"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" — Back to the wasteland
“The question is: do you have it in you to make it epic?”
The wasteland growls with ravenous heat as a tired, beaten woman with a heart full of anger tears across the sands in search of the man who destroyed her life. This isn’t a world friendly to life anymore: the planet once known as Earth was obliterated in nuclear fire, leaving a scorched, destructive landscape behind. To survive, the remnants of humanity have turned to brutality and violence, desperately trying to carve out a chunk of the planet for themselves at the expense of all else. In the middle of the end of the world, this lonely woman carries her righteous quest. We’ve seen her before: Charlize Theron gave the character of Furiosa life back in 2015 when she rode out onto the Fury Road with precious cargo aboard her stolen war rig. Tasked with protecting the lives of five female slaves, Furiosa found herself trying to forge a new path for herself and her species through the desert. But before her quest for justice in the madness of the apocalypse, Furiosa undertook another journey: one much more personal and much more bloody.
Filmmaker and madman George Miller may have put himself in an unfortunate situation with his critically lauded 2015 action film Mad Max: Fury Road: how could he ever hope to surpass one of the greatest action films of all time? To Miller, the answer is that you don’t try it. Instead of making a direct follow-up, Miller turns to the past for a prequel about Fury Road’s real protagonist: Imperator Furiosa. Theron’s interpretation of the character saw her as a strong, self-assured woman, a powerful fighter in the army of Immortan Joe, and having all the guts to take on the Immortan’s fanatical forces alone. Here, Anya Taylor-Joy and newcomer Alyla Browne take on a much younger, more unstable version of the character, one who still has years of growth ahead of her, blinded by her trauma and violent tendencies. Deepening and complicating the drama of Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga makes for another fantastic journey into the wasteland. It excels as a prequel while never feeling tied down to the legacy of its predecessor. What it lacks in the breathless action that made Fury Road so incredible, Furiosa makes up for with its intricate character drama, stunning set pieces, and some excellent performances.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
The film begins with a nectarine dangling tantalizingly from its step, a rare sight in a world so barren and hostile. But for a young Furiosa, the harsh, irradiated lands that dominate the world around her are a distant reality. She calls the “green place,” as it’s affectionately known by its inhabitants, home, one of the last vestiges of fresh water and growing things left. But mere moments after this semblance of tranquillity is established, Furiosa comes across a gang of bikers who have strayed a little too far into her people’s territory. A botched sabotage later, and Furiosa finds herself as the prisoner of the bikers with her sharp-shooting mother hot on their tail. Just minutes into the movie we’re off to the races. Miller certainly doesn’t waste much time warming the viewer up to the post-apocalypse or the seeming normality of the green place. Instead, we’re jettisoned into the heart of the conflict and an early meeting with Dementus (played by Chris Hemsworth), the film’s charismatic principal villain. From there, Furiosa begins her saga of violence and retribution.
Nine years ago, Mad Max: Fury Road was a shock to the system of the action genre. Utterly relentless and completely overwhelming, its frenetic pace became totally iconic, sending it into the pantheon of The Great Action Films. On the awards circuit, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards (including Best Picture), winning six. It was not only a wonderful return to the more visually grounded and effective action films of past eras, but its clever storytelling and set pieces made it one of the most ambitious projects of its kind. If you’re looking for Fury Road 2, you won’t find it here. Furiosa doesn’t try for the same punch that its predecessor delivered — that would be a fool’s errand, even for Miller himself — but it manages to weave a narrative much more emotionally involved and character-heavy. In comparison to the rest of the franchise, Furiosa and Fury Road feel more aesthetically and narratively linked than any of the other Mad Max stories before them. We’re playing in the same chunk of the world, with many locations and characters from Fury Road returning. Immortan Joe, his cronies, and his citadel play major roles in the film’s narrative. The film finally depicts the “Bullet Farm” and “Gastown” (a name which earned some chuckles from my Vancouver audience), places alluded to in Fury Road. The iconography and distinctive yellow-and-blue colouring remain the same.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
The returning visuals are a welcome sight. The film utilizes colouring and production design to create a world that feels tactile and lived in, a welcome change from the lifeless landscapes employed by so many blockbusters today. The extensive use of practical sets, stunts, and reckless driving gives the film some excellent kinetic energy. Yet, despite some of the aesthetic similarities, the execution of Fury Road and Furiosa is night and day. Furiosa is a decades-spanning, highly personal revenge odyssey, told across five chapters. It’s more than just the two-hour-long chase scene that defined Fury Road. The dialogue is a little more expansive, the story takes a little more time, and the characters are more explicitly detailed. This is, of course, within the context of Furiosa ultimately being a Mad Max movie, albeit without the series’ titular character. Miller hasn’t turned out some slowly-paced, character piece set in the post-apocalypse. The engines still roar, the bullets still fly, the action is as brutal as ever (perhaps even more so than in Fury Road), and the gods of the desert get their offering of blood.
