Ian Thomas Malone

Friday

4

October 2024

0

COMMENTS

Joker: Folie à Deux is a meandering mess with no clear sense of identity

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Two prominent complaints surfaced in the wake of Joker’s blockbuster success in 2019. The first criticism took aim at the way Todd Phillips’s origin story bent over backward to garner sympathy for the most notorious villain in the history of comic books, if not the entirety of American popular culture. The second focuses more on the film’s derivative nature, an excessively derivative take on Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Neither of these legitimate criticisms stopped the film from grossing over a billion dollars against a modest budget, a smash hit with fertile ground for a sequel.

There is no set formula for what makes a sequel work. At a bare minimum, one might hope to see a story that moves the ball forward in some tangible way, or uncovers something fresh to say about its subjects. Joker: Folie à Deux does not cross this small bar. It’s unclear if anyone even tried. Rarely does a film plod along with such reckless abandon toward the idea that anyone is supposed to enjoy what they’re watching.

Folie à Deux mostly centers its narrative on the trial of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) for his actions in the first film. Living out his days in the custody of Arkham State Hospital, Fleck is frequently abused by the prison guards, largely keeping to himself. While walking to a meeting with his lawyer (Catherine Keener), Fleck comes across a music therapy session in part of the hospital not used for inmates, where one patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga) quickly takes an interest in him. Lee sparks an interest in music within Arthur, sending him on numerous hallucinogenic interludes that comprise a large part of the film.

The narrative is essentially split into three camps. Folie à Deux tries to be a musical, a psychological thriller, and a courtroom drama, all at the same time. It succeeds with none of them. The songs are terrible. Worse, they’re forgettable.

Phoenix, who won an Oscar for his last go-around as Joker, appears to be functioning on autopilot. Much like the “incels” who championed the first film, Arthur is merely a reactionary figure responding to the world around him. The Joker is supposed to be an agent of chaos. Folie à Deux’s Fleck is just an aging edge lord who frequently appears bored or indifferent to the world around him. There is the sense that the musical interludes are supposed to serve as an escape from the monotony, but they’re not strong enough to make much of an impact.

The courtroom scenes are quite boring. A pre-Two Face Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) anchors the prosecution. While Lawtey puts forth an admirable effort, the script gives him nothing to work with. The legal drama plays out like a run-of-the-mill episode of Law and Order or The Practice.

Lady Gaga brings some interesting depth to Quinzel, whose backstory follows Fleck’s lead in being a loose riff on the comics. The script once again fails its actors, with Gaga being given little to work with. Folie à Deux reduces one of the most interesting new female comic book characters of the past few decades into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. It’s almost as if Phillips included her for the sole purpose of proving that the male basement dwellers weren’t the only people obsessed with the lunatic that is Arthur Fleck.

Successful sequels bring something new to the table. Folie à Deux starts off reasonably strong, building up the panopticon that is the Arkham State Hospital. The pacing is a complete mess once the courtroom is introduced. The film spends large chunks of its back half alternating between boring musical sequences and testimony from characters from the first film. The 138-minute runtime is painfully long, a meandering film that could’ve easily cut a half hour without missing a beat.

For all the complaints about Joker being derivative or morally irresponsible, the first film at least had a story to tell. Folie à Deux is fueled off scraps from the first, laced with boring musical interludes that add nothing to the story. Films do not need to be responsible, but all narratives should have something to say. Folie à Deux brings nothing to the table, an embarrassing waste of time for everyone involved.

Wednesday

2

October 2024

0

COMMENTS

Vote Kamala Harris & 2024 Senate Analysis

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It’s that time again! ITM makes her appeal for you to fill out a ballot. The stakes are too high, something we’re used to hearing, but the threat of another four years of Trump is simply unfathomable for our country. Too many people’s rights are on the line. The Senate map is very tough for Democrats, and every vote counts.

 

Please take a moment to check your voter registration status, and be sure to make plans to vote in this election. Thank you.

