The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a first for the long-running series, a new instalment that is explicitly tethered to another episode in director George Miller's ongoing chronicle of a post-apocalyptic, Australian wasteland. Whereas previous films played fast and loose with any ideas of continuity, placing Mel Gibson's Max (or Tom Hardy's Max) in situations and settings that didn't quite tally with everything previously established, Furiosa is specifically designed to predate Mad Max: Fury Road almost to the second. It seems notable that, when returning to their successful, 1970s science fiction properties, several originator directors have specifically attempted to stake a claim on both an in-universe past and alternative perspectives when considering another, modern re-telling. George Lucas used the childhood of his villain as a way to animate his long-promised pre-Star Wars episodes while Ridley Scott's second (and third) stab at decoding Alien cross-pollinated draughty space hulks with further inquiries into the biomechanical treachery suggested by Ian Holm's malfunctioning android Ash and, also, Scott's 1982 feature Blade Runner. 

Perhaps this tactic is indicative of older artists looking back over their careers, hoping to worm their way back into the headspaces that they found particular rewarding? To elevate exciting but subordinate voices within the original text from the margins to a bigger, more narratively central role? As well, thanks to the first Mad Max, the fragment of happiness officer Rockatansky's experienced before the bombs fell is already known to us. So, having already woven his title character in and out of irradiated myth, it's only natural that writer-director Miller (who shares a screenwriting credit here with Nico Lathouris) has lasered in on a different character to power this prequel. Played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa was an anomaly: a woman who had risen to a position of power and status within a monstrous, misogynistic society that had otherwise reduced women to subterranean beggars or beatific breeding stock. Furiosa's unsuitability for that latter role seemed to be visually coded, as if to immediately settle that query in the mind of the audience. She had the same shaven head as the terminally ill shock troopers that she fought alongside and one of her arms was mangled and mechanical; a claw that curled around a steering wheel adorned with the leering skull mark of her branding obsessed owner. 

That Furiosa was a survivor, Virginia Hey's Warrior Woman from Mad Max 2 raised from a striking but supporting role to the lead character. In a film nominally built around Hardy's Max returning from the wilderness, it was Theron's Furiosa that shone brightest. She was the one who stole Immortan Joe's wives from under him; the convoy commander who brought generations of displaced women out of their crater and into governance. Although Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga covers decades in the life of its subject, the film forgoes spending any significant amount of time describing the green utopia that Alyla Browne's Furiosa was born into. Rather than delineate the particulars of a shaded paradise running on renewable energies, proceedings instead kick-off with a chase across a desert. Seized by raiders after she takes it upon herself to cut the fuel lines threaded through the trespasser's motorbikes, young Furiosa doesn't freeze when captured, taking any opportunity she can to frustrate this hasty escape. The men holding the child are pursued across a sizzling Outback by her mother, Mary, played with steely determination by Anyone but You's Charlee Fraser. 

Dips in the landscape provide cover, while speeding up a particularly steep incline exposes these fleeing marauders to the crack shot that is hot on their heels. Although simplistic in terms of route - this getaway is largely ran in a straight line over undulating dunes - Miller's film builds and releases tension through clashing expressions of expertise. So, when a raider is blasted off his motorbike, his allies pick his vehicle apart, taking spare fuel tanks with them or depriving the dirt bike of its front wheel. This isn't enough to halt the advance of Furiosa's Mother though. She's already claimed a bullet-riddled ride that no-one had the chance to scuttle. Mary is then able to cannibalise her flagging chopper for parts, resurrecting the discarded, badlands tuned motorcycle. As a model of action, Miller chooses to prioritise the prolonged description of frayed expertise rather than, simply, explosive dominance. The director's subjects are seen to struggle within desperate situations. They might find themselves hog-tied armed only with their teeth or dangling under a speeding vehicle; their limbs lashed by chains or crushed then shredded by whirring monster truck tires. 

Later sections of Furiosa return to the scrambling road wars introduced in the series' first sequel, adding remote-controlled hydraulic arms while, simultaneously, transforming the titanic, semi-truck climbing frames into rolling, religious iconography. But this first chapter is different, even singular. It combines the bold imagery of anime (by all accounts Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time co-director - not to mention Fury Road concept artist - Mahiro Maeda was in the frame to head up an animated Mad Max instalment that would've covered similar ground to this film) with the bubbling, histrionic emotions of Italian westerns. Specifically, this connection is made thanks to a lingering sense of personal culpability felt by a hero when they are at their most helpless; the despairing memories of Harmonica from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West sunken here into a digital lacquer. While the canvas of Furiosa expands to cover close to twenty years, this opening event is told with that same, embedded feeling of pure incident that Fury Road effortlessly generated. Ultimately though, Mary is unsuccessful in her attempts to rescue her child, and so Furiosa falls into the hands of Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, the khan of a great hoon horde that rolls across the sand plains, gobbling up everything and everyone in sight. 

