After nearly a decade, director George Miller has returned to the Wasteland with "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." Are critics united in their praise? Or is there a surprising division among them?
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00:00 After nearly a decade, director George Miller has returned to the Wasteland with Furiosa,
00:05 a Mad Max saga.
00:06 Are critics united in their praise, or is there a surprising division among them?
00:11 Furiosa serves as a prequel to 2015's Oscar-winning epic Mad Max Fury Road, which has garnered
00:16 a reputation as one of the greatest action films ever made.
00:19 "What a lovely day!"
00:21 Miller enlisted Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth to tell the tale of Furiosa years
00:25 before we met her in Fury Road.
00:27 After being snatched from the Green Place and winding up in the hands of the warlord
00:31 Dementus, she's forced to survive many trials as she tries to find her way home.
00:36 As of this video, Furiosa holds an 87% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
00:41 While that's not as high as the 97% rating Fury Road holds, it seems like the majority
00:46 of critics have enjoyed what Miller has put together after all these years.
00:49 SlashFilm's own B.J.
00:51 Colangelo gave Furiosa a perfect 10 out of 10 review, proclaiming that it very well might
00:55 be one of the greatest prequel films ever made.
00:58 She went on to say,
00:59 "Not only does it stand on its own as a masterful action-adventure blockbuster, but it also
01:04 exemplifies Miller's thesis as a whole — that survival in extremis reveals the true essence
01:09 of a person."
01:10 Writing for the Arizona Republic, Bill Goodykoons had a similarly glowing review, saying,
01:14 "The question is," Dementus asks, "do you have what it takes to make it epic?"
01:18 Miller answers that question with a resounding yes.
01:21 While being careful to differentiate between George Miller's two latest offerings, Ian
01:25 Sandwell told Digital Spy,
01:27 "Furiosa, a Mad Max saga, is not Mad Max Fury Road, but it is another singular cinematic
01:32 experience that needs to be witnessed."
01:34 Writing for Den of Geek, Matthew Bird praised the film's happy luridness and shamed other
01:39 filmmakers for their inability to craft quality origin stories.
01:42 He said,
01:43 "Watching Furiosa, I couldn't help but be a little angry that we don't get more prequels
01:46 like this.
01:47 But what about those who didn't enjoy the film?
01:49 That's where things get tricky with Furiosa.
01:51 While the majority of critics love it, the ones who weren't into it, uh, really weren't
01:56 into it."
01:57 "Furiosa!
01:58 We've come too far."
02:00 In a scathing review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Nicholas Sell wrote,
02:03 "For me, this isn't cinema.
02:05 It's not even movies, but rather a joyless, pointless, pretentious, and inartistic slog.
02:10 It's visually monotonous and tonally random, casual when it should be serious and then,
02:15 out of nowhere, self-important.
02:17 It's awful."
02:18 According to the Los Angeles Times, Joshua Rothkopf was particularly hard on Miller's
02:22 use of CGI in Furiosa.
02:24 He said,
02:25 "Too much of its blood and fire is the work of computers, and for the first time, that
02:28 work is obvious.
02:30 There's something very unMad Max about this.
02:32 The tactility of the earlier films fed into the realness of potentially surviving the
02:36 fall of civilization, even if that meant coming face to face with a tyrannical Tina Turner."
02:41 "Depth is listening."
02:42 In Nicholas Barber's review for the BBC, he lamented,
02:45 "You soon reach the point where you're sick of sand, sick of explosions, sick of off-puttingly
02:50 sadistic violence, and sick of thunderous drums bashing away on the soundtrack.
02:55 And yet, the film keeps piling on more and more and more of them."
02:58 Shubhra Gupta was especially put off by the prequel.
03:01 She told The Indian Express,
03:02 "It gets so busy with all the revving and the roaring and the non-stop decimation of
03:06 faceless computer-generated creatures that you feel completely uninvolved and unmoved.
03:11 I couldn't wait for it to get over."
03:13 Where might you fall on this spectrum?
03:15 Considering how split the critics are over George Miller's latest installment, it could
03:18 go either way.
03:19 [music]