Tuesday

1

October 2024

0

COMMENTS

My Old Ass puts a unique spin on the coming of age genre

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August often brings a peculiar sense of melancholy. The dog days of summer are a natural time to process the foreboding nature of change. Even for young people about to embark on adventures such as college, there is often a certain state of apprehension that marinates in the waiting period, when the mind has ample time to reflect on everything that will be left behind. The film My Old Ass takes a novel approach to the anxieties of youth.

Elliott (Maisy Stella) has just turned eighteen, about to start her freshman year at the University of Toronto. She blows off her family’s surprise party to take mushrooms in the woods with her two best friends, Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler). After initially failing to feel the effects while her two friends trip, Elliott encounters an older version of herself (Aubrey Plaza). The two bond over the course of the evening, though Old Elliott annoys her younger self with her coyness toward revealing future details of their life, only warning her to steer clear of a boy named Chad.

Having previously only considered herself attracted to women, young Elliott discovers that Chad (Percy Hynes White) is a charming seasonal worker for her father’s cranberry farm. Ignoring her older self’s advice, Elliott spends large chunks of her remaining time at home with Chad, mourning her family’s decision to sell off the farm at the end of the season. Older Elliott remains in touch via phone, often encouraging her younger self to use the time to bond with her family, and to enjoy her last few weeks amidst the beautiful scenery in Ontario’s Muskoka Lakes.

Writer/director Megan Park mostly uses the film’s sci-fi trappings as a hook, the narrative mostly follows a traditional coming-of-age story. As the older Elliott, Plaza brings a lot of humor to the table, but Park wisely deploys her most well-known talent sparingly, giving Stella plenty of space to ensure that My Old Ass still belongs to young Elliott. Stella possesses great range as an actress, especially in the film’s quieter moments. Park captures the essence of the fleeting nature of youth, finding great beauty in familiar territory.

The film’s greatest asset is its cinematography. The Muskoka Lakes are breathtakingly gorgeous. It’s very easy to see how anyone would fall in love with such a special place. Even with a brisk 89-minute runtime, the audience starts to learn the quirks of the lakes, making them seem like an additional character in the story.

My Old Ass wears its queerness on its sleeves while the film explores the nuances of the LGBTQ umbrella. There’s a certain understated sense of beauty in the way that Elliott’s sexuality is never undermined by anyone in the film, even as she experiences romantic attraction toward a man for the first time. Park handles this territory with grace and confidence, never trying to hold the audience’s hand along the way. The one area where the film falls a bit short on this front was the handling of Elliott’s longstanding hookup buddy Chelsea (Alexandria Rivera), who is easily the narrative’s flimsiest character.

Park shows off her skills as a director with the narrative’s sense of pacing. Some of the film’s message about the fleeting nature of time, and spending it with the people you love, clashes with the reality that young Elliott often blows off the bulk of the cast to hang out with Chad or her older self, the two characters she didn’t know at the start of the story. My Old Ass is a quietly powerful testament to the importance of living in the moment, time never fully belonging to any one of us. Life waits for no one.

Friday

20

September 2024

0

COMMENTS

Classic Film: Platinum Blonde

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There is a certain timeless nature to comedy centered around class differences. The drama at the core of Frank Capra’s 1931 film Platinum Blonde could resonate with modern audiences if the film were released today. The question of whether the film brings anything new to the equation, whether to modern viewers or those who saw the film nearly a hundred years ago is a different story.

Stew Smith (Robert Williams) is a hardworking reporter only making 75 dollars a week. An assignment sends him into the orbit of the wealthy Schuyler family, where playboy Michael (Don Dillaway) is caught up in a blackmail scandal. Taking pity on the family, driven by his feelings toward daughter Ann (Jean Harlow), Stew goes easy with his reporting. Stew and Ann quickly fall in love and elope.

Much of the film’s comedy derives from Stew’s discomfort at his integration into the Schuyler way of life. He spurns Ann’s efforts to clean him up, quickly dismissing a valet hired to attend to him. In particular, he absolutely refuses to wear garters. A chance encounter with his best friend from the paper, Gallagher (Loretta Young) stirs up old passions, putting Stew on a natural collision course with his new overbearing family. 

