FURIOSA trailer arrives

Warner Brothers have unveiled the trailer for their upcoming Mad Max spin-off movie, Furiosa.

A prequel to the much-acclaimed 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa follows the adventures of the younger version of Charlize Theron's character from that film. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the young Furiosa who is swept up in the insanity of life in the post-apocalyptic landscape, becoming a warrior and, er, rally driver. Chris Hemsworth plays Warlord Dementus, the leader of two factions battling for control of the wasteland.

Development of the film began after Fury Road's release in 2015, with director George Miller considering both a Furiosa-focused prequel and a further Max-focused movie, Mad Max: The Wasteland, as his next project in the series. He ultimately settled on the Furiosa project. The COVID pandemic significantly delayed filming before shooting began in mid-2022.

The film is scheduled to debut on 23 May 2024.

RIP Hugh Keays-Byrne

British-Australian actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, well-known for his villainous turns in the Mad Max film series, has sadly passed away at the age of 73.

Keays-Byrne was born in India to British parents. Raised in the United Kingdom, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1968 and appeared in numerous productions. One production, A Midsummer Night's Dream, took him to Australia in 1973. He decided to remain in the country when the tour ended and switched to acting down under. He snapped up roles in the TV shows Essington (1974) and Rush (1974, winning the actor a Logie Award) and the films Stone (1974), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), The Trespassers (1976), Blue Fin (1978) and Snapshot (1979).

In 1979 he starred as Toecutter, the primary villain in George Miller's Mad Max, acting opposite Mel Gibson. His earlier role in Stone, a film about biker gangs, helped inspire Miller's development of the story for the movie. Keays-Byrne was nominated for an Australian Academy Award (AACTA) for Best Supporting Actor for his turn in the film.

He continued to act in film and in television. In 2001 he was cast as in the character of Grunchlk on the TV series Farscape. He appeared in two episodes in the second and third seasons, as well as the Peacekeeper Wars mini-series that wrapped up the main story arc.

He was re-recruited by George Miller in 2015 to play the role of Immortan Joe, the main villain of Mad Max: Fury Road. This became his last acting credit.

Miller is currently prepping Furiosa, a prequel to Fury Road, but it is unknown if Keays-Byrne was due to reprise his role.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD prequel announces cast

Director George Miller has announced the cast for Furiosa, his forthcoming prequel movie to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Anya Taylor-Joy (Split, Glass, The Witch, Peaky Blinders) has been cast as the younger version of Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in the original movie. The film explores Furiosa's backstory as a young woman before she comes into the employ of Immortan Joe.

Chris Hemsworth (Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) is playing Dementus, whilst Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman, Watchmen) is playing Pretorian.

Miller spent some time working with Theron to see if there was a way of letting her continue as the character, including using de-aging technology, but concluded that the cost of doing so would be prohibitive. Theron has given the project her blessing.

Miller is shooting another project, Three Thousand Years of Longing, delayed due to the pandemic, whilst Hemsworth will be shooting Thor: Love and Thunder for the first few months of 2021, so production of Furiosa is not expected to begin until later in the year or in 2022. He has also been developing a sequel to Fury Road, called The Wasteland, but that seems to be a much further off project.

George Miller locks in a FURY ROAD prequel as his next project

After five years of writing scripts and getting into legal tussles with studios, George Miller has locked down a prequel to his 2015 movie Fury Road as his next project.

Miller is currently on hiatus from working on Three Thousand Years of Longing, his current movie, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. The movie was deep in pre-production and cameras were ready to roll on principle photography when the pandemic stopped abruptly stopped all work on the project. The plan is to resume production when circumstances allow.

In the meantime, Miller has pulled the trigger on writing his next Mad Max universe film. After the huge success of Fury Road, he put forwards two ideas: a direct sequel (presumably retaining Tom Hardy as Max) called The Wasteland and a prequel focusing on the character of Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. He's now decided to proceed with the Furiosa prequel.

In surprising news, though, Theron will not return. Miller wrote the script from an outline he'd prepared for Theron discussing Furiosa's backstory, which he later realised made for an excellent film outline. However, it required delving deep into Furiosa's past. Miller was hoping to use digital de-ageing technology to retain Theron in the role, but called time on that idea after watching The Irishman and declaring that the technology was not ready yet.

