Jordan Zhouyi
5 min readJun 11, 2024

I saw Fury Road (2015). Several times. Loved it. Like many other people I wanted to see Furiosa only because George Miller co-wrote it and directed it.

It was nice seeing some of the characters again, like young Immortan Joe. I was pleased to see the actor they cast for him being just as menacing, if not more.

Now, Furiosa as compared to Fury Road:
Furiosa has more to its plot, much more of a storyline. Fury Road was just a bunch of people getting chased in one direction, turning around, and getting chased back, all in few days. With Furiosa we follow her from her happy childhood to being captured by a maniac and traded into sex slavery, to her finding her place as one of the Warboys, to eventually becoming the driver of the War Rig, and that last bit was unearned. She didn’t strong-arm her way to the driver’s seat, the former driver caught feelings and basically just gave her the job. And that made more sense, was more plausible. A skinny girl was going to be last in the long line of warboys capable of scoring the coveted job of driving the oil tanker.

Furiosa has too much noticeable CGI. Some of the stunts were too unrealistic. Furiosa lacked the grit Fury Road had. Fury Road used CGI too, but it looked minimal, and at least a majority of the stunts looked like something that can actually be done.

Furiosa didn't match that, and that took me out of it several times, like when people are climbing vehicles barely hanging onto one another, or someone getting pushed off a platform by a rush of bullets.
Look at this:

I've seen video game graphics more polished than this. Is this what $168 million can get?
Much of Fury Road was filmed in the Namibian desert, Southwestern Africa.

All of Furiosa was filmed in Australia.
during filming

It seems there's always some greenery in the background that they had to edit out in post-production, so for much of the movie there's this little nagging feeling of the background being a little unreal. It's like they filmed the entire thing in a studio in front of greenscreens, it was a little odd.
Miller is 79. He can't be running around in a desert at his age, I suppose. That's understandable.

The scene involving the chase of the War Rig - that long big truck - apparently took 86 days to film. 86 days, wow. It looked it, too. Easily the highlight of the movie.

New cars, new tricks, new bad guys. Even though many of the old characters like the Bullet Farmer and Rictus Erectus are featured, none of them take center stage. It’s all given to the new bad guy - Dementus.

Furiosa had some humour in it - mostly delivered by Dementus - and it was a very welcome addition, a refreshing change from Fury Road's male lead who was moody and barely spoke (Max). The humor was only there in the first chapter and by the second chapter there was a dramatic shift in the tone to a more serious one, and by the time Dementus came back into the picture years later he seemed to have aged out of his comedic antics, which was a bit disappointing but in retrospect it was more suited to how serious the last chapter was.

As to whether the movie is "woke" in terms of it being "feminist," I would not necessarily disagree, but I would argue Fury Road is 2.5 times more feminist than this film could ever be. Mad Max in Fury Road was outshined and the screen dominated by the female lead, who was a better shot than Mad Max despite having one hand. The movie featured several young women - being aided by a group of older women - taking up arms and fighting to be freed from their demented husband who had enslaved then, kept them to be nothing but sex slaves and breeding machines.

It was as "feminist" as you could possibly imagine, and it yet held up just fine. It didn’t set it back, it made it even better. You wanted these women to kill Joe and get away, wanted them to win, to be free. Furiosa, for all its CGI and humour, was just another selfish revenge story.

Furiosa was no Fury Road, and that’s actually a good thing. Why give your audience the same show you gave them before? Sequels and prequels are supposed to enchance on the previous films, and be a different experience of their own. Furiosa did do that. It also gives much more lore on the Mad Max universe.

"Witness Me!"

Jordan Zhouyi

Black student studying in China. I write about my experiences as a foreign student, and about my small Pacific island nation - Papua New Guinea.