Film Review — Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
“DO YOU HAVE IT IN YOU TO MAKE IT EPIC?”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is probably not what you’re expecting. Trading in Fury Road’s unstoppable octane for an exhilarating mode of mythmaking, George Miller deconstructs the very nature of legends in a brutal, mournful revenge epic. Fury Road was one of the best films of the previous decade. Furiosa is even better. Minor spoilers ahead…
There’s something beautiful about our great artists refusing to repeat themselves. Mere gravity would suggest that a follow-up prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road would attempt to recapture its predecessor’s elemental octane, but George Miller has something completely different in mind. What can only be described as an evolved engine in the same rust-colored chassis, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is more companion piece to the gorgeous flop of Three Thousand Years of Longing than Fury Road: tales from the wasteland and who gets to tell them, dystopian love and revenge as a system shock to those expecting something else. Late in the film, Chris Hemsworth’s giddy despot asks: “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) doesn’t respond, but Miller certainly does with a resounding “yes.”
In the verdant paradise of the Green Place, long-sunken by the time of Fury Road, Furiosa begins with a childhood flashback as the titular heroine (Alyla Browne) picks Edenic fruit from her world’s lone patch of vegetation. It isn’t before long that the future Imperator is abducted by a roving band of bike-bound savages, hell-bent on delivering Furiosa - and news of a fertile idyll - to their raving warlord: Dementus (Chris Hemsworth in his best role in years). The grown-up Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t even show her face until 45 minutes into the runtime, but Furiosa’s first act is all killer and no filler, belonging to Charlee Fraser - as Furiosa’s mother Mary - as she embarks upon a one-way rescue mission to retrieve her kidnapped daughter. However, even Mary’s rifle and her young daughter’s tacit determination aren’t enough to prevent the inevitable: Furiosa witnesses her own mother’s crucifixion as she swears revenge on the bloodthirsty villain responsible, launching her decades-long saga that ends with Fury Road.
“With Furiosa, George Miller forges his protagonist’s sizzling, magma rage into a new blade that is remarkably unlike Fury Road…”
With Furiosa, George Miller forges his protagonist’s sizzling, magma rage into a new blade that is remarkably unlike its 2015 counterpart: an elegiac tale of retribution that spills into the world that Fury Road - by design - never really bothered to explore nor explain. Scattered across the wasteland as pieces of a mournful tapestry, Furiosa drills into the very nature of stories themselves, almost fracturing its revenge tale into a dystopian anthology. More so interconnected vignettes ripped from the pages of 2000 AD than the straight octane action cinema of its predecessor, Miller’s daring prequel processes Furiosa’s deliverance through Bullet Farm and Gastown politics, a star-crossed romance, and pure Aussie mythmaking. There’s a purposeful, wanton disregard for continuity in Furiosa: the same movie that will painstakingly and digitally track Anya Taylor-Joy’s large almond eyes onto Alyla Browne’s face for fidelity will also cast the same actors in different roles and never bother aging down returning Fury Road characters. It tickles the brain to know that George Miller doesn’t give a shit about consistency, but his freestyle also strikes at the heart of Furiosa’s elegant metafiction: history is malleable, and legends are borne from the mouths of survivors.
If Fury Road is action nirvana, then Furiosa is action opera; George Miller has accomplished the near-impossible and crafted a movie so virtuostic and self-possessed - through its sprawling fable and simmering revenge - that it transfigures last decade’s apocalyptic pile-up masterpiece into a coda: Furiosa is the main course, Fury Road is dessert. Much of this is thanks to Anya Taylor-Joy, with teeth simultaneously grit and sharpened. Having the unenviable task of adding dimension to Charlize Theron’s lean and instantly iconic role from almost a decade earlier, Taylor-Joy imbues the character with the mythological zeal that would eventually harden for one final escape. Biding her time disguised as a disciple of Immortan Joe (Lacey Hulme, taking over for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), Furiosa precedes Fury Road’s platonic synergy with Tom Hardy’s Mad Max with the more romantic overtures of Praetorian Jack (a tenderly subdued Tom Burke), a kindred spirit in the Road War and the Citadel’s top driver. Her relationship with Jack forms the backbone of the film, anchoring the action setpieces - and inevitable tragedy - as the two take turns saving one another from the barbaric wasteland.
“If Fury Road is action nirvana, then Furiosa is action opera… a movie so virtuostic and self-possessed that it transfigures last decade’s apocalyptic pile-up masterpiece into a coda.”
It’s true that Furiosa operates in a mode completely different from what’s expected of it, but Miller consistently reminds us that he is still the architect behind one of the best action movies of all time. Exploding Fury Road’s aggressive, laser-like focus, Miller widens the gamut of spectacle; things in Furiosa aren’t quite the breakneck carnage of its precursor, but a more methodical chaos. A mid-film sequence - dubbed “Stowaway to Nowhere” - recaptures the Fury Road energy with aplomb as a group of paragliding marauders attack a convoy carrying Furiosa and Jack, but a second barn burner at the Bullet Farm - a shootout and sniper sequence - reveals just how extraordinary this movie really is: dozens of moving parts, precise formalism, and not a single move of the camera without clarity of purpose. Simon Duggan’s camerawork, along with the editing by Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel, is a powerful elixir you rarely see in action movies today.
Furiosa succeeds because of the fascinating contradiction at its core: the ability to steer clear of modern franchise pitfalls while still delivering at the peak of blockbuster craftsmanship. But George Miller doesn’t just sidestep the labored prequel traps of the current Hollywood zeitgeist, he obliterates them with a biblical self-awareness. It’s a fool’s game to reverse-engineer Fury Road’s once-in-a-lifetime propulsion and Miller knows it; instead, he opts to find the mythical, melancholy “guzzoline” required to power it. It’s not a big deal. All he had to do, at almost 80 years of age, is follow up one decade-defining masterwork with another.