Platinum Blonde is mostly noteworthy for being Williams’ only leading role, as the actor died just three days after the film’s premiere. Williams brings plenty of range to the stock archetype that largely defines Stew. Despite having two fine actresses as leading ladies, Williams puts in most of his best work opposite Smythe (Halliwell Hobbes), the butler. Their interactions provide most of the film’s comedy. 

Strong performances and a competent showing from Capra are sunk by a meandering screenplay that gives the actors little to work with. While Stew’s apprehension toward a life solely known as “Ann Schuyler’s husband” provides much of the drama, the film constantly hints at a subplot concerning Stew’s aspirations as a playwright that don’t really come into focus until late in the third act. Stew claims to want to write, suffering from writer’s block and a lack of inspiration, an underwhelming dilemma for the viewers to watch unfold on the screen. While fairly charming at first, Stew’s constant negativity grows tiresome as the narrative rolls along.

The 89-minute runtime feels exceedingly drawn out. Ostensibly billed as a comedy, there’s very little to laugh at throughout the film, but it’s hardly much of a drama either. Capra does make some strides toward redeeming his picture down the stretch, but as a whole, the experience plays out as a first draft that struggled to tie everything together. As a time capsule, the film has some value, showcasing Williams’ ample potential, but Platinum Blonde is too unfocused to leave much of a lasting impression.

Monday

9

September 2024

1

COMMENTS

Classic Film: The Passion of Joan of Arc

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The Passion narrative carries a lot of theatrical value even for non-believers. The sham trials of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate perhaps best illustrate the larger-than-life nature of one of history’s defining characters, a man grappling with the contrast of divinity and humanity in real time. The 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (original French title La Passion de Jean d’Arc) blends the history of one of France’s most beloved icons with the biblical tribulations of her spiritual lodestar.

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s work is a singular experience in filmmaking. Relying heavily on close-ups, with an absolutely breathtaking concrete practical set, the narrative sets up a succulent contrast throughout its 82-minute runtime. As the titular heroine, Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s expressive dramatic range evokes a sense of claustrophobia, buoyed by the imposing prison all around her. Falconetti never once lets up on all the angst coursing through Joan’s veins, delivering one of the finest performances in the history of film.

The silent film medium is perfect for the kind of storytelling on display in the film. The inter-title cards provide the necessary grounding for the audience to follow along with the plot, giving space for the actors to transcend all other conventional dramatic obligations. The musical accompaniment to Joan’s agony and the Machiavellian machinations strips the form down to its bare essentials, an immensely fulfilling adaption of the passion narrative.

All art is essentially human nature channeled through the creator’s preferred medium. There are limits to what a painting can do on a canvas or a film on its reel. Dreyer delivers a timeless treatise on the agony of the soul that bristles against the confines of its structure, a film so carefully constructed yet completely raw in its delivery. The Passion of Joan of Arc grabs you from its opening minutes and never lets go, an exhausting experience that drains almost as much as it inspires.

Perhaps more impressive than its ample artistic merits is the way the film breaks down the terrifying sense of awe and wonder of Catholicism, particularly its penchant for evoking guilt, for a general audience. Religion looms over much of popular culture and society at large, even for those of us who have nothing to do with the Church. Many religious narratives fall flat through their preoccupation with attempting to explain the unexplainable. The whole point of faith is belief in something larger than yourself, essentially for little reason other than it’s what you’ve chosen to believe. It’s not particularly convincing for many, for obvious reasons.

Billions of people have come and left this earth hanging on to a promise of eternal life that may never come. The Passion of Joan of Arc does not make much of an effort to explain why its titular hero chose martyrdom at the hands of a sham trial. What it does achieve is perhaps the most impressive feat for a religious narrative. For those seeking to understand the agony of faith grappling with itself in real-time, there are few better places to start than Falconetti’s spectacular performance. Dreyer’s nearly one-hundred-year-old work is still one of the defining examples of the sheer power of filmmaking to break down the barriers of time and space and deliver the essence of what it means to be alive.

Editorial note: Ian viewed a screening of the film with a live original score featuring the George Sarah Ensemble at the Art Theatre in Long Beach, California.

