Now then, here are my random comments and observations for those of you who do know Mad Max quite thoroughly:"Furiosa" exceeded my expectations in a big way. The trailers make it look like a CGI-laden Marvel movie, but it's actually insanely good.
I found it deeply satisfying that, like "Fury Road," this movie contained numerous echoes of the previous Mad Max films. Amazingly, these echoes, homages, and inside references never felt forced, overbearing, or like fan service.
As for the CGI, its use was more than justified. George Miller was clearly using CGI when he had to, in order to tell the story, and not as a substitute for practical effects or solid storytelling.
It's also wonderful that this movie is not in any way a re-hash of "Fury Road." It's as different from that film as "The Road Warrior" was from "Mad Max."
Miller could have easily cranked out a carbon copy of "Fury Road" in order to cash in on its success. Instead he gave us all kinds of world-building to flesh out just how and why the Mad Max universe is able to function.
Amazingly, he did this without falling victim to the folly of the Star Wars prequels where every little damned thing you saw in the Original Trilogy had to be explained so thoroughly that it lost all its mystique and magic.
And speaking of Star Wars, Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa is everything Daisy Ridley's Rey should have been. Star Wars asked us to believe Rey was a shell-shocked survivor without ever doing the work to justify us believing that.
"Furiosa" does the work.
SPOILERS AHEAD
1. The opening shot of our planet, which revolves around to show the Australian continent, is an interesting bit of confirmation that Mad Max is still taking place in Australia. That might sound like a ridiculous thing to say, but, honestly, "Fury Road" was so divorced from the three previous films, and shot in Namibia, so I kind of got the impression George Miller might very well have intended his reboot of the franchise to be conveying to us a mythology; a legend that could be taking place anywhere, in the ruins of any country on any continent.
Now I want to acquire a copy of this film and compare screen shots of that view of the Australian continent with actual present-day globes and maps. Because in Fury Road, Max tells Furiosa and friends they could drive for (I forget how long, but maybe days and days) and still encounter nothing but sand, so we know Fury Road takes place in a world where the oceans have receded and/or dried up.
So I'd like to get an analysis of this shot from Furiosa and find out whether the continent now appears much larger, since there's much less water.
Honestly, that has to be the case in order for the film to make sense, because there is no surface feature matching The Citadel in present-day Australia. I feel, therefore, that The Citadel has to have been under water, and only been revealed after the disappearance of the oceans.
2. I was surprised to learn from the Mad Max Bible YouTube channel that George Miller had not worked with the people who made the 2015 Mad Max video game, because so many of its elements were so compatible with what we saw in Fury Road. According to Mad Max Bible, this was simply because the game's creators had access to tons of notes and art George Miller had created maybe twenty years ago when he originally began working on not only the epic that would become Fury Road, but also his ideas for a video game.
Therefore, it was wild to see things in Furiosa that we had previously seen in the 2015 video game. First and foremost, there's the introduction of Imortan Joe's other son, Scrotus. His appearance is quite different in the film, and unlike in the game, nobody addresses him as "Lord Scrotus," and he doesn't have his own compound or his own cadre of war boys, but it's certainly noteworthy that he's in the film at all.
Another thing I loved about the game was that it made the Fury Road world seem more plausible, because as Max explored the various encampments and encountered various people who needed him to go on various missions, we as the player began to understand how an interconnected economy would have made it possible for cars and motorcycles to still exist in the wasteland. The game, of course, provided us with our first look inside Gas Town and our first encounters with its residents!
Another echo of the game is the parallel between Hope and Glory and Furiosa and her mother. Toward the end of the game, we see Hope strung up and dead in a position very similar to the one Furiosa's mother was in when she was killed. And like Furiosa, Glory was forced to watch her her mother was mutilated and tortured to death.
I am not, of course, implying George Miller had any interest at all in referencing or honoring the video game; I'm just saying it's interesting and satisfying that the same ideas that were in his notes from such a long time ago appeared in the game and in Furiosa.