THE WRITERS TAKE: FURIOSA

With Less Mad, And No Max.

The Wasteland…. The ORIGINAL Wasteland, we'll get to Fallout eventually. The music, the war boys, oh the war boys, god I hope they find Valhalla! Immortan Joe and his deformed children and his beautiful wives, oh how I feel for them. But this time, the wasteland brought us a new character Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, and a new take of Charlize Theron's impeccable Furiosa, this time played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

It’s a whole new look at THE most metal franchise to ever hit the screen. So what did I think of it? Did I love it like the critics? Did I hate it as the box office reflects, or do I wish the wasteland would have propelled us forward instead of tell a story for which we know how it ends? 

Well, surprise surprise I think my feelings are more inline with Gastown than Bullet Farm fates. It wasn’t a heap of shit that went up in a ball of glorious flames. No, it was much more a beautiful construction overrun by incompetent shephards unwilling to tell the boss what he needed to hear until it was too late. The Mad Max franchise is about action. Unabashed ruthlessly fun insane action. Nothing glorifies this more than in Fury Road where we have a guitar player attached to the front of a rig going into battle. It is just completely absurd. Or the war boys eating chrome as they go into a final action worthy of Valhalla that is no less insane then the idea of spraying chrome on their lips. 

Mad Max is about pure, full throttle adrenaline loving cinema. Furiosa is not this. Though it tries to be. I would not categorize it with the likes of Blade Runner 2049 which I think is a great “film” but it’s not a Blade Runner film, it's a sci-fi detective story, not Blade Runner. This is the wasteland. We DO get some action, but for the first time ever, Mad Max tried to tell deep emotional stories. 

I don’t know if I need to say this, but, if you're going to put me in the wasteland, I’d like to be in the wasteland. I’d like to have heart pounding insanity, story is secondary YEA that’s ME saying that, the LORE KING, but some tales are told with layered lore and some are told with masks that give children nightmares and crazed pale men killing themselves in the name of Valhalla. You gotta work with what you have, and here, George Miller didn’t quite get the assignment right. 

Ok, now that I got that mud water out of my system, let's talk about that 15 minute action sequence that took 70+ days to shoot… that didn’t include Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus… It was pretty cool, it was fun, it was insane, it was NOT as good as any sequence from Fury Road. I kept thinking to myself why, WHY would they not one up Fury Road here? It angered me, kept me up at night. Countless puffs of my vape pen and numerous interviews of George Miller later I realized the trap he had set for himself, the reason Furiosa was never going to succeed in the box office, and why it was always doomed to fail. 

Because Furiosa is a TRUE prequel. It’s not a prequel like Star Wars Episodes 1-3, which happened in the same standard of world. No, Furiosa happened at a different time in a place that was evolving exponentially, so the action could not be greater in Furiosa than in Fury Road, because it was scaling up, because George Miller saw it as one 4+ hour piece of art, so if Furiosa had crazier battles than Fury Road, like any self respecting sequel prequel would, it would not flow well together. The guitarist wasn’t on a rig yet, because it hadn't been built. They built everything IN Furiosa. 

So while the battle scene was epic, and the flying bikers were wild, it just didn’t hold up to Fury Road and the unhinged nature of those battles. How could it? Those techniques hadn’t been invented yet. So the problem here is that this film was destined for failure IN THE BOX OFFICE, but, and here’s where this Take takes a turn like the high flyers who turned on Dementus. I actually think this film, as a streaming movie, to be watched in unison with Fury Road is a great completionist's dream. If you are like me, and love to soak in a world, be in it, really be in it, cue in the 11 hours & 22 minutes marathon of the EXTENDED Lord of the Rings trilogy I did last December with my buddy Jack, then sitting for 4ish hours in the wasteland is not only interesting, it's a goddamn dream! 

The gradual scale from Furiosa that I just spent most of this article bashing, is exactly why if watching it in correct order makes it a great film, it is an awesome world building tool to bring you to Fury Road. Even the over storytelling that I find to be too much WORKS if it is half of the entire entry, not the whole thing. Perspective is everything, and never more so when you make a film that is a part of a whole and made it after the second part meant to be put in the first. Which, and I will reiterate, is why this specific story fits fantastically for streaming. Not too dissimilar of a concept to what DUNE is doing with the Bene Gizert and HBO, highly excited for that. 

So we went back to the wasteland 10 years later, 5 years too late, to explore a storyline 20 years in the past. The spectacle aside, this story, like so many others from great storytellers, died on the vine because no one was willing to challenge the ideas of someone too entrenched in his own world. Propel the story forward for the big screen, fill in the gaps on the small one and never leave your six unguarded. For there are war boys around every corner. 

Be Furiosa’s mom, whose sniper rifle could hit her target from 1500+ meters, whose steady hand knew what she wanted, and whose thoughts were always to the future, and never to the past. 

GUNGNIR, ICONIC ARTS and other musings…

I wanted to take a moment during our intermission here to shamelessly and directly promote my two companies. Gungnir Entertainment, (www.Gungnirbooks.com) a genre-focused publishing company with best-selling titles from yours truly hitting shelves nationwide this Fall.  With books focused on classic sci-fi ideas like “What does it mean to be human” and “is the bible right?” “Adventures throughout the stars” are just a few of the prompts for the books you can dive into with Gungnir. Gungnir’s website will launch this summer, and you can stay up to date on the forthcoming titles on my Instagram, @matthewmedney, or at my author page on Simon & Schuster. 

And then there is Herø Projects. The Perennial leader in custom comics and animated services, Herø is a state-of-the-art creative studio that has worked with talents such as Bobby Wagner and the NFL, Floyd Mayweather, Shaggy, Nghtmre, and brands such as Remi Martin, Live Nation, and Rolling Loud. If Branding through storytelling isn’t your thing you can check out our original titles, the Onyx line with books such as Stable, Remnant, and Best Selling Comic The Red.  To learn more about Herø Projects visit us at heroprojects.io.

Iconic Arts is a next gen IP and franchise studio leveraging the best story-tellers and technologists to reinvent how stories are told. www.IconicArts.com