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I took a few extra days off around this holiday weekend and pretty much did nothing except go to a movie and make progress on the next novel. The movie of course was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga the prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

Warner Brothers Studios

Furiosa is the story of the character Furiosa introduced in Fury Road as she assists the escape of the warlord Immortan Joe’s wives from their sexual slavery from the Citadel. Fury Road drove into blockbuster status scoring on target hits with both audiences and critics.

As recounted in the earlier film the story of Furiosa is of her abduction from ‘The Green Place,’ an oasis of rich fertile lands with within the Wasteland and her eventual life in the Citadel as one of Joe’s Imperators, a trusted driver, warrior, and lieutenant. In Furiosa we discover that between her abduction and gaining the status of Imperator, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) was the captive of another, but lesser warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the bulk of the film is comprised of her struggles to both survive and wreck vengeance upon Dementus.

Furiosa suffers from some of the trouble typical to a prequel. An audience member familiar with the following story knows that the character can’t die because there is another story to tell, and many elements exist to ‘explain’ why things are the way they are in that earlier released but later in the timeline tale. Why does Furiosa have only a single arm?

While the action in Furiosa is exciting and thrilling, with impressive stunt work performed by skilled professionals, the story is lesser to the one rendered in Fury Road. The major challenge in prequels is the character arc of the protagonist. The character’s nature is what drew in the audience originally and caused them to love the person so in the prequels there is the temptation to make the character as close as possible to the already adored version and that stunts any characters growth. They have nowhere to go because they start out in the final form by which we have already known them.

Furiosa in Fury Road is a woman who is risking everything to save other women, what we needed in the prequel is seeing her as a woman who doesn’t two fucks for anyone else and the transformation as she becomes a person willing to risk it all for others. This should have been the crux of the scene between her and Dementus when he intones she’s like him.

The other issue with this fil is that at the onset we are given her overriding goal, return to The Green Place but that is a goal she cannot achieve in the film because it’s the next story. So, the character and the audience can only be frustrated.

Furiosa was a lot of fun but ultimately it is not a movie that I will add to my collection as Fury Road is a better film on every measure.