{"id":3791,"date":"2024-05-31T16:42:51","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T15:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3791"},"modified":"2024-05-31T16:42:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T15:42:51","slug":"furiosa-and-challengers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2024\/05\/31\/furiosa-and-challengers\/","title":{"rendered":"Furiosa and Challengers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome<\/em>, and to everyone\u2019s surprise, George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max<\/em> and brought us the astonishing Fury Road<\/em>, which hoovered up dollars, acclaim and awards in pretty much equal measure. Since, by all accounts, a detailed backstory for Charlize Theron\u2019s Furiosa<\/strong> had already been written, the surprise this time around is that it took a further nine years for the prequel to hit our screens. But, while the new film is still a wildly entertaining, beautifully shot, thrill-ride, it doesn\u2019t have the ice-water shock of the 2015 film, and nor does it have anything new to say, despite being a good half-hour longer.<\/p>\n

What it does do is split its narrative into individually-named chapters, a gimmick I always appreciate. But while this lends a welcome feeling of a sure hand on the tiller \u2013 \u201cI know you aren\u2019t sure what the story is quite yet, but sit back, you\u2019re in safe hands\u201d \u2013 I came away feeling I\u2019d seen half-a-dozen very exciting but rather samey short action films. Fury Road<\/em> didn\u2019t have this gimmick and didn\u2019t need it. It was stripped to the bones. The first half is running away and the second half is going back again. Nothing else is needed.<\/p>\n

Here, it\u2019s all a bit more complicated and convoluted. We don\u2019t even see Anya Taylor-Joy (taking over from an absent Theron) until about an hour in, because we\u2019re seeing the adventures of a prepubescent Furiosa first. And it\u2019s all very well done, with a nice turn from Tom Burke in the middle, and there\u2019s no shortage of demented action set pieces, eye-popping visuals and the familiar rogues gallery of badguys and misfits. Miller even seems to be aping Sam Raimi with his bonkers push-ins through the windscreens of various vehicles, and there\u2019s almost as much undercranking here as in a 1960s James Bond movie.<\/p>\n

Saving grace of what could have been a fine, rather exhausting, over-familiar affair is the amazing performance of Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, and it\u2019s greatly to the film\u2019s credit that the climactic scene is all about him and Furiosa as people, rather than as ballistic objects.<\/p>\n

Speaking of ballistic objects, Luca Guadagnino\u2019s Challengers<\/strong> sees a profoundly odd trio of actors (Spiderman\u2019s girlfriend, Prince Charles and Riff from West Side Story<\/em>) hashing out their complicated romantic feelings via the medium of tennis. I wouldn\u2019t have seen this coming from the director of Call Me By Your Name<\/em>, who\u2019s always proven to be a keen observer of human nature, but who hasn\u2019t previously struck me as much of a visual stylist. Here he goes to town on the material, slamming Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019s techno score into ordinary dialogue scenes, shooting arguments like tennis matches and tennis matches like video games.<\/p>\n

Too much of this stuff and you\u2019d get the impression that the director doesn\u2019t trust the material, a feeling emphasised by the free-floating timeline with early scenes turning up in what almost feels like a random order. But the playing of the three leads holds it together and when a should-be low-stakes tennis match in a no-name tournament starts to become the spine of the story, the central trunk to which all the other scenes connect, then it comes fully into focus. Just as I was beginning to get exasperated at it, the pulpy soap-opera plotting pulled me back in, and then I surrendered to the beguiling excess of it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, and to everyone\u2019s surprise, George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max and brought us the astonishing Fury Road, which hoovered up dollars, acclaim and awards in pretty much equal measure. Since, by all accounts, a detailed backstory for Charlize Theron\u2019s Furiosa had already been written, the surprise this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[12,19],"class_list":["post-3791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-movies","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Z9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3792,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions\/3792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}