I watched Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at the cinema today. It’s a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. I did not enjoy it.

It felt like for most of the runtime, the film preoccupies itself with showing the protagonist Furiosa experiencing trauma after trauma and, admittedly like a bad-ass, stoically never giving up. But it doesn’t really feel like she grows as a character and the story fails to raise the stakes in a way that produces narrative tension.

The chase sequences were fine I suppose, but I felt like they lacked the punch that Mad Max: Fury Road had. Or, maybe, I wouldn’t like Mad Max: Fury Road as much if I went back to watch it.

For much of it, it felt like Furiosa was used as a pawn to shuttle from one place to another in order to treat the audience to a world-building session — and solely for telling more about the setting of the Mad Max universe.

And lastly, the story has a few plot holes that I find odd:

• How do Dementus’s thugs show up at the Green Place in the first place, if everyone is so reluctant to travel such a large distance for a place none of them believe exist? If it is so easy to stumble across, why hasn’t it already been discovered? It doesn’t seem like the Green Place has particularly well monitored borders.
• How does Furiosa evade detection and reintegrate into society in the Citadel after escaping the Vault? Surely, given the limited number of people even allowed in the Citadel, a manhunt could have been successfully conducted? It seems like Immortan Joe would do that, given how important he views the wives.