Do you have it in you to make it epic?

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — 3.5/5

So you're telling me I just wrote a whole-ass blogger.com post about how the joy of these movies are the loose application of continuity, and so then you build a movie entirely out of connected parts? Who am I even speaking to? Do I not control the tides and waves with my words? Am I not gravity? Sigh. I thought these reviews might reach someone in power; alas. Even so, I enjoyed it!! In many ways, I like it more than Fury Road; namely, I am an unfortunate traditionalist and like a nice character backstory and an A to B to C plot. Furiosa is a set character, in opposition to Mad Max who, despite his backstory, is now become just Mythological Man. Furiosa meanwhile feels positioned in a final world state for George Miller to explore. No more leaps in time and look and feel; this is the final resting place for these doomed people (and these doomed movies?). And then, in many ways, it is worse. Worse, or less interesting. I, perhaps unfairly, hold these movies to some standard of realism, and this movie is largely a CGI-fest. All movies use CGI, I understand, but in this one, it is used poorly. It stands out; it stands apart. And then its final commitment to rushing to a pre-existing conclusion; ending exactly where the previous one begins feels like an unnecessary Lego block clicking into place. It closes a newly opened door. There are certainly twenty years of eternal history and non-history that could have happened between this one and that one. It also, unfortunately, retreads through imagery. Here, again, are War Boys. Here, again, are Bullet Town and Gas Town. Here, again, is Immortan Joe, in look alone, completely divorced from the absolute power, the absolute wildness of Hugh Keays-Byrne. Here, introduced, very intentionally, is Scrotus, who has no ultimate use and is weirdly missing between this one and that one. But also, within that—the flying motorcycle octopus man, and the chariot of bikes, and Dementus is familiar but new enough (though short of iconic). A wild idiot. Worse than the existing world in his way. Proof that there's nothing you could have that someone else doesn't want to make worse. He's the only one of them who seems to be clearly having fun, which is a nice break from the only-ever-serious Furiosa (fantastic as a child and a mute adult, but who loses something powerful when she speaks). Though serious, she carries a knowledge that there is a better world, which Mad Max does not carry. He is the hope without hope. She is simply hope. Which I, again, am an unfortunate sucker for. I feel as though I am only mostly saying negative things but, despite the things I don't like, despite my reluctance to accept this world as the final world—it is still a wonderful world, one that I'm glad to keep revisiting. It is an excuse for characters and visuals and words and names and bombast. And my boy and yours, George Miller, knows how to film an action sequence, hoo-ha. I'm sorry that we may lose more in the near-term, but I hope we get that even newer world twenty years from now.