Monday

9

September 2024

0

COMMENTS

The Queen of My Dreams buckles under the weight of its many ambitions

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Film as a medium often shines best when introducing its audience to worlds unfamiliar to their own. Many in the West are unlikely to be familiar with the 1969 Hindi musical Ardhana, an intense intergenerational family drama. Fawzia Mizra’s 2023 film The Queen of My Dreams leans heavily on Ardhana, including clips from the classic film in its own narrative while adapting many of its themes. Its title is also the English translation of Ardhana’s most popular song “Mere Sapno Ki Rana.”

Azra (Amrit Kaur) is a grad student studying acting in Toronto in 1999. A closeted lesbian living with her “roommate,” Azra butts heads with her mother Miriam (Nimra Bucha) over her career arc and lack of desire to adhere to the strict expectation of a first-generation Muslim immigrant. The sudden death of her father Hassan (Hamza Haq) on a trip back home to Pakistan takes Azra out of her world, forcing a reexamination of her relationship with her mother, and her culture.

Flashbacks play a sizable role in Mizra’s feature. In a nod to Bollywood casting traditions, Kaur performs double duty as Miriam in the 1969 flashbacks, showcasing a colorful, inviting world that’s a lot of fun to spend time in. Though the first act spends much of its time building up Azra as the protagonist, Queen of My Dreams is really Miriam’s story, increasingly ceding ground to the flashbacks as the narrative rolls along. After finishing med school in Europe, Hassan finds work in Canada, drawing only daughter Miriam away from home, deceiving her own mother in the process, setting up some intergenerational strife that’s eerily similar to Miriam’s own struggles with her daughter.

Mizra delivers a touching commentary on the cyclical pattern of daughters antagonizing and emulating their mothers. The theme of defying expectations transcends culture, religion, and sexuality. Queen of My Dreams is very confident in its own world, delivering a welcoming portrayal of Pakistan for audience members who might be unfamiliar with the region.

The film loses a bit of its power in the third act. Mizra doesn’t have a great handle on the balance between the flashbacks and the film’s present-day narrative in 1999, exacerbated by an unnecessary pitstop in 1989 Nova Scotia, where Miriam and Hassan first settled. There’s little rhyme or reason to how the flashbacks come and go, Mizra’s fascination with revisiting Ardhana growing tedious in the absence of plot progression.

Queen of My Dreams often severely underdelivers on its LGBTQ themes. Azra’s girlfriend Rachel (Kya Mosey) is a nonentity for the bulk of the film, Mizra unwilling to force any lesbian awakening on her characters. Real life doesn’t often come with easy answers to the struggles that some families feel toward homosexuality, but this film doesn’t really try to confront any of this either.

The narrative is too often bailed out by the film’s gorgeous aesthetics. Inexplicably, the whole experience feels like it’s overstayed its welcome despite a brisk 96-minute runtime. There is a beautiful film to be found in Mizra’s work, but it’s hard to praise her technical skills as a director when her narrative so blatantly holds back from its audience.

Monday

5

August 2024

2

COMMENTS

House of the Dragon’s second season tethers itself too closely to its meager source material

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Game of Thrones faced a gargantuan challenge in adapting an unfinished book series with thousands of pages of material, an unwieldly balancing act it handled spectacularly, at least until the last two seasons. House of the Dragon essentially faces the opposite problem, with its meager source material that needs to be stretched out into four seasons. The book Fire & Blood is essentially cobbled together from two novellas originally published in anthologies, The Princess and the Queen and The Rogue Prince, as well as the coffee table book The World of Ice and Fire.

You can read the entire tale of the Dance of the Dragons in a single sitting. There are certain challenges in adapting such scant offerings, but also plenty of advantages. The characters that make up the opposing sides of House Targaryen, the Blacks and the Greens, are essentially blank slates for the show to define on its own terms in ways that couldn’t be true for beloved book characters such as Jaime Lannister or Jon Snow. The only trouble with making House of the Dragon its own thing is the presence of George R.R. Martin amidst HBO’s broader landscape to milk the A Song of Ice and Fire franchise for all it is worth.