Miller seems quite anguished by that decision, and Theron has spent the day tweeting about her experience shooting the film and thanking Miller for his support, confirming the new film has her backing. Miller has apparently already begun outlining his choices for auditions, with Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, Split, Glass) being mentioned as a possibility.

Work on the film is expected to not get underway until next year, but of course all timelines at the moment are subject to change.

George Miller back at work on MAD MAX: FURY ROAD follow-up

Australian writer and director George Miller has resumed work on the follow-up to his highly-acclaimed 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road.

After Fury Road turned out to be an unexpected success, the studio put both a sequel and a spin-off (focusing on Charlize Theron's Furiosa character) into development. However, Miller was forced to take legal action against the studio for non-payment of $7 million in bonuses from the movie's much higher-than-anticipated global box office. Warner Brothers' merger with AT&T then further delayed the process, although it also resulted in a change of regime at the studio, which Miller has indicated has suddenly removed some of the obstacles to the next film happening.

Miller had previously touted ideas for a fifth and sixth Mad Max movie, with the fifth having the working title The Wasteland, as well as a Furiosa spin-off. As the delays stretched on, Miller chose to shoot an unrelated movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing (starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba), which is due to begin filming early in 2020.

We're still probably 3-5 years away from seeing Mad Max back in the cinema, but at least things are now moving in the right direction.

Mad Max (2015)

Years after the collapse of civilisation in the great resource wars, former cop-turned-survivalist Max Rockatansky is headed for the Plains of Silence in his trusty car, the Interceptor. He runs afoul of Scabrous Scrotus, the ruler of Gastown and son of Immortan Joe, who steals the Interceptor - after Max stabs him in the head with his own chainsaw - and leaves Max to die. Max is rescued by Chumbucket, a maverick and zealous engineer-priest who believes that Max is "The Saint", a holy figure who will save the world using an amazing car that Chumbucket has been building for years, the Magnum Opus. Max reluctantly takes on the mantle of the Saint so he can find and defeat Scrotus and reclaim his Interceptor.

Given that the Mad Max franchise has been around for almost forty years, it's surprising that it hasn't been the inspiration for a good video game before. There was one previous attempt, a rather poor action title released in 1989, but that's it. This game is very different. It's a huge, sprawling open-world game combining an intricate third-person fighting system with vehicular combat, held together by a typically Mad Max-esque story of revenge and heartbreak.

Mad Max: Confusingly Lacks a Subtitle was created by Avalanche Studios, the team behind the Just Cause series. They know a thing or two about creating massive open-world games featuring lots of action and explosions, and the DNA of the Just Cause games can be seen in Mad Max. However, this is more than just a reskin. They very cleverly repurpose elements from those earlier games to the Mad Max universe and create a title that is very much a worthy addition to George Miller's post-apocalyptic franchise. Miller's own relaxed attitude to canon means that there isn't a huge effort made to fit the game into the existing storylines, but it can be said to take place between Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road without too many difficulties (and the presence of Gastown and a brief appearance by Immortan Joe ties it more into the latter).

The massive map is divided into several territories, each controlled by a major character: Jeet, Gutgash, Pink Eye and Deep Friah. Each warlord is subservient to Scrotus and keen to help Max bring him down. Max has to do missions for each leader to progress the main storyline, but can also do a lot of side-missions and optional activities (such as racing or exposing hideouts of the pirates of the wastelands, the Buzzards) or just cause mayhem for Scrotus by destroying his camps, tearing down his "scarecrow" map markers, ambushing convoys and assassinating the snipers he has set up at strategic locations across the map. There's also some pleasing Mad Max-style lunacy in that you can also clear minefields using your mine-detecting dog (!). In terms of game structure, there's more than a whiff of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry to it, even down to the use of a mechanism to allow you to spy out surrounding regions. Rather than radio towers, you instead have to float a balloon (!!) above the landscape and use your binoculars to identify points of interest. The game's combat system, which is robust and crunchy, is heavily influenced by the Arkham games and Shadows of Mordor and relies on a steady progression of blocks and counter-punches.

