Rating: ???/5
Reviewer: Dog
I went into this movie as a longstanding fan of the franchise. I knew beforehand it was going to be a departure from the tone and structure of the previous films and was pretty excited to see where this would take the series. Nowhere good, it turns out.
This entry broadens the horizons of the franchise by travelling worldwide in a present day timeline before ending up in the pre-apocalyptic Russia directly preceding the original films - a nice touch. It was strange, but refreshing, to have an instalment set outside Australia.
I found the ensemble cast to be charmingly ragtag but suffering from poor writing. Vin Diesel as a maverick split from his found family was an appealing plotline obfuscated by unnecessary details that just confuse and contradict existing lore. It was a shame that Tom Hardy was too busy to reprise his leading role. Theron’s return as the Imperator was a delight but the costume design choices (bad) reflected her revised characterization (also bad). She raced exactly zero cars but did quite a lot of hacking which leads the viewer to wonder what happened between this movie and the events of Fury Road.
The action sequences did not seem to just pay homage to those of the previous movie but appeared to be the actual footage. During the fruitless race to disarm the nuclear submarine that sets up the events of the rest of the franchise, we see actual roll from Fury Road, colour graded from desert to tundra tones. The vehicles also left a lot to be desired, being neither historic nor shiny and chrome.
While this eighth addition to the series was a weak and frankly confusing one, I am excited by the possibility that the missing four movies will be discovered in a New Mexico desert one day.