Furiosa spends years with Dementus, who takes her as a prize through his many great, violent accomplishments as a warlord, cruelly subjugating anyone who stands in his way. Still a child (played by Alyla Browne), Dementus eventually sells her off to Immortan Joe (played by Lachy Hulme, taking over from Hugh Keays-Byrne, who died before production began), another warlord, in a bid to take over control of Gastown, the Wasteland’s primary source of oil mining and gasoline production. Furiosa is held captive, living in relative comfort, while being groomed to be one of the warlord’s “full-life” wives, who will give him children. One night, after a bad run-in with one of Joe’s sons, Furiosa escapes the wives’ vault, lying in wait. Years later, as a young adult (played by Anya Taylor-Joy), Furiosa lives in hiding as a part of Immortan Joe’s car-building underlings. After an escape attempt goes wrong, Furiosa falls in with Praetorian Jack (played by Tom Burke), one of Immortan Joe’s top drivers, who trains her in the ways of Road War, her first step towards the woman she will eventually become. Together, now partners, Jack and Furiosa dream of taking their revenge on Dementus and escaping to the Green Place.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
Furiosa lives and dies on its characters, and the excellent performances from the film’s lead cast keep the movie alive, with stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth being the standouts. Taylor-Joy’s stoic and subdued performance as the adult version of the titular character is distinct from Theron’s iconic turn, while never losing the strings between them. This isn’t Imperator Furiosa, not yet anyway. She’s angrier, more internal, and much more unstable. She’s electrifying to watch as Taylor-Joy asserts herself as a particularly promising young star. Hemsworth’s against-type performance is amazing. Since the ‘79 original, The Wasteland has been populated by extreme caricatures of characters, and yet, Dementus — the Great Demntus, the Red Dementus, the Guardian Lord of Gas Town, among his many titles —might just be its most strange and unique. With his distinctive voice, Hemsworth rides the fine line between strong acting choices and overacting, leaving Dementus in this beautiful state just beyond reality but not yet into fantasy. The dynamic between these two, especially their eventual final encounter, provides so much energy for the film to ride on. The film’s emotional core and central conflict are beautifully realized by these two actors, who feed off each other into a beautiful explosion of ferocity and violence.
Furiosa finds the balance between telling its own story and serving as a prelude to the original that few true prequels are able to accomplish. Miller takes time to dig into the title character, her wants, desires, and trauma, making her actions in both films all the more meaningful. It provides retroactive clarity that makes Fury Road feel like a culmination of the story here, with the themes of each film playing in perfect harmony. Furiosa isn’t content with just being a prequel. The film is more than just lore and context for Fury Road. In fact, the film delivers very little context or explicit worldbuilding beyond Furiosa’s journey. Just like Fury Road, the film lets its images speak for it, with so much of the complex worldbuilding established through throwaway lines, gestures, and architecture. Immortan Joe and his War Boys return in all their Valhalla-infused glory, but the film still denies any sort of explanation about their violent, yet deeply spiritual way of life. Miller and the rest of his team take full advantage of the visual nature of storytelling to build the rich and detailed world of The Wasteland. The storytelling is environmental and expressive, with the audience left to put the jumble of anachronistic costumes and set pieces into a discernable story.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
Now 79 years old, George Miller has spent his entire career in and out of his dystopian Australia. In a sorted career that has taken him through directing duties on Babe: Pig in the City (1998), the Happy Feet films, and the fantastical Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), the director has certainly kept busy, with Mad Max being a key cornerstone of his early and, now, late career. Five movies and 45 years into this world, Furiosa feels just as energetic, and much more refined, as the rest of his Mad Max work. It makes sense that this prequel was conceived in tandem with its predecessor as two halves of the same whole. Although nothing will quite match the sheer intensity of Fury Road (if you haven’t seen it, it’s a must-watch), Furiosa drives home just what makes Miller special as a filmmaker. When it does reach its act-defining action sequences, the film certainly doesn’t hold out. The staging and choreography are unique, the editing is razor-sharp, and the score pulses through the theatre like it’s coming from the centre of the earth. There’s one particularly excellent action sequences around a mine that I don’t think I will ever forget. Despite how violent and chaotic the Fury Road and Furiosa duology can be, the excellent thematic texture of these films cannot be overstated. The subtle worldbuilding and clever character writing keep the audience involved in interpreting the story at all times. And, through this, Furiosa packs a big emotional and thematic punch.
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” poet T.S. Elliot asks in his epic poem, The Waste Land. Elliot’s haunting verse seems to permeate the metatext of Miler’s Furiosa. Miller’s desperate, restless characters are cursed with trying to find purpose in a world that poses a never-ending existential question: What’s the point? “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,” Elliot continues. This is the world of Fuiorsa. A world where there seems to be no peace or relief, where the memories of the Green Place are never realized. Yet, Furiosa persists. As one unanswered question at the end of Fury Road asks, “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?” Furiosa’s sense of longing is never satiated, not in this movie nor, spoilers, is it in Fury Road. Yet, the film pulls the viewer so fully into her world that we are content to go with Furiosa, even to the ambiguous, treacherous end.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now playing in theatres.
Written by Josh Friedman
Starring Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, and William H. Macy
Released May 10, 2024
145 minutes
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