… but
the post just kept devolving into utter fanboy drooling about how
amazing Charlize Theron is as Imperator Furiosa so let's just embrace
that.
[minor
spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road]
I
mean, just to start off with, its always nice to see Charlize Theron
being cast as something other than an imposing blonde sex goddess.
She's a great actress, a woman so good at projecting power (be it
physical, emotional or, yes, sexual) that its a crying shame that so
few directors seem to know what to do with her.
Hell,
she absolutely saved Snow White And The Huntsman as Ravenna,
the Evil Queen. That film was all kinds of confused about its tone
and what it wanted Kristen Stewart's Snow White to be but Theron just
about managed to rescue it. Up until now that was probably my
favourite role she's played but Furiosa blows Ravenna out of the
water.
For
a start she's very clearly not being cast for her looks here. Don't
get me wrong, there's not a make-up artist on the planet that can
make Theron unattractive but one of the benefits of the fact Furiosa
is smugglings sex slaves to freedom is that the slaves can be dressed
in floaty, diaphanous clothes and coded “attractive” so Theron in
her practical clothes and skin covered in layers of dirt gets to be
more clearly coded “fighter” and equal to, if not superior to,
Max in the narrative.
And
she absolutely is Max's equal if not narrative superior. This movie
is absolutely her story that
we are experiencing through the period in which it intersects with
Max's larger story. Max is the franchise, she is the film. This has
grated the spuds of a lot of... let's just call them sensitive
gentlemen who have a problem with this for some reason even though
this is a perfectly common way of handling a long-running character:
have them as a unifying presence in a bunch of stories about the
people they encounter. I've seen it done with Batman, Judge Dredd, a
few other long-running 2000AD strips and it is how Doctor Who has
worked since they started doing character arcs for companions. This
format basically allows there to be a defined journey with a
beginning, middle and end without spending all possible development
of the title character, or where all that possible development has
already taken place (like with Dredd).
Furiosa kicks arse, too. She has an amazing knock down,
drag out fist fight with Max early in the film and she's a dab hand
with firearms. She's absolutely a product of this world as much as
Max, Immortan Joe and the random gangs. Again, the presence of the
sex slaves allows fantastic contrast: they are beautiful and soft and
dressed to emphasise their femininity while Furiosa has very short
hair, very practical clothes, she's dirty, she's muscular, she's
armed. Her prosthetic arm matches the cobbled together over-design of
every other piece of technology in the film.
As for her personal journey that's too spoileriffic to
go into here but suffice to say that there's a fantastic consistency
in how her every action proceeds from a unified set of motivations
which are never explicitly explained but perfectly understandable
from those actions. More characters, not just female characters but
all characters in all media, should work like this.
Furiosa is a great character portrayed by a fantastic
actress and hopefully by tomorrow I'll be sufficiently over that fact
to actually discuss the film.
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