The more I think about it, the more I think it’s unfair to compare Furiosa to Fury Road. The problem is that I keep making that comparison anyway.

I keep making that comparison despite the fact that they’re fundamentally different styles of movie. It doesn’t help that they’re both in the same setting, no other movie in the setting came out between them, and their storylines tie directly together. Somehow it doesn’t matter that one was honed to a razor edge of high speed clarity while the other literally has “saga” in the name (sagas, not exactly known for being fast paced stories).

Fury Road told an extremely snappy story with its boot firmly on the accelerator at all times. Furiosa tells a rather long story at a slower pace, split into multiple segments by literal chapter breaks. Fury Road builds all of its characters’ backgrounds up through quick snippets and rapid-fire context clues, while Furiosa sits us down and tells us—in detail—how things came to be. They’re in the same setting, but they have wildly different approaches to storytelling. They just happen to exist next to each other in both story-time and release date.

What I’m saying is…

… ‘expectations matter,’ and I think Furiosa has suffered because of that.

In many ways, I think Furiosa was trapped. One, Fury Road is a hard act to follow. Two, Furiosa was stuck because of its prequel status; we knew so much about how the story had to end that it was hard for the movie to build in tension and peril. Three, I think the movie tried to tell too many stories in one go without focusing on a single emotional throughline.

On that first point… I loved Fury Road. Living up to that movie is difficult. I honestly don’t know what Furiosa could have done that would have satisfied me there.

To the second, this isn’t an issue unique to Furiosa. I find that prequels often suffer from a lack of tension. For whatever reason, the storylines that writers choose for prequels are frequently too settled for my tastes. Prequels often lack tension, or stakes that I care about, or character development that feels interesting and meaningful. I actually thought that Furiosa made some good choices on this front, and could have focused on a few different pieces of backstory and Furiosa’s character development that would have felt really good, but…

That brings us to the third issue I had. Rather than focus on one or two intertwined pieces of character development, this movie tried to tell us Furiosa’s whole life story. I can understand why that decision was made given the story the movie told, but I think it wasn’t the strongest option. If the movie wanted to give us a stronger throughline, we needed more engagement with the characters and elements that drove Furiosa’s internal conflicts.

Here there be *SPOILERS*. Also, specific examples.

Dr Dementus, Chris Hemsworth’s character, is vitally important to Furiosa’s emotional arc. Despite this, she has virtually no interactions with him through the center of the movie. What’s more, during this time we don’t get windows into how Furiosa’s feelings about him or his role in her past have evolved—her interior state felt inaccessible to me on that front.

I get it, there aren’t many opportunities for that kind of display in the Wasteland. I don’t know where it would have made sense to add them. Maybe Furiosa could have confided in one of Immortan Joe’s captive wives, or… something. We could have seen her deciding that Dr Dementus had to die. But what it came down to, for me, was that while I could make up how she felt the film felt like it was leaving me guessing as to her internal emotional state. Worse, this meant that her final confrontation with Dr Dementus felt hollow. That’s a shame, because that confrontation includes a whole bunch of impactful dialogue that felt like it was speaking to emotional truths for Furiosa—but those truths weren’t something the movie had built up over time.

It felt like someone reached the end of the film and then said “aw, yeah, you know those things that we brought up briefly a little while back? Those were themes. Emotional themes.”And then I’m left wondering whether this person knows that you’re supposed to build on themes gradually throughout a story, and that you have to do more building when your story is longer. I mean, I could see the themes, they just didn’t feel like they’d been consistently explored or developed.

End *SPOILERS*.

Furiosa could have had that clarity of focus. Some script edits prior to filming (or maybe some deleted scenes) could have given those storylines greater emotional clarity and weight. At the very least, the movie could have identified the themes and struggles they were building to and then made those themes a larger part of the rest of the movie. But ultimately I felt like the movie tried to do an okay job of delivering all of the story, instead of telling some of the story well.

I’m okay with the fact that this movie is longer and slower than Fury Road. It’s a good movie. It’s especially good if you know what you’re getting into and aren’t hung up on mismatched expectations. I just wanted it to have a stronger and more focused thematic throughline.