Cannes 2024 Dispatch - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Cannes 2024 Dispatch - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Stephen David Miller shares his experience at Cannes and reviews George Miller's 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.'
Today I’m pleased to bring you the first of 3-4 dispatches covering the 2024 Cannes Film Festival by Decoding Everything’s festival correspondent Stephen David Miller. Stephen has previously covered the Toronto International Film Festival and he’s the co-host of The Spoiler Warning podcast. -David Chen
Hello, Decoding Everything readers! I’m presently on the ground at the Cannes Film Festival, which I will be attending for the full duration this year, all while recapping some of the buzziest premieres I’ve managed to grab a ticket to. Many of these screenings are for films which may not see a theatrical release in the U.S. for upwards of a year — if they manage to nab a distributor at all.
One of my favorite things about attending Cannes is that it offers me the chance to peer into future awards seasons, tracing the hype and critical acclaim as they evolve over months or years. Some films start with raves of “masterpiece” but fizzle by the time they reach a U.S. audience; others are met with a polite-but-muted reception here, only to build passionate followings at venues like Toronto and snowball their way to serious Oscar contention.
And some films render all of what I just said moot, because they’ve already amassed years worth of hype….and will be playing in a theater near you next weekend. I’m talking, of course, about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
But first, a bit about the festival itself.
Yes, Regular People Can Go To Cannes Too
This is my fourth time attending the Cannes Film Festival. Typically when I mention that I’ve been here, I’m met with some variation on the question: “People can just…go to Cannes?” After all, the red carpet carries an air of extreme exclusivity in the public imagination, populated by megastar celebrities, veteran industry insiders, high-profile film critics, international supermodels, guys who seem lifted directly out of Entourage, and an army of sweaty paparazzi. All of those people very much exist here, to be clear—but I am not one of them. I’m just a random dude who loves movies. And it turns out, some of us are allowed inside as well.
While I do cover movies for Decoding Everything, I’m here with what’s called a Cinephile badge, which is reserved for members of the general public who are particularly passionate about film. I won’t go into the details of the accreditation process (though for those curious, I blogged about it the first time I got in). But if you’re lucky enough to get selected, you are granted free entry to the festival, meaning you can theoretically join every screening those celebrities and industry insiders attend. However, actually getting into one of those screenings can be monumentally difficult in practice, requiring patience, shamelessness, a tolerance for uncertainty, and a slew of tips and tricks accumulated over the years—including literally begging on the street.
But it is possible! Every night, alongside the stars of the silver screen, dozens of regular movie lovers find a way to walk the red carpet. Tonight, that was me for Furiosa.
Walking The Red Carpet
Cannes has a famously strict dress code for all red carpet premieres: regardless of your festival badge or the invitation with your name on it, security will absolutely turn you away if you aren’t in black tie formal wear. This means many attendees are wearing tuxedos and formal gowns from morning to night. For those of us lucky enough to have an AirBnB in the city (and who can’t be trusted to drink coffee, eat a sandwich, or experience the Mediterranean heat within a 10 foot radius of a tuxedo), this means a mid-afternoon race home for a quick outfit change. Either way, about an hour before the premiere, we were lined up and ready to go.
After getting my badge and ticket scanned and going through security, I made it onto the carpet about 40 minutes before showtime. Furiosa is one of the most high-profile premieres of the fest, which means at this point the carpet was already packed with celebrities and paparazzi. On a typical night I’d try to make myself scarce, zigzagging between supermodels and flashing cameras (whose owners scream at me in French to get out of their way) as fast as I can until I make it up the stairs and into the Grand Théâtre Lumière. But tonight I felt it my duty to document the experience, and violate the strict “no phones on the carpet” policy for the good of the Decoding Everything audience. So I stopped halfway up the stairs, held my iPhone out to snap a photo, was immediately met by a security guard shouting inches from my face, and dropped the phone by mistake while apologizing profusely. But the phone did get a picture on the way down, so…mission accomplished?