Although almost entirely absent in this film, the Max character instead enjoys an unusual, spectral presence in Furiosa. Mel Gibson's wanderer has been trisected. The Road Warrior prised apart, with each of the fragments then elevated into individual, supporting players for Furiosa to bounce off. First there's the V8 Interceptor, seen here attended by a figure played by Tom Hardy's stunt double, Jacob Tomuri. We get a tiny glimpse of the most literal manifestation of this character as he idles on a cliffside, seemingly moved by the sight of a bloodied Furiosa struggling back towards one of her prisons. Chris Hemsworth's Dementus is the second part of this triumvirate, representing Max's bone-deep grief taken terrible shape. As Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome demonstrated, there's always the potential for this kind of powerful, charismatic larrikin to sink into the same maniacal rhythms as their enemies. We see Dementus experiencing waves of horror, presumably memories of his slaughtered wife and children, but his salve for these nightmares is chatter and momentum. Both of which, in this boiling hell, tend to segue swiftly into pointless, bloody violence. 

Dementus talks a good game: professing to be an uncommonly generous warlord whose only wish is to lift his people out of impoverishment or, when it comes to the subject of Furiosa, a doting adoptive father. He is neither of these things. Dementus has a gift for summoning up honeyed, declarative statements and, when faced with intractable problems, he is (by the standards of his environment) unusually daring. That's it though. This leader's failing is that he cannot actually nurture anything. His desires are purely sensory and consumptive. Literally, in terms of transforming his beloved adoptee, who he fashions into a jangling, pale-faced trinket. The caged Furiosa displays an obvious lack of colour, all thanks to a blood-letting routine that ensures Dementus is never short of sausages. Later, when faced with a towering reproduction of John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs - painstakingly copied onto a look-out tower wall by a former warden of Gas Town - the head of the biker horde cannot help but scrawl in an extra arm. A white, sinewy limb that extends out from Heracles' passive companion to touch the naked bodies of the wading Naiads. 

Completing the Rockatansky Trinity is Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack. This is Max in his physical prime, the undisputed champion of The Fury Road who takes Anya Taylor-Joy's older Furiosa under his wing then trains her in his own greaser image. Jack is Max's bravery and dauntless expertise codified, through repetition, into a being that offers a kind of masculine tranquillity otherwise completely absent in this setting. While the citadel's rulers obsess over their own degrading biology and the War Boys clamour to end their lives as burning shrapnel, Jack offers stillness and an encouraging word. As Jack's apprentice, Furiosa is finally able to reveal a femininity that she wears proudly. She sheds her androgynous, sickly disguise and her long, curling hair returns - previously shorn when it drew the attention of Joe's hulking, paedophilic son. Her status as an Imperator in training protects Furiosa in a way that she has never really experienced. She can be assertive now rather than shrinking. At this point Furiosa has long held the respect of her unusually (given their environment) easy-going peers but now she has an appreciable, fame-level value. One that is not based on her ability to deliver healthy progeny either. She's become part of the machinery. 

Naturally, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga works hard to undo these connections. To detail the ways in which Taylor-Joy's enormous Clara Bow-meets-Sailor Moon eyes will lose their shimmering, expectant quality; physically shrinking into the sadder, heavier orbs set into the face of Charlize Theron. Miller's latest does so by telling a much more conventionally structured story. There are chapter stops and our heroine's progress is measured in decades rather than a few, fraught hours. These breaks allow tension to wane, to draw attention to a fractured approach to storytelling that underlines the suspicion that these are fragments culled from Fury Road's fruitful pre-production period. That fourth Max may be the livelier piece then, one that never stops to explain (really) anything, but Furiosa is still light years ahead of its nearest action contemporaries. Even with the odd stuttering computer generated stunt double that doesn't quite match the physical capture, the conceptual focus on determined figures surmounting hair-raising hazards, all without ever losing either a sense of geography or genuine, physical danger, is the work of a master. Above all Furiosa underlines the very real phenomena that nothing is as purely exciting as watching a bloodthirsty maniac hurl their screaming hot rod down an impossibly steep sand seif, hoping to collide with their trembling prey below. 

Fast X

Fast X is, in every way that the film is enjoyable, a testament to the second-unit teams who describe the crashing action and the VFX studios that knit this disparate coverage together, allowing camera perspectives to come unshackled from their physical limits to zip around like curious insects (in this sense, Fast X is very much post-Michael Bay's Ambulance). Although pre-production and principal photography were begun by series mainstay Justin Lin, a falling out with Vin Diesel means that this tenth instalment is now credited solely to Louis Leterrier, a director who hit the ground running in 2005 with Unleashed (or Danny the Dog as it's known in Leterrier's native France) then never came close to scaling the same heights. Michelle Rodriguez revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that not only was this handover a few weeks shy of instantaneous but that a fight sequence between her character and Charlize Theron's Cipher was accomplished without any principal director in place. This point notable because this specific set-to, staged in a futuristic surgical theatre, is easily the highlight of Fast X: a crunchy back and forth between two actresses with very little else to do in the wider feature that uses shattered glass both as an improvised weapon and as an editing exclamation point. Other than that, Mr Diesel's efforts to elevate his Dominic Toretto from a rage case petrolhead to an invincible folk hero are a noticeable, and consistent, drag on the film. This insistence on relentless self-mythologising not only renders every new, radioactive, danger instantly moot, it also muscles out more of the piece's genuinely entertaining elements - be that John Cena as a world class entertainer of children or Jason Momoa swapping beauty tips with his decomposing henchmen. 

