There are few franchises I want to keep going and Mad Max is one of them. Growing up, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior dictated everything I did with my Hot Wheels and Diecast replicas. Mad Max: Fury Road, 30 years later, came when I thought I had put those dusty childhood obsessions to bed in this (then) age of Avengers and Jurassic Worlds and Forces Awakening. If Fury Road juiced up my half-life by reminding me of the old fashioned joy of cars going VROOM, then Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is like being reborn by the V8 gods themselves. Action movies are a scarce resource in this wasteland ruled by streaming services and expanded universes. George Miller doesn’t just give this dormant franchise a shot of chromium adrenaline, and our glut of IP a quadruple bypass. He refreshes it with something it never knew it needed.
The saga continues…or reverse 180s into the past of everyone’s favorite imperator. Furiosa is only a kid when she’s abducted from her home in The Green Place. (Also referred to as “a place of abundance.”) Stolen, she falls through the cracked hands of warlords and biker goons and piss boys, over time stockpiling grudges and fuel reserves to one day make it back.
Those expecting Fury Road 2 may be in for a shock. Where its predecessor was the go-for-broke, metal-on-metal sprint, Furiosa is a marathon, a biblical poem spanning dunes, canyons, and the empty stretches in between. Miller primes us for this change of pace with the film’s protracted opening sequence. Young Furiosa gets kidnapped by a biker gang where her mother (fierce newcomer Charlee Fraser) gives chase, picking them off one by one across day and night. It’s not breakneck (though Mommy Furiosa does break necks), it’s engines starting, stopping, brief shooting and scuffling, and repeat until cub is in her mother’s arms, though the reunion won’t last.
Deliberate, measured, and dare I say, meditative, the pacing is a changeup for the franchise. Miller holds the frame longer, or douses us in long sequences of silence. He’s thinking in a bigger span of time than a car chase over a few days, instead charting the life of a character who will blaze the trail of her own legend, replete with chapter cards.
To be clear, Furiosa does NOT skimp on the action. In the movie’s first major set-piece, there’s an attack on a supply convoy that has everything you’d expect from Mad Max. Plus parachutes. Plus a new contraption called a “bommy knocker.” AND Anya Taylor-Joy’s eyes – a Carrie-level stare – running down bad guys by the dozens. Is it bigger than the Cirque du Soleil shenanigans of Fury Road? No, but it might be Miller’s best directed set-piece. Because at this point he understands that pure action is just that: action, movement, energy. No exposition or witty dialogue to get in the way; our eyes and the way our bodies move do SO MUCH to visually communicate all that’s needed. Miller, together with his star, speaks the language of a thousand bullets.
Perhaps you’re thinking: What’s the point of Furiosa when Fury Road exists? Speaking for myself, not once while watching Fury Road was I itching to know why Furiosa was missing a forearm, or what happened to the Green Place. Because Fury Road contextualized these things in the present tense. Things like her prosthetic arm told us she’d been THROUGH some shit. Or, when they find what’s left of the Vuvalini, her all-female clan, it told us grimly that she was too late. And beyond that, what happened to the Green Place is what happens everywhere in this apocalyptic wasteland—it takes and takes and takes.
Fury Road told us what we needed to know about characters in the moment, then showed us what they’re made of in the gauntlet of vehicular warfare. The shaky prospect of prequels is that they run the risk of prying open things that were better left unsaid and providing answers that, as it turns out, weren’t that interesting after all. Here, Miller achieves the opposite: Furiosa mythologizes its heroine.
“Whatever you have to do, however long it takes, promise me you’ll find your way home,” Furiosa’s mother tells her before she’s taken for good. (Reader, it choked me up.) We know this won’t happen in this movie. That makes the line all the more tragic, and makes this scene in Fury Road hit harder than a semi. Furiosa’s repeated attempts to escape illustrate a lifetime of false hopes—a portrait of a soul forged in an unforgiving wasteland and inevitably cratered. Furiosa deepens the mythology to a degree that by the time we first see Charlize Theron in Fury Road, we understand every tear and scar behind that brutal stare. Theron’s Furiosa is on her last pillar of hope; Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is building that foundation.
A line like “Remember me” in Fury Road is given a new punctuation. The idea of “redemption,” too, is rendered in a whole new light. This is what makes Furiosa so remarkable at a time when every entry in a franchise is just a brand extension. So many prequels, sequels, and legacyquels exist just to fill in the blanks, or connect A to B like a conveyor belt for fan service. Miller instead gives new meaning and depth to what we’ve seen before. While the movie does answer things like how Furiosa lost her arm, or how the ruins of this wasteland functions, thankfully Miller is always more interested in confronting and complicating Furiosa’s story than tidying things up on the path to Fury Road.