George R.R. Martin wrote The Princess and the Queen as part of the Dangerous Women anthology he co-edited in 2013 with his beloved friend Gardner Dozois, who passed away in 2018. The cover of the book includes a promo noting that the collection contains an all-new Game of Thrones novella. The 2018 release of Fire & Bloods expands the peripherals a bit, but there is a fundamental reason for the fast pacing of the novella. Though the Dance itself has been referenced numerous times within the mainline series, the novella exists largely to help sell an anthology that George R.R. Martin enjoyed working on with his buddy.

There is no real inherent reason that House of the Dragon must maintain such a rigid devotion to its source material, other than perhaps the idea that deviation might anger its creator, who is prominently featured in the credits. There are plenty of reasons why one might think it’s actually a good idea to change things up. A single novella is not exactly meant to carry multiple seasons of a television show. The show burned through its other source material, The Rogue Prince, published in 2014 as part of the Rogues collection put out by Martin and Dozois, halfway through the first season, hence the awkward timeline.

A show might consider it a bad idea to sideline Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) to his hallucinations in Harrenhal for an entire season. A show might consider it a bad idea to kill off a sympathetic character like Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) in episode four of its second season. A show might consider a bad idea to spend an entire second season on build-up after it spent its first season building up two mostly separate casts. The early demise of Kingsguard twins Erryk and Arryk Cargyll (Elliott and Luke Tittensor) wasted valuable screentime with a meager payoff. At least Rhaenys died in the season’s best sequence.

House of the Dragon is needlessly chained to its flimsy source material, a poorly paced slog that would do well to break free from the timeline of the novellas it remains haplessly devoted to. Prestige television takes years to make. You can’t expect viewers to wait years for a full season of exposition when most of them could read the entire novella within the runtime of a single episode.

The few substantive deviations from the source material have turned out pretty well for the show. Reuniting Rhaenyra (Emma D’arcy) and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) produced two of the season’s best sequences. The show’s bizarre devotion to the novella’s timeline hindered the season from spreading its wings after an uneven but compelling freshman effort.

As its title suggests, dragons are a large part of the show’s appeal. The CGI for the dragons has been spectacular, particularly during the battle sequences. Season two spent a large chunk of its time building up The Sowing, where four of the six riderless dragons living on Dragonstone, occupied by the Blacks, received riders. The show did a very good job spreading out the action, first building up Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty) and Seasmoke in episode six before giving Vermithor and Silverwing new riders with Hugh the Hammer (Kieran Bew) and Ulf the White (Tom Bennett), with Sheepstealer teased for next season, presumably bonding with Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell), replacing Nettles from the novella.

These four characters will all play important roles in the rest of the series. It’s hard to really make the claim that season two introduced them all that well. Hugh and Ulf received scant attention for the first half of the season, not making much of an effort to define their personalities until the final episode of the season, where their lowborn crassness was seemingly ratcheted up to put them in conflict with Jacaerys Velaryon (Harry Collett). Though the show has a huge cast, it spent the whole season keeping its leads in a bizarre holding pattern, leaving piecemeal for the newer, also important characters.

None of this is particularly excusable. House of the Dragon knew precisely which characters would be important. Vermithor made his debut in last season’s finale, serenaded by Daemon, only to be treated as an afterthought for much of season two. Season one had twelve episodes. Season two only has eight, an arbitrary number ill-suited for the show’s unwieldy cast and complex narrative.

One might expect a showrunner to look at the many pieces of the Dance of the Dragons and arrange them in a way that fits a four-season narrative. Not House of the Dragon. This show is so hellbent on following George R.R. Martin’s timeline that it forgets to be engaging television. The space between last season’s Dance over Shipbreaker Bay and the Sowing amounts to a handful of pages of the novella, hardly the best outline for a full season of television. Game of Thrones made plenty of changes from its source material. It’s not as if House of the Dragon hasn’t made a few of its own, but its sluggish pacing is an unfortunate, preventable lapse in judgement. One of the most exciting chapters in A Song of Ice and Fire lore has no business being this boring.

