Picoreview: Furiosa: boring :(
I had heard enormously mixed reviews from friends, and…do you ever feel like sometimes other people have somehow seen a completely different movie or TV show than the one you’ve seen? I’ve taken to saying “I wish I’d seen the cut THEY saw,” which is how I feel about the positive reviews of Furiosa. I’m very glad people enjoyed it, I just don’t understand how. :)
Everyone in it was good. Chris Hemsworth’s fake nose was actively not good, but despite that, he was very good. Anya Taylor-Joy was good, and so were two girls who played younger versions of Furiosa. Everybody was fine. It’s just…it was really long, and really boring. I looked at my watch grimly at what I feared (corrently) was only the halfway mark, and sat through another tedious hour.
There were a couple of good tense action scenes, but one of the problems was that because we know where the story ends, there were parts of this story that had to be contrived in ways I didn’t believe in order to allow the foregone conclusion to conclude that way.
I think ultimately one of the major problems for me was that the emotional heart of the story is the relationship between Hemsworth’s Dementus and Furiosa, except because there are three people playing Furiosa and at least one of them never engages with Hemsworth at all (as best I can remember, at least), it sort of leaves the emotional core of the film hanging.
I will, however, say that Furiosa’s development as a character/person did not go the way I expected it to/gleaned from what we got of her backstory in Fury Road, and given the implications from that movie, this is a very good thing. I just wish I’d liked it. :p