#i think anya taylor joy is too...dainty for a wasteland character

[poorestforest]

I finally watched the Furiosa movie. Mad Max Fury Road is in my top 3 favorite movies of all time and so obviously I wanted to delve into this prequel. It was...good....but I don't think I loved it as much as other people did.

1) the aging/timeline was not clearly defined so I literally thought the first time Furiosa & Jack interacted on the war rig that she was still a teenager because she was so tiny and he looked like an adult man. So it was weird to see all these "tender" moments between them. I also didn't feel the chemistry between them (nothing like how I felt it during Fury Road) so I was kinda like "?? This guy?? We're telling him about the green place, inviting him, and going back to bullet farm for HIM?!" Maybe I'm so used to distrusting men in these kinds of movies that I truly didn't think he was a good guy and that he would have turned on her. I took all the scenes with him being a "good man" with a grain of salt but maybe I should rewatch the movie with a new pair of eyes so I can see what others saw.

2) it was also weird to see Furiosa with long hair at the citadel. I don't understand her motivation for growing it out knowing that she has the means to cut it off especially since she's passing as a boy. I wanted more buzzcut!Furiosa damnit! It felt like she was written with long hair because of the romantic angle and I think that was a poor choice.

3) as we know, Furiosa smuggles the wives out of the citadel on her war rig. Why? Sure, it's to get them out of a bad situation. But Miss Giddy in Fury Road said that the girls begged Furiosa to take them but the prequel implies that Furiosa went to them (with the peach slices) at the end. Was that just to forge a bond or was that with an offer to leave?

Nothing that happened in the movie showed the reasons why Furiosa would take them. I always thought Immortan Joe did something to Furiosa and this was one way to get back at him but she was invisible to him the whole movie (obviously with the exception of when she was a child).

The whole time she was just trying to survive for herself. Jack was the only other person she was trying to leave with. I wish there were moments between her & the wives when she was kept with them (for how long??) that showed a shared connection or a sense of solidarity so that it didn't feel so sudden re her smuggling them out.

4) I really thought Dementus was going to be Immortan Joe lmao but no just turns out he's a wannabe war lord who should have stayed in the desert. Overall, while an interesting character (maybe Chris Hemsworth's best role) I didn't really care for him being the movies entire plotline. Also I didn't understand the negotiation scene where he ripped off his own nipples. Like wtf lol maybe I missed something.

5) I didn't like the role Rictus played in the movie. I didn't like the pedo insinuations. I wish Furiosa was the one to kill him in Fury Road.

Final thoughts: Mad Max Fury Road is still the top movie. And I have argued for years that it is one of the most romantic movies. Not because it's about romance but because of how intimate Max & Furiosa's partnership is. They come to trust one another explicitly and save each other over & over again. He is reliable in a world of men who would set fire to the world. They are a team. And it's so beautiful to watch it develop in an instant.

When she puts the gun over his shoulder in the blue place and instructs him not to breathe - no, when he misses the first two shots and wordlessly hands the rifle to her as she stands quietly behind him - that is trust, that is equal partnership in a wasteland. There is no room for an ego.

There are so many sequences in Fury Road that grip me deeply and have profoundly shaped me. Jack does not hold a candle to the man that Max is. But I am grateful to him because he was soft with Furiosa and because of him she could finally love someone again in this terrible world.