Wednesday

17

July 2024

0

COMMENTS

Stereophonic presents a grounded take on the messy nature of greatness in motion

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There is a certain temptation to glorify the antics of so-called tortured geniuses who produce great art while turning the lives of everyone around them into complete hell. Truly moving work is so sparse across the narrow confines of capitalism that those capable of making it are often forgiven for their shortcomings. The consumer only views the landscape through its finished product, not the countless hours it took to arrive at such a destination.

The play Stereophonic is a treatise on the ugliness of beauty. Based heavily off the turmoil of Fleetwood Mac, the show centers around a five person band and their two sound engineers as they attempt to record a follow-up to build on their growing success. Peter (Tom Pecinka), the singer, guitarist and relative newcomer to the group, takes lead on producing the album, butting heads with drummer and group leader Simon (Chris Stack) and bassist Reg (Will Brill), who is in a dysfunctional decaying relationship with keyboardist Holly (Juliana Canfield). Peter’s own longtime relationship with singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) runs into its own problems when Diana starts to come into herself as a songwriter, challenging Peter’s stranglehold on the group.

The three-hour show takes place entirely on a single set, a recording studio with a live room upstage, complete with a glass barrier where the band performs real music. Two engineers, Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) supervise the production from a center console, often providing comedy in the quieter parts of the play. The music is largely confined to the first act, only comprising about twenty minutes of the runtime, but sound plays a major role in the narrative, particularly when the band is separated from the audience from behind the glass, requiring the actors to communicate their sheer disgust for each other through gestures and facial expressions.

Where Stereophonic achieves its greatest success is through its deconstruction of the creative process, particularly the tedious monotony that often consumes the space between moments of genuine inspiration. A band can sit in a studio for fourteen hours doing nothing but engaging in drugs and idle chitchat, only to find the magic in the dead of night for a few moments until everyone comes back to earth, just as a writer can sit at their desk for hours on end procrastinating in an idle search for twenty unadulterated minutes of glory. Great art makes you feel alive. Making art is often a painful negotiation between the soul and its obligations to earn a living.

Artists often produce their best work when their backs are up against the wall, because they have nothing to lose. Success provides the individual with a much more tangible sense of what can be gained, if one could only figure out how to set ego aside and learn to work on a schedule. Artists are drawn to their work often because it’s the only thing they’re good at, but a balanced existence cannot be achieved through songs or words alone. A career can provide the fruits for a happy existence, but you can’t build a life off work alone. Creative genius may leave a powerful legacy, but life is a daily grind, hardly a three act structure.

Life is a team game. No work designed to be consumed by the masses exists in a vacuum, without the aid of editors, engineers, or other collaborators. The tendency to glorify the artistic tyrant comes from a place of acknowledging that there is often a hierarchy to the creative process. Just because a guitarist has a harder job than a bassist does not mean that the bassist doesn’t have anything to contribute. Greatness can in fact be achieved without stomping over everyone along the way.

Playwright David Adjmi crafted a remarkably balanced portrayal of greatness in motion. Will Butler, best known for his work with Arcade Fire, did a wonderful job with the music, blending the seventies-era melodies of Fleetwood Mac with his own indie trappings. The runtime absolutely flies by, an emotionally intense journey that makes plenty of space for quieter moments.

It’s rare to find art that achieves greatness while never losing sight that greatness is not some pedestal to structure one’s entire existence around. The Tony Award for Best Play was well-deserved, an immensely rewarding odyssey that gives all seven of its actors a chance to shine. For a show that leans as heavily on another artist’s legacy as Stereophonic does, the play displays great maturity in its restraint toward romanticizing the messiness that often defines genius in conflict with itself and everything around it. Artistic tyranny may find lightning in a bottle, but life is a day-to-day game.

Friday

5

July 2024

0

COMMENTS

Pride, Surgery, Relationships, Stress

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ITM has a bunch of updates, including a lip implant removal procedure that kept her away from the microphone during Pride Month. It’s been a stressful time for many LGBTQ people. Ian shares her own struggles with stress, and talks about her new relationship. It’s a weird time to be LGBTQ in the world. It’s okay to not be okay 100% of the time (or any of the time). Be good to yourselves, fam.

