APOCALYPSE; MEOW

Opening:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--In the unlikely event that I'm ever asked to take the "Colbert Questionert" on Late Night, my answer to the question "Favorite Action Movie?" will be George Miller's 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It would probably be on the list of my twenty or thirty favorite movies, all-time. So any later chapter in George Miller's postapocalyptic Down Under car chase franchise has a lot to live up to.

This fifth entry is a prequel, offering backstory on the one-armed warrior played by Charlize Theron in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Turns out that Furiosa was abducted, as a child, from a "place of abundance" into the Wasteland, a vast desert region inhabited by gnarly motorcycle-borne pirates shuttling between three horribly symbiotic fiefdoms: The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm.

The Citadel, a water source, is presided over by the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and filled with his bald, pale, mindlessly loyal followers the War Boys, who recall the acolytes of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. Gas Town refines the fuel that the Wasteland's countless motor vehicles burn; The Bullet Farm provides the munitions.

Furiosa is dragged into this miserable world as a girl (Alyla Browne) and ends up in the clutches of the gabby nomadic biker chieftain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who more than earns her grudge against him. Over the more than two-hour run of the movie, the grown-up version of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is carried along through Miller's lengthy showcase chases and battle scenes, which have the feel of movements in a symphony.

I saw this film in IMAX, with a large screening audience, and what I noticed is that every time one of Miller's mad, headlong, thundering action sequences wound down, the crowd was left quiet, mesmerized. The term "gripping" gets thrown out a lot in describing movies, but Furiosa truly grips. I liked but didn't love Fury Road; this one still falls shy of Road Warrior for me, but it's a majestic piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

There's no director quite like Miller. His action scenes are staged with an epic sweep but also with a macabre slapstick intricacy. His view of humanity seems deeply jaundiced; he's forever showing us people taking cruelty and indifference to their fellow humans to horrifying extremes, yet he does it with a casual humor, as if to say, of course we're capable of this.

Yet somehow this bleak outlook doesn't come across like cheap, sophomoric cynicism, and it isn't depressing. Partly this is because he always shows us decent human values struggling to hold on in this world, but it's also because the generous-hearted Miller imbues his characters, even the deplorable ones, with so much personality and grotesque glamour.

Taylor-Joy, with the jolting anger that takes over her almost inhumanly urchin face, fits the role perfectly. As her love interest, driver Praetorian Jack, handsome Tom Burke has a valiant and sympathetic appeal. But it's Hemsworth, his eyes wounded and his tone aggrieved every time somebody has the temerity to resist him, who really engages with the audience. The final clash between Dementus and Furiosa, featuring some of the best dialogue from the script (by Miller and Nico Lathouris), gets at the impulse to avenge with a subtlety that few action movies attempt. 

There can be little doubt that Miller's films have contributed to the dangerous illusion that many people, especially young men, seem to hold: that the collapse of civilization would be cool and liberating and fun. He should probably be censured for this, but it sure makes his movies exhilarating.

The Garfield Movie--Another origin story; this computer-animated yarn starts by tracing the humble beginnings of the indolent, lasagna-loving housecat from the calculatingly marketed comic strip by Jim Davis. Turns out that as a kitten, Garfield, voiced here by Chris Pratt, was left in an alley by his feral father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and met his devoted human Jon (Nicholas Hoult) when he saw him through the window of an Italian restaurant. His overeating is a psychological overcompensation for early want.

The rest of The Garfield Movie concerns our hero and his exuberant canine pal Odie getting abducted by the cronies of the Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who has a grudge against Vic. Somehow it all leads to an attempt to steal milk from a commercial dairy, and an alliance with a glowering, lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames, who's pretty funny).

Admirable as Pratt is as an easygoing onscreen star, his voice struck me as a bit generic for this character, after being performed in earlier iterations by such distinctive voices as Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music. But he's not bad, and the movie has imagination and a snappy, propulsive comic precision, not to mention a catchy theme song by Jon Batiste. It's inconsequential but slickly-made fun, and when it was over, I'll admit I went out for lasagna.

IT TAKES A PILLAGE

Opening this weekend...

The Northman--The hero of this historical epic is Amleth, a 9th-Century Nordic prince whose father is murdered by his brother, who then marries Amleth's mother. Amleth flees, vowing revenge. When he's all grown up into the strapping Alexander Skarsgård and enjoying a nice career as a raiding, ravaging berserker, he travels to Iceland, poses as a slave on the estate of his Uncle (Claes Bang)--who's still married to Amleth's seemingly contented Mom (Nicole Kidman)--and waits for the chance to avenge his Dad.

Wait, haven't we heard this story somewhere?

Yeah, sort of. The Amleth legend, as recorded in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th Century, is the root that, greatly refined by time and civilization, ultimately grew into Shakespeare's Hamlet. But director Robert Eggers, who wrote the script with the Icelandic poet and novelist known as Sjön, prefers to take the story of fratricide punished back to the raw source material.

This is, on the whole, a serious attempt at a historically and mythically accurate depiction of the Middle Ages. That's not to say that it's always an accurate depiction of daily reality in those times, but the movie tries to be true to the era's imaginative and moral sensibilities. As such, it's a seriously harsh, bloody, gory, nasty tale. It offers us almost no quarter, and asks none of us.

For that, it has to be respected. Not many big-budget period movies are this unwilling to throw a sop to modern attitudes. These characters aren't just 21st-century people dressed in Viking drag; when, say, helpless peasants (including children) are locked in a hall that's set on fire after a battle, Amleth isn't the perpetrator, but he doesn't stop it, or object to it, or even seem to notice it. It's just another day at the barbarian office.

The acting is strong. Skarsgård is capable and appealing as Amleth, Anya Taylor-Joy feels period-authentic as the enslaved woman he comes to love, Kidman has an impressive, almost Shakespearean bearing as the Mom. Ethan Hawke as Amleth's Dad and Willem Dafoe as a lippy jester are both effective, and Björk has a creepy scene as a prophet. Best of all is Claes Bang, who wisely plays the murdering brother as a sensible, reflective man.

Despite all this creditable work, what with mutilated servants, and the horses with severed heads, and plenty of other atrocities, the list of people who will prefer to take a pass on The Northman is likely to be long. Even on it's own terms, it's a little slow, and a little heavy, although it gathers steam as it goes, and by the time we get to the final showdown--in the midst of a volcanic eruption!--it's entirely engrossing.

The movie also comes across--unintentionally, I think--as a little, well, Aryan. If you aren't in the mood to watch a lot of stripped-down white guys screaming into the camera as they psych themselves up for battle, this may not be the flick for you. This behavior is historically accurate, of course, and again, I don't think for a moment that it was what Eggers and Sjön had in mind, but it's too easy to imagine a bunch of skinheads or Proud Boys watching this movie over and over, and nodding along with the rage.