Mad Max: No Colon Here is tremendous, unmitigated and unrelenting fun. These kind of open-world games are starting to become a little repetitive, with everyone just copying the Ubisoft model (including Ubisoft themselves) to the point of boredom, but Mad Max just ditches a lot of the more tedious busywork and brings a lot of fun to proceedings. The game lets you engage in combat on foot or with your vehicle, the Magnum Opus, which starts off being a bit slow and unimpressive but by the end of the game has become a powerful death machine complete with rocket launchers, side-mounted flamethrowers and a grappling hook that can attach itself to both people and enemy towers to destroy them. Collecting scrap (the game's currency) allows you to unlock an absolutely massive array of upgrades for both Max and the Opus, with a huge degree of customisability.

The game is enormous. Focusing on the core storyline alone, you could probably put the game away in about 20 hours. However, I also decided to completely liberate one quarter of the map (which took 10 hours by itself), unlocked all the balloon rides and did all of the factional side-missions, as well as dozens of races and other optional elements. I eventually finished the story at the 32 hour mark, but completing everything outstanding in the game would easily have taken at least a couple dozen more hours. Pleasingly, it's a huge game but also one that allows you to push on to the end of the story once you start getting bored of it.

What is remarkable for a game of this size is that it is hand-crafted. Just Cause 2 used a lot of procedural generation for its enormous map and many of its enemy bases were interchangeable, with very similar layouts. Mad Max's outposts are all intricately detailed. Completing each outpost (you have a separate counter for each one, telling you if there's still stuff to do there) takes a lot of time in combat, exploration, looting and resupplying: you have to keep the Opus fuelled up and Max in supplies of water, which adds some tension to the opening hours of the game but later on is almost negligible thanks to character upgrades.

 
Graphically, the game isn't cutting edge but still looks impressive, especially the frequently-beautiful environmental effects and skyscapes. Having a map of this size as just wasteland sounds boring, but Avalanche carefully sculpts each region to make it stand out, whether it's a network of deep canyons or the bleached remnants of a dried-out seabed or an actual Sahara-style desert or mountainous badlands. Avalanche get a surprisingly huge amount of variety out of what sounds like a limited premise.

The game is brilliant fun to play, dialogue is sharp and true to the movies and you get a huge amount of game for your money. There are a few negatives, however. The storyline is fairly bare-bones and not always gripping. The Mad Max films are all fairly minimalist and restrained in exposition and background, but you're only spending two hours with each movie. With this game easily taking over 50 hours for completionists, a bit more engagement with the world would have been nice. Also, whilst Avalanche go to enormous lengths to make each one of the hundreds of locations in the game unique and interesting, repetition does eventually set in. The same problem as the Just Cause games - that the game may be a bit too big - does start creeping in towards the end.

The biggest surprise of the game is how true it is to the cynical nature of the films. In a few moments they look like they're going to cop out and turn Max into a hero but they always hold back and keep him more the character we all know. Max isn't always very likable in the game, which is definitely true to the movies but some people may find controlling what is a really an antihero for the length of the game to be wearying.

Overall, though, Mad Max (****½) is the most unexpectedly enjoyable game I've played in a long time. It's the best video game version of a movie series since the iconic Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay back in 2004, will consume a lot of your time and ties in very well with the style and tone of the film. It is available now on PC, X-Box One (UK, US) and PlayStation 4 (UK, US).

Mad Max: Fury Road

Writing any kind of traditional plot summary for Mad Max: Fury Road is totally redundant, so I'll eschew my normal opening to cut to the chase. Should you go and see this film? Yes, it's awesome or, as I understand the kids phrase it these days, "'Da bomb," so there you go. Job done. Peace out.

For a bit more of an analysis, I am late to the party here. By now, most reviewers have waxed lyrical on the film's explosions, car chases, feminist subtext, fight scenes, action sequences and Max's shockingly small number of lines (although shocking only in the context of someone who's never, ever seen a Mad Max movie), and these are all points that stand up to scrutiny. Fury Road is essentially a 100-minute-odd-long car chase as the forces of Immortan Joe try to recapture "breeders" (female slaves imprisoned for the purposes of procreation) liberated by Imperator Furiosa. "Mad" Max Rockatansky ends up helping out Furiosa by accident after getting randomly caught up in the whole mess. It's the modern action film stripped back and laid bare, and it's surprising how powerful this is. So many recent action movies have been straddled with incoherent, over-complicated storylines revolving around tedious magical maguffins and their plots have been filled with more holes than Swiss cheese. In fact, another recent Charlize Theron-starring CG blockbuster, Prometheus was nothing but a string of plot holes strung together with good performances and nostalgia for back when Ridley Scott was good.

