Fast and furious prequel that takes the action to the Max
On the one hand, you can see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga as a comprehensive prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, jumping back a quarter of a century or so in ‘Wasteland’ time and then spending the best part of two-and-a-half hours getting us back to where Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy memorably started in 2015.
On the other, however, you can also see it as a very long film about how Furiosa – played by Theron in the original and seamlessly here, first by Alyla Browne, who plays her as a young girl and later by Anya Taylor-Joy – lost her left arm. Yes, she has both upper limbs at the beginning but, alas, not by the end. It’s an anxious wait, I can tell you.
But whichever way you look at it, Furiosa is a superlative bit of film-making by its 79-year-old director, co-writer and franchise founder George Miller, who made the first Mad Max film an astonishing 45 years ago with Mel Gibson in the title role. It’s stunning to look at, the pace never drops and it pulls off that rare feat of making the widely acclaimed
Fury Road look even better than it already did.
Canny cinema operators will surely already be making plans to show the two films in chronological order.
So what happens? A young Furiosa is kidnapped from her desert Eden, the so-called ‘Green Place’, by a hunting party from a biker gang controlled by the charismatic and loquacious Dementus, played with swagger and a touch of Thor by Chris Hemsworth.
Having answered another big question from Fury Road – what happened to Furiosa’s mother – Dementus sets his sights on the Citadel, already run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme taking over from the late Hugh Keays-Byrne).
Big mistake.
What ensues is set more convincingly in a post-apocalyptic Australia than Fury Road and gives us a better sense of the geography of the Wasteland, with both Gastown and the
Bullet Farm finally brought spectacularly to cinematic life.
It does slightly outstay its welcome, but rarely has getting right back to the beginning been quite so much action-packed fun. Franchise fans will love it.
Jennifer Lopez’s new film, Atlas, is also set in a post-apocalyptic world, where millions of people have been killed by AI robots that have somehow managed to over-ride their security protocols. It’s a promising, Terminator-like premise made all the more timely by recent developments in AI technology.
Unfortunately, nearly all that promise is wasted by an increasingly ludicrous story that sees Atlas Shepherd (Lopez) joining a military expedition to another galaxy, taking on the rogue robot developed by her mother and clunking around an inhospitable planet in one of those giant, armoured exo-skeletons that have been littering sci-fi films since Sigourney Weaver climbed into one in Aliens.
The Present turns out to be a well-cast and thoroughly enjoyable addition to the Groundhog Day genre, with the same day being lived over and over again, here courtesy of a magical, time-reversing grandfather clock.
But what adds a layer of proper poignancy is that the day being repeated time and again is the one when a seemingly happy couple, played by Isla Fisher and Greg Kinnear, are going to tell their three children that they plan to separate. Until, that is, their youngest child, a strange, socially reserved boy, discovers how to turn back time.
What is it that is so difficult about Garfield? Is it that the original newspaper strip cartoon was aimed at adults but film companies keep trying to turn him into a children’s film character? Or is it that a lazy, overweight, lasagne-loving cat is no longer funny in an increasingly obese world?
Whatever the reason, I never really warmed to the strip cartoon, hated the 2004 film and now find The Garfield Movie, with its fully animated tale of kidnap and dairy processing, little better, despite a voice cast led by Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson and Hannah Waddingham.