Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens with a voiceover variation on this franchise’s guiding question: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” This being a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 action masterpiece that was driven by an unlikely well of hope, Furiosa is necessarily a narrative regression—meaning that hope here is in even shorter supply. But as a brilliant exercise in cinematic sound and fury, director George Miller’s latest entry to the series that he began with 1979’s Mad Max is anything but a step backwards.
Furiosa opens with the title character as a child (Alyla Browne) living in the “green place” referenced in Fury Road. Her kidnapping—also alluded to in that film—takes up the first third of the movie. Anchored by continually rumbling drums, this is a gripping, multiday chase sequence, one that establishes Furiosa’s determination and ingenuity (while strapped to a captor’s motorcycle, she chews through the fuel line to slow him down). It’s immediately clear how Furiosa survived to be the cool, calculated, and ruthless figure of Fury Road (where she’s played by Charlize Theron).
The opening section of Furiosa also introduces us to a new villain: Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus. The preening, loquacious leader of a rogue Wasteland gang, Dementus is at once the ringleader of a cruel circus and its unwitting clown, considering the ways Hemsworth comically undercuts the character. Costuming has always been a hallmark of this series, and here Dementus’ overblown getup—including a billowing cape—frequently gets in the way, sometimes even making him wobble. Make no mistake, though, Dementus is also capable of extreme barbarity—to which the young Furiosa bears witness, her eyes logging every act of savagery.
As Furiosa grows up under Dementus’ lock and key, she finds herself caught up in his attempt to wrest control of the Wasteland from the warlords we already know from Fury Road, including Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Furiosa’s suffering at the hands of these various men—which she manages to parry, at least partially, at every turn—informs the weary woundedness Theron carried in that film. I imagine another viewing of Fury Road will only be enriched by the fact that this movie now exists.
As the older Furiosa, Anya Taylor-Joy captures the ferocity and resilience that precedes that weariness—and she does so almost solely with her eyes, accentuated for much of the film by a forehead blackened by grease. Since breaking out in The Witch, Taylor-Joy has struggled, to my mind, to find another part that used her unique, doe-like presence as effectively. Furiosa does so by turning the doe into a nearly silent demon—a demon of resourcefulness and cunning. “That is the darkest of angels,” a prophetic character says of Furiosa near the end of the film, as she rumbles into the horizon in pursuit of retribution. “The fifth rider of the apocalypse.”
By this point, Miller and action designer Guy Norris—working with a vast army of effects artists and stunt performers—have given us a number of set pieces to rival those in Fury Road. A mid-film attack on Immortan Joe’s war rig—driven at this point by Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack, who has the greaser cool of a Wasteland Elvis—is a highlight, featuring all kinds of wonderful new toys. Wearing curved, chrome mini-skis, marauders slice through the sand behind motorbikes, then unleash parachutes that launch them into the air. Others swoop toward the rig in gliders that appear to be powered by onetime weed whackers. The coupe de grace has to be Dementus’ chariot, which is powered by three riderless bikes he controls with a set of reigns, looking like Ben-Hur by way of Harley-Davidson. As in Fury Road, the precision in these scenes—in regard to the framing, the editing, and physical performances—is exquisite.
And, like the best action movies, it’s all to a purpose. The last section of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is titled “Beyond Vengeance”—and that is indeed where the movie takes us. If Fury Road wound its way, through much pain and violence, to a vision of a new “green place,” Furiosa leaves us in a place of tension, one caught between mercy and wrath, hope and despair. It’s the rare prequel that nearly feels necessary.
(5/21/2024)