Fury Road inverts this trend. The villain wants his captive women back (including Lenny Kravitz's daughter and Elvis Presley's granddaughter, because the film thrives on random awesome) and will drive his army of Viking-inspired, albino-skinhead truckers, bikers and flamethrower-wielding guitarists (yes, really) across dozens of miles of wasteland to achieve that end. Hilariously, every time you think, "This is kind of dumb," someone on-screen will also say, "This is kind of dumb," and a brief discussion will ensue about why it is not, in fact, dumb. In fact, at one stage Immortan Joe's accountant takes his boss aside and points out that the trip is ludicrously expensive considering they're a bunch of Viking albino skinhead truckers living in the desert with limited resources, and Joe actually takes his warning seriously. Whether such moments are convincing or not is another question, but this is a film that is a lot smarter than it looks, and it smartly keeps things simple and straightforward.

Simple doesn't mean shallow, though. For such a concentrated, intense story, the film has a surprisingly large cast, but all of them, even Immortan Joe's dumb-arse son (with the amazing name Rictus Erectus), have at least a few scenes establishing character and motivation. Riley Keough's Capable (the red-haired captive) has maybe a dozen lines in the film but she is nevertheless established as a strong and resourceful individual who is quick to learn the ways of fighting on the road. It's been said that Mad Max himself  - a taciturn performance by Tom Hardy - gets a little lost in the mix but this isn't really the case. He's present throughout, comes up with some important plans and ideas and is skilled and important in the fights. However, the film follows the convention of the earlier movies in that Max isn't invested in what's going on, being a drifter caught up in the madness and being the audience's viewpoint in what's happening. Max is the window through which we see the story, not the story himself, and that's the same as it was in at least the previous two films in the series. It's also interesting that the director keeps Max's most impressive solo moment of heroism and carnage off-screen, leaving what happened to the audience's imagination.

The centrepiece of the film is Charlize Theron's Furiosa. She gets most of the lines (although in a dialogue-spare picture, this isn't saying a huge amount), forms the emotional core of the film and is responsible for several of the movie's most awesome moments. That Theron (an Oscar-winner, lest we forget) is a fantastic actress is something audiences have taken for granted, but Fury Road reminds you exactly why. She combines steely resolve, bravery, pain (physical and emotional) and commanding charisma in what might be the most impressive female action lead since Ripley and (T2's) Sarah Connor. Apparently a Furiosa-centred spin-off is in the works and should be greenlit as soon as possible.

If this is the Memetic Femocalypse, bring it on.

Also worthy of note is Nicholas Hoult as Nux, a "War Boy" who reluctantly joins Team Furiosa after failing Joe one time too many. Hoult has been around for a few years, putting in solid performances in TV shows such as Skins and films such as the previous two X-Men flicks. But his unhinged, sympathetic performance in Fury Road as a kid dreaming of Valhalla and who has drawn smiley faces on his tumours to humanise them is dazzling. Expect to see his career level up after this movie as well.

Director George Miller spent fourteen years or so trying to get this film made and this allowed him to rewrite the script and storyboards so many times that everything was polished to a T. His direction is crisp and flowing, his action scenes crunchy and chaotic but fully understandable. The cinematography by John Seale (Cold Mountain and The English Patient, amongst many others) is jaw-dropping, with the film filled with iconic shots and epic panoramas. Expect to see a blizzard of memes and screenshots overrunning the internet once the film hits Blu-Ray. The soundtrack is appropriately bananas as well (remember: flamethrower guitars). The action sequences also benefit from mostly being done in-camera. The one 100% CGI sequence - a massive, towering sandstorm - is itself a brilliant set-piece, but for the most part Miller uses CG to combine and enhance landscapes and occasionally punch up explosions to give them a bit more oomph. Otherwise everything you see is actually being staged for real in the Namibian Desert, which gives the film a verve and heft other action films can only cry out for.

Mad Max: Fury Road (*****) is what happens when you cancel your director's previously-contracted movie and then you go a bit overboard with the severance package. It's the result of $150 million given to a director of talent and skill who knows exactly the right people to hire to turn his unhinged vision into a reality and never compromises on it. It's the most un-Hollywood Hollywood movie of the last decade. It's loud, violent and visceral, but also smart, restrained and respectably short. It is on general release now.