No good will come of this.
CW: General post-apocalyptic nastiness and stylised violence
"What was that?"
"The darkest of angels. The fifth rider of the apocalypse"
George Miller's prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road calls itself a saga and gets away with it. It's the origin story for Imperator Furiosa and works perfectly at explaining her motivations in the earlier movie.
Broadly in three sections: her childhood with Dementus, fighting her way through the ranks of Immortan Joe's Citadel and finally facing Dementus in a power struggle with the Citadel it really is epic.
I struggled a little with the childhood scenes as they were slightly stagey and seemed to have the most "floaty CGI" but once it hit that first big action scene where she's on the War Rig with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) I was hooked. It was so intense I had to pause it afterwards and go and get a beer. After that it pretty much doesn't let up, George Miller hasn't lost his touch. After Fury Road I said "we will never see its like again" but I was wrong.
Taylor-Joy is as good as expected despite only a handful of lines but the revelation is Chris Hemsworth inhabiting the naff but effective malaprop spouting Warlord Dementus. It wouldn't have worked without him, a true baddie you love to hate.
Lots of the old characters are there and bizarrely for all the horror of what Immortan Joe is almost paints him as pragmatic in the face of what the world has become, which I wasn't expecting.
This is a thing throughout. Nothing terribly twisty happens but it's not just by the numbers. There are little choices it takes that could have been less interesting without anybody complaining that would have made it a lesser movie.
Highly recommended one of the great bits of action cinema of the last couple of years and unusually a prequel that doesn't suck 9/10.