BABA YAGA

For his solo debut, John Wick co-director David Leitch has put together a Cold War period piece about Charlize Theron's post-punk spy beating hell out of anyone who looks at her sideways in pre-unification Berlin. Quite right too.

Mad Max: Fury Road

In Mad Max: Fury Road the title role slips a little further into the mythic. George Miller and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris deliberately posit a situation that doesn't quite align with the previous Max Rockatansky stories. Tom Hardy's take hears voices. He's haunted by visions of a woman, an Aboriginal man, and a child who calls him by his first name. Max hasn't just failed a family (his?), he's failed a community. Mel Gibson's Max wandered out into the wasteland to find something big enough to kill him. Hardy's Max seeks escape. This Max is out of time, the factions and systems he brushes up against are well-established to the point of enjoying several distinct industries. This isn't the day after, this is decades. A generation. The Smegma Crazies have settled into a corner and started breeding. Hugh Keays-Byrne's Immortan Joe is the convoy Khan, a diseased, barrel-chested Daddy who's willing to risk everything he's made just so he can hold a perfect son. His Citadel is awash with water and greenery but his humans, his property, are still born with lumps and irradiated half-lives.

In Joe's world healthy women are fashion shoot chattel to be hoarded in bank vaults. Joe's wives flee after collectively deciding that they don't want to raise warlord juniors. Men are surplus to requirement, Joe's doing all the fathering so their shaved heads are filled up with white line fatalism, McCarthy's Skin kids swept up in a Freakwave. God is the all-powerful V8, a burning chromed skull that sits under a divine light hoarding fetishised steering wheels. These War Boys spray paint their teeth, hoping to emulate this deity on their way to the great pile-up in the sky. The Radback teems with enemies to all, scattered gangs with graphic identities, their prevailing aesthetics weird off-shots of Joe's roughly hewn hot rods. The most striking are The Buzzards, a gang of shrivelled up sand people encased in vehicles that look like the Monster Minds from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors as dressed by Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris. Each machine is a mess of rusty bayonets, pregnant with tetanus, outfitted with grasping mechanical arms and circular saws.

Despite all this progress, Max hasn't aged. He's a raggedy man frozen in his defining moment. This free-wheeling approach to continuity recalls Akira Kurosawa's two bodyguard films, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Each film taking place in a completely different time period, the spectral, problem solving hero the only constant. There's also a touch of Seiji Miyaguchi's super swordsman from Seven Samurai in how Max casually tackles a pursuing tank. 007's in the mix as well - like Hardy, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan all cracked skulls for decades while nursing a vague, sense memory of George Lazenby's departed wife. Since this is a reintroduction Max has to develop and change. He begins his adventure in bondage, an O-neg commodity, muzzled and manacled so he can be slowly drained to prolong Nicholas Hoult's flagging War Boy, Nux. When Max joins the freedom convoy he's violent and irritable. Max is the nervous energy in Fury Road, it falls to Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa to provide a sense of stability. 

She's Aliens' Ellen Ripley come again - quiet, capable and utterly commanding. If anything, Max is trying to impress her. Theron has priors with this kind of role. Her Meredith Vickers in Prometheus was also essentially the same kind of character as Ripley was in Alien. Unfortunately Ridley Scott's newer film chose to interpret Vickers' by-the-book pragmatism as the behaviour of a spoilsport. In Fury Road Theron's allowed to sing. She drives the rig, she calls the shots. Rather than jostle for the lead Max slots into a similar role as Michael Biehn's Hicks, a comfortable component, happy to assist. Eventually their relationship transcends language entirely, both parties able to scramble around the tanker, assured that their ally is doing exactly what needs to be done. Their actions are ultimately interchangeable.

George Miller and cinematographer John Seale approach action laser focused on clarity. The frame is stable, often dreamlike in how it hovers around the conflict. Moments are expressed clearly and concisely, you never feel like editor Margaret Sixel is having to engineer excitement. Everything you need to know is communicated in an image or a sound. Since the entire film is a never-ending chase we spend a lot of that time watching fragile, barely clothed humans climbing all over speeding, filthy machinery. It's the thrill of watching Peter Kent casually hop from a pickup to a big rig in Terminator 2: Judgment Day exploded to feature length. During Dredd's original theatrical release Alex Garland spoke about a sequel that would adapt Pat Mills, Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland's The Cursed Earth storyline. After that film tanked it seemed unlikely that we'd see a film about a highly motivated cop leading a ragtag group across an unyielding desert, pursued by radioactive mutants. As it turns out, George Miller has delivered the best possible version of that premise. Fury Road is an overcranked treat full of white impact frames and distant carrion squawks that's exactly as excellent as your memory of Mad Max 2.