For one, Furiosa had a mentor named Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, who could’ve been Mad Max in another universe). Secondly, it turns out Immortan Joe isn’t Furiosa’s first warlord. That vile honor goes to Dr. Dementus (a game and wacked out Chris Hemsworth) leader of the biker horde that kills Furiosa’s mom and takes the little angel as his co-rider. It means Furiosa will look to a younger Immortan Joe for help, and in doing so will help out those who control the wasteland.
To that end, Miller does some efficient world-building, illuminating how this world keeps itself on the edge of chaos and order. Gastown and Bullet Farm were mentioned in Fury Road. With the Citadel, they form the triangle that rules the wasteland, and Dementus is the monkey wrench in Immortan Joe’s mechanical fiefdom. Furiosa surprisingly adds layers to the Immortan’s story as well. He’s not just the guy who sits on top with a rad muzzle design; he’s a methodical and patient bureaucrat compared to the hurricane brewing in Dementus. Hemsworth, it must be said, gives a career-best performance as a weaselly tyrant with a thing for the mic.
While Furiosa sees a use in the enemy of her enemy, she’ll come to realize that she and Dementus have more in common—that he isn’t the agent who killed the world, but a product of it, same as her. A beautiful complication; her quest to avenge her mother and a stolen childhood feeds her inner beast, while corroding her soul the further she goes. Fury Road shows us the literal way back for her; Furiosa climaxes with her pondering, is there?
Much has been marketed about this movie being Furiosa’s “odyssey” à la Homer’s Greek epic. More astonishing is how the script carves out narrative space for The Iliad. Dementus’ tyrannical campaign across the wasteland mirrors Agamemnon’s conquest of Greece in the 10-Year Trojan War, while Immortan Joe is perched in the Citadel’s rock towers like King Priam behind Troy’s impenetrable walls. Miller even gives the conflict a name: the 40-Day Wasteland Wars. Furiosa unwittingly becomes a crucial cog in the conflict; if she gets her revenge then it’s clear who will benefit. Her quest becomes the stuff of myth not unlike Achilles or Odysseus, or a welding of both. Furiosa, in a sense, is both The Iliad and The Odyssey, with Fury Road now retrofitted as the epilogue to Furiosa’s epic poem.
Miller’s previous film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is a crucial piece here too—a movie about mythmaking, the stories people tell, and the stories we tell ourselves. The Road Warrior implied that these Mad Max sagas are ones told by campfire, offering glimmers of light in a desolate world. Furiosa seals this notion of hopeful fables and folklore in amber. After all, it’s only a wasteland if there’s no hope. These tales of fiery vengeance and hard-won redemption, however brutal and tragic, keep us sane in a world gone mad.
In that regard, Furiosa isn’t just essential to the Mad Max saga, but also this era of IP where nostalgia leads to the endless rebooting of stories and, in turn, the undoing of conclusive chapters. Maybe that’s too hyperbolic. All I’m saying is if nothing ever ends or stays dead then it better be different, or something other than using Luke Skywalker as an action figure for fan service. It better take bold risks and hairpin turns, or at least throw in something as rad as a motorcycle chariot.
If I have one complaint, it’s that I didn’t need the overt Mad Max tie-in. The man (or a silhouette of him) makes a cameo in this movie alongside his trusty Interceptor. Since Furiosa’s story is so engrossing, this feels unnecessary, and a stretch that “Furiosa and Max Rockatansky Crossed Paths Before!” Something tells me this was a requirement, like bearing “A Mad Max Saga” as a subtitle as studios seek to cattle brand their IP, so I suppose this comes with the territory. Elsewhere, Furiosa redeems the prequel-izing and expanding of franchises, that it CAN be an exciting and rip-roaring frontier—if you’ve got the shotgun shells and mileage to go all the way.
Before this movie, I didn’t understand the church of Anya Taylor-Joy; now I do. She gives a throwdown action star (and near-silent film) performance as iconic as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. I certainly didn’t think Chris Hemsworth had a Joker in him; his Dr. Dementus is up there with Lord Humungus and Aunty Entity as legendary baddies of the wasteland. It’s rare for franchises to get better as they go on, rarer for a prequel to make its predecessors look like rough drafts. And further, for a 79-year-old filmmaker to make something that’s faster and more furious than the competition. I can’t imagine not having the cinematic miracle that is Fury Road in my life. Now I can’t imagine Fury Road without Furiosa. By my deeds I honor you, George Miller. Five more Mad Max sagas, please, before the world goes to shit.
4 Bommy Knockers out of 4
ADRIAN MANUEL 