Furiosa Max Mad Saga was a turning point for Mad Max (a too long ramble about this movie) SPOILERS

I think it’s a pretty common opinion that Fury Road and Furiosa seems like a completely different universe to that of the other Mad Max movies, also that the first three movies are stand alone (considering that some actors play the same character archetype but don’t seem to be ‘the same’) and you can watch them in any order. This is also unlike Fury road and Furiosa as they have the same characters and a running story. Hopefully this doesn't change for Wasteland.

Now don’t get me wrong, i’m analysing too much into this series than i probably should.. but i like Mad Max too much rn and need to get my thoughts out somewhere lol

Furiosa being a turning point is clear, it holds subtle messages that weren't there in Fury Road. It held incredible cinematography and also characters that were deeper than what we’ve seen before. I am honestly a massive fan of how Furiosa and Dementus were written and i can’t say i liked other characters in Mad Max as much as i do them for how they were shown. Obviously we had bad guys and we had our man of little words Max, but here we explore the reasons for Dementus’ personality and why he makes some of his choices (his lost family) and Furiosa desperately trying to hide her tracks and being silent- though eventually opening up and then having to loose the only person she had trusted. 

I’ve already seen this talked about but.. Fury Road is hope, Furiosa is despair (not a danganronpa reference). Obviously Fury Road is a plainly written but good hope story (we escaped this place, but if we go back now we can take it over as they have no defences up and live in this really nice area! (Yeah okay people on our side died but thats kind of expected)) but Furiosa.. Furiosa is a ruthless, twisted story of loss, Furiosa herself is the badass and silent protagonist we needed for this story. She gets hurt, she loses everyone she had loved and lived for, she sees death and causes death at a young age, she delves into having to cut off her own arm (by means we never found out) and she bikes away bleeding out and she carries on not because she has hope but because she needs her revenge. She is fuelled by revenge. 

Unlike Fury Road where she is fuelled by needing to help others.

Thats what i have to say on the plot itself, the way we loose people in Furiosa is similar to Road Warrior, same with the environment. Also i’m actually really surprised at how well the increased depth into the world building was. Like wow. 

Now for the other things as to why this is a turning point. 

As i said in the start its clear Fury Road is a different world to the other movies. Furiosa seems to have never seen a world before its dystopian state, her childhood home being a place that looks pieced together from the wrecks of a different time. It looks as though the world hasn’t been in a good state for a while, and if Max is 33 (as said in his back tattoo) it doesn't seem like he would have seen a better world either. Unless i am proven wrong in Wasteland i don’t think he would have been a cop in this universe. Also the way we have our dystopian world is different to Road Warrior, it’s because of climate change, water running out, the whole world destroying itself.. it’s not just from ‘a war’ like it was. Again, Max’s family had been lost in a different way to the original Mad Max.

I don’t really know how well liked Furiosa was as a movie, i’m not like big into the fandom.. or whatever fandom the series has. I mean i’ve looked through articles and the odd comment or two that say ‘it wasn’t really Mad Max without Max’. Apparently it flopped. I dunno, people should have watched it.

In my opinion Mad Max should change from being solely about ‘Mad Max’ and become ‘Madness Maximum’. I loved brutal action and the brutal world in Furiosa and i loved her gruesome revenge being also a disgusting way/metaphor for Dementus being able to nurture, something he never thought he could do. I loved the despair and loss and the awesome yet terrifying world that could actually be a product of if we don’t stop eating away at our worlds deplenishing sources. Also obviously the vehicles that are very far past from what they used to be, turned into something wild and monstrous.

It was very real, and the characters felt more believable and less like archetypes, and though we had the return of the war boys and immortan joe they were also painted in a completely different way. The war boys had less characterisation and we saw their mindless sacrifices more which also told a-lot. It was a very real commentary.

I also liked the connection between Furiosa and Praetorian Jack, mainly because they never weren’t romantic in a way we see in our world and we still understood how much they meant to each other (that could be that romance just isn’t a thing in this world, which is fair, or that this is romance) the way it was ambiguous(?) was so extremely excruciating when Jack was left to be tortured and eventually die because we knew that he was the only person Furiosa had ever been close to away from her home in any way, platonic, romantic, anything. But i think all Mad Max movies do a nice way of expressing relationships, can’t fault them for that (I’ll make another post for that).

I think i’ll stop for now, but i might come back to edit and add to this in the future. Go watch Furiosa, you’ll like it more if you start to think about Madness Maximum, not Mad Max.

(Also i probably have information wrong. I’ll realise eventually, you can point it out or smt lol)