse, Guy Spence, Clarence Ryan, Tim Burns, Tim Rogers, Florence Mezzara, Sean Millis, Dylan Adonis, David Barnett, Peter Sammak, Karl Van Moorsel, Dawn Klingberg, Stephen Amadasun, Nick Annas, Matthew Van Leeve, Shane Dundas, Jacob Tomuri (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Bryan Probets (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Darcy Bryce (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Chudier Gatwech, Shivanta Wijesinha, Spencer Connelly, Toby Fuller, Jayden Irving, Jesse Turner (last seen in "Elvis"), Harrison Norris, Ash Hodgkinson, Sean Renfrey, Kelli Bailey,
with archive footage of Hugh Keays-Byrne (also last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (ditto), Richard Carter (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Courtney Eaton (last seen in "Gods of Egypt"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Zoe Kravitz (last seen in "Allegiant"), Abbey Lee (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "The Yards"),
RATING: 6 out of 10 sandstorms
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