u/JeffBaugh2

My brother said, upon seeing FURY ROAD for the first time, that it felt like the climax of a longer story - like the series finale of a TV show that'd been going on for a while. At the time, I said "well that's just the strength of the visual storytelling and the world building at play - you're right, but our narrative is the chase."

It turns out he was kind of right! FURY ROAD was always meant, at least since 2007 when The Praetorian and The Wasteland were first conceptualized, as the final Film in a trilogy released in reverse - with FURIOSA, and ideally with THE WASTELAND, you're seeing what led both Max and Furiosa to where we find them in FURY ROAD, both cast about in their own way in Immortan Joe's Wasteland. Then, FURY ROAD is the two of them coming together - watched chronologically, that's going to add a big bump of importance to the entire thing.

Hopefully THE WASTELAND does get made, and with Miller primarily at the helm, so the trilogy can stand as a finished work - and audiences in the future can watch them in either order.

This one's for the more Film literate people here - I've started considering where FURIOSA sits in Miller's filmography, and whether it's the prime example of what I'd consider his "late style."

That is, MAD MAX FURY ROAD seems to be the cap-off on his middle period - and this is all rather vague obviously, because it's one Film critic waffling - stretching from, say, LORENZO'S OIL to FURY ROAD, including the Babe and Happy Feet Films. These are mythic stories whose subtext and symbology is subsumed beneath a layer of realism in style, even in his Family Films.

There's an emphasis on presenting the idea that these narratives take place in somewhere close to the "real world," and even when there's CGI dancing penguins, the goal is an intense photorealism. This reaches it's zenith in FURY ROAD - a Film for which so much of its style is in how textured and immediate and real it seems, even at a mile a minute, when so much of what we're seeing is obviously figurative. Where there is CG, it's used in a purely practical sense - to enhance backgrounds, to build Storms and replace faces.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING, meanwhile, is proud of its artifice and it's meta fictional narrative - it's a story about stories, about a narratologist falling in love with stories. It's very much like a late Powell and Pressburger Film in how much of it takes place on these massive constructed sets, and how giddy the Film is with its fantastical use of CG.

The same could be said of FURIOSA, which does see a more creative use of CG than FURY ROAD, and which is also a plainly meta fictional narrative - while the use of CG arose out of practical concerns at first, the narrative's scale and scope and focus on the inner workings of this dream time world Miller presents us with aligns it more closely with Hard fantasy, and draws comparisons to Tolkien. It's also a Film where the Storyteller - in this case the History Man - directly intersects with the narrative at various points, something that Miller's been trying to do for a while in Mad Max Film.

What are your thoughts on this?