Inside, I headed up to the balcony to find my seat. For the next half hour, I watched as the remaining red carpet coverage played on the big screen, with the camera following a handful of miscellaneous celebrities, including this year’s Jury members Lily Gladstone, Eva Green, and (President of the Jury) Greta Gerwig. Eventually the soundtrack changed to signify the arrival of the Furiosa cast and crew. They made their way up the steps, stopped to pose for photos, then continued into our auditorium where they were seated for the film. We stood and cheered for a few minutes, then took our seats as the lights dimmed and the film began.
The Movie: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Editor’s note: The following section contains basic plot details for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Though the energy of a full-house world premiere certainly added to the experience, I would have been excited to see Furiosa in an empty AMC. Excited, and just a little bit nervous. After all, it had big shoes to fill.
With Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller captured lightning in a bottle, creating a film which is somehow both elegant and chaotic, stripped-down and maximalist. Using a richly-textured (but virtually unexplained) world as a launching off point, it pairs a deceptively simple plot and incredible practical effects to distill the “action” genre down to its essence: movement as an art form. It’s a Cirque du Soleil show forged in fire and chrome. And like the greatest feats of acrobatics, it seemingly defies the law of physics. There’s this thing that happens a handful of times in the film, when the mayhem and adrenaline is amped up so high that it hits a sort of breaking point, like blowing out a speaker. Suddenly, the chaos transcends the frenzy and feels almost calm. I’ve never seen it replicated in another action film; I can only describe it as “magic.”
It’s a formula that likely could only work once, and Furiosa wisely doesn’t try to repeat it. Rather than double down on the action in an attempt to recreate the magic, the prequel turns up the volume on Fury Road’s quiet, crucial foundation: the world George Miller built. For as much as this movie is an attempt to show us how Furiosa became Furiosa, it’s also meant to expound upon the Mad Max universe writ large. The Citadel, The Green Place, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, the warring clans who roam the wasteland, and the demagogues who wield them—all that texture gets deepened in the process. The result feels like a marriage between the kinetic energy of Fury Road, the genre zaniness of the 1980s Mad Max sequels, and the exuberant mythmaking of Three Thousand Years of Longing. To paraphrase the words of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), Miller took the raw energy of the former film and dared to make it epic.
I say “dared,” because Furiosa is a big—and risky—swing for the franchise. Rather than a compressed action narrative, we’re given a five chapter epic spanning multiple decades. Where Fury Road was almost entirely spent on the road, Furiosa’s first major vehicle set piece occurs over an hour into its runtime by my estimation. Even that star power, which was so palpable on the carpet, is somewhat undercut by its design. For the first hour of the movie we follow the young Alyla Browne as Furiosa rather than Anya Taylor-Joy, and Chris Hemsworth’s scenery-chewing villain could hardly be considered the film’s narrative center. The film trusts that we’ll care as much about ideas as we do specific cast members or action sequences. Only once those ideas are established will it give us the spectacle of its predecessor.
But the risk paid off; the film is a blast from beginning to end. Anya Taylor-Joy inhabits Furiosa so completely it’s easy to forget she’s the third actress we’ve seen play her. She has every bit of Charlize Theron’s grit and swagger, while adding new emotions to the mix as the film demands. She’s as captivating in all-dialogue scenes as she is behind the wheel of a war rig. Chris Hemsworth, too, is a total delight as Dementus: an alternatingly goofy and terrifying warlord with delusions of erudition, who reminded me of the campier villains of the Mel Gibson era… or a human version of Proximus in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Miller brings back the majority of the Fury Road side characters as well, fleshing out their backgrounds while planting Easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers. The storytelling is rich and engaging, handling major time jumps with ease. And when the myth-making is eventually set aside and we find ourselves back on the road, the action choreography is thrilling and visceral. If it never quite hits that moment of transcendent magic, it remains extremely satisfying.
Furiosa is not Fury Road, and no one should expect it to be. This is not a masterpiece of pure action cinema. What it is: an action-adventure prequel which deepens that masterpiece while also being very good, maybe even great, in its own right. Given the countless ways this could have been a disaster — or even worse, blandly serviceable — it’s a thrill to see George Miller not only pull it off but also surprise us in the process.
And hey, if Furiosa doesn’t defy physics like its predecessor, it did manage to defy biochemistry: For two and a half hours, my jet lag completely disappeared! But for now, I’ll have to succumb to it.
Hope to see you soon for another entry on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.