Thursday

30

May 2024

0

COMMENTS

Furiosa is an entertaining, underwhelming addition to the Mad Max Saga

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The entertainment industry’s fascination with prequels forces its risk-aversion tendencies into an inherent state of contradiction. The types of successful films that produce prequels are generally the same that don’t actually need sizable holes in their narratives filled with the equivalent of feature-length exposition. Prequels also save studios money on not needing much of the cast back, unlike sequels that often run the additional risk of undoing the hero’s journey of the original work.

Mad Max: Fury Road is not the kind of film that needed a prequel. The entire series is built on minimalistic storytelling, each film essentially operating as a standalone. Nobody needed to see a single installment in George Miller’s original trilogy to enjoy the franchise’s first release in thirty years. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga diverges from this pattern by directly linking itself to Fury Road, following the origin of its title character (played as a child by Alyla Brown, and Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult, taking over from Charlize Theron).

While Fury Road left most of its world-building details to its audience’s imagination, Furiosa as a film spends most of its narrative building out the entire backstory of its leading woman, as well as the Wasteland itself. Taken from The Green Place of Many Mothers at an early age, Furiosa survives the harsh conditions of the Wasteland, first as a captive of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, taking over from Hugh Keays-Byrne), before finding a mentor in Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). The narrative is divided into five chapters, covering a wide spread of Furiosa’s life.

The politics of the Wasteland are thoroughly explored, particularly the supply chain that runs from Bullet Farm, Gastown, and The Citadel. The people who lamented Fury Road’s status as a feature-length chase stunt will find much to enjoy in the way Miller built things out this time around. Furiosa’s finest achievement is the way that the film enhances Fury Road without taking away from it or trying too hard to retrace its footsteps.

There is so much to enjoy in Miller’s approach to filmmaking, thoroughly marching to the beat of his own drum in a production that feels intimate in the way it centers Australia. Few movies with a budget of 168 million can make such a claim to exist in the same space as arthouse. So many blockbusters are overstuffed with obligations their greater franchise lore that they never stop to catch a breath. Furiosa is a lot more introspective than Fury Road, occasionally to its detriment.

Furiosa proves that the franchise can do just fine without Mad Max, but the film missed a key lesson from Fury Road, which subtlety built out its ensemble amidst all the mayhem. Furiosa rarely talks, leaving Hemsworth’s Dementus to occupy a weird space as not only a villain, but the force relaying most of the information to the audience. Hemsworth gives the role his all, but there is the sense that he’s doing too much, overstaying his welcome in more than a few sequences.

The way Miller allots the bloated 148-minute runtime also boxes Taylor-Joy out of much of the movie that bears her name as its lead. So much time is spent on Furiosa as a child that Taylor-Joy isn’t given much space to make the role her own, often amidst frantic action sequences that pale in comparison to Fury Road, inevitably drawing unflattering comparisons to Theron’s superior performance. Taylor-Joy only has about 30 lines of dialogue, and absolutely no chemistry with Burke, whose Praetorian Jack occupies an awkward space in the narrative.

To some extent, one might want to give Miller credit for not buffing out Furiosa with unnecessary side characters whose absences from Fury Road would have to be explained. The trouble is, the film doesn’t really have anyone to root for. You never lose the sense that Furiosa’s bond with the audience relies too much on what Theron built in Fury Road. There’s no Nicholas Hoult-type side characters to enjoy. Hemsworth is spread too thin carrying the dialogue, occasionally producing some unexpectedly substantive moments from his cartoonish character.

Miller’s technical craft is almost always on full display, but Furiosa lacks the sheer spectacle of Fury Road. The film is nearly a half hour longer, but the action feels smaller. That shift in scope isn’t really replaced by an added sense of intimacy either. Taylor-Joy never invites us into Furiosa, lacking all the subtle nuance of Theron’s performance.

Furiosa is not a bad film. There’s a lot of entertainment value in the way Miller puts on a show. It’s just a show you’ve seen before, longer, but not better. Fury Road felt like a genre-defining masterpiece. Furiosa settles on just being a solid, unspectacular prequel.

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