To answer the question that most anyone even vaguely interested in seeing Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment in George Miller’s long-running and highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic film franchise—no, it is not better than Mad Max: Fury Road, the film that brought the series out of dormancy with a jaw-dropping, award-winning epic that was deemed one of the greatest action films ever made by both critics and audiences alike from practically the moment it hit theaters in 2015. That said, it comes closer to topping that one, both in terms of wild ambition and technical execution, than anything else that has appeared since its release and it doesn’t miss the mark by that much. This is pop cinema at its grandest—a work so thrilling and audacious and confident in its moves that when it is all over, you will find yourself alternating between feeling exhilaration regarding the astonishing sights you have just witnessed and vague resentment that most other over-the-top cinematic spectacles hitting theaters these days are unwilling/unable to demonstrate even a fraction of the originality and vision that Miller has consistently demonstrated in these films from as far back as the groundbreaking 1979 original.
As you can presumably guess from the title, with this film, Miller has completely shifted his focus from Max, the character who was at the center of the previous entries but who remains all but completely absent here, to Furiosa, the one-armed driver/warrior that, as played by Charlize Theron, became an instantly iconic figure in the annals of action cinema. From the moment she first appeared on the screen in that film, she came across as an almost mythical creation and Furiosa essentially show us the creation of that myth. In a narrative spanning roughly 15 years and broken up into several distinct sections, we bear witness as Furiosa evolves from a young, though not at all helpless, young girl to the steely-eyed badass who was the heart, soul and spine of Fury Road. You might think that because the film is a prequel to Fury Road, the amount of originality and excitement on display might be tempered slightly by the fact that the story, by necessity, has to evolve in a certain way in order to properly fit in alongside its predecessor. You would be wrong.
When we first see Furiosa (in the form of Alyla Brown), she is a girl who, along with a similarly young companion, is picking fruit from a tree that is one of the very few examples of greenery on display in the entire saga. This is the area that would be referenced in Fury Road as The Green Place—a rare place of abundance in a world where everything else has been reduced to what feels like one unending stretch of desolate desert. Alas, this moment of bucolic peace is short-lived as Furiosa is snatched by bikers and while both she and her pursuing mother (Charlee Frazer) both put up a hell of fight, she ends up being enslaved by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), one of the numerous warlords battling for control of the Wasteland and its three key outposts—Gastown, Bullet Farm and the Citadel, the slave labor camp under the control of the vile Immortan Joe (Lacey Hulme) that we saw in Fury Road. Dementus certainly lives up to his name—with his preening pomposity, he combines the worst qualities of a cult leader and a professional wrestler—but beyond all the bluster and self-regard, even he can recognize that Furiosa is something special and takes her on as a sort of protege as well as a symbolic replacement for his own long-lost children.
As part of a deal between Dementus and Immortan Joe, Furiosa is passed on to the latter and when the story picks up again years later, she (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy) distinguishes herself when she disguises herself as a War Boy and gets on a War Rig (the massive armored truck that she would pilot herself in Fury Road) being driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). When the rig is attacked—in the film’s extended action centerpiece—Furiosa more than proves her mettle and an impressed Jack agrees to teach her everything that he knows. Over time, Jack becomes her mentor and possibly the only person outside of her mother with whom she has forged a genuine emotional relationship. However, the only thing that truly drives Furiosa is another confrontation with the man who took away her mother and when she does once again gave Dementus, the results are suitable brutal and hair-raising in equal measure.
George Miller kicked off his directorial career with the original Mad Max and has directed (or co-directed, as in the case of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) every one of the subsequent entries in the franchise. Although he could have easily just gone the lazy way out and made sequels that offered up rehashes of what had worked before, each film has seen him pushing his justifiably famous chase sequences to heretofore unimaginable levels of wildness while at the same time building and expanding upon both the post-apocalyptic world that he has created as well as the people populating it. This is obviously challenging enough by itself but in creating Furiosa, Miller has two additional obstacles to face—the fact that Fury Road was such a towering achievement that it seemed impossible that anyone, even Miller himself, could ever hope to come close to equaling it and the fact that, unlike any of the previous films, he was locked into a narrative that could theoretically go in any number of unexpected directions but had to end in such a way that it could properly lead into the Furiosa storyline in Fury Road.
Although the film does fill in a few of the blanks left tantalizingly open in Fury Road (such as the existence of the so-called “Green Place” and the alternately gruesome and badass circumstances surrounding the loss of Furiosa’s arm), Miller manages to avoid the aforementioned hurdles by making a film that manages to fit in nicely with the established parameters of the series but which still manages to stand as its own individual thing.
Perhaps realizing that even he could not sustain the 2 hours of relentless, kinetic excitement of its predecessor and live to tell the tale, Miller has taken a new approach to the material that might frustrate those looking for another Fury Road but which brings a new energy to the proceedings. Unlike the previous films, which pretty much all took place within relatively compressed time frames, the narrative here is a series of stories set over a span of about 15 years, each of which could have been expanded into their own full-length films, that collectively serve to show how Furiosa—both the woman and the myth—came to be. Basing a narrative around the very nature of storytelling itself is something that Miller explored in his previous film, the criminally neglected Three Thousand Years of Longing, and in many ways, that one can be seen almost as a test run for what he is trying to accomplish here. And yet, because Miller is genuinely interested and invested in the character of Furiosa, the backstory that he supplies for her throughout the course of the film is always interesting and builds upon our knowledge of her without ever coming across like empty fanboy servicing, which is always a danger when it comes to prequels.
While the dramatic scenes and character development are both nicely handled, it is during the big action beats that things literally go into overdrive. Considering the astonishing array of kinetic action sequences that he has created over the years (not just in the Mad Max films—recall his version of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” that he did for Twilight Zone: The Movie that was a master class in the art of building and maintaining tension), it almost seems too much to ask Miller to live up to his previously established standards, let alone try to top those accomplishments. Nevertheless, Miller, aided by the invaluable contributions of cinematographer Simon Duggan, editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel, a presumed army of stunt performers and yes, the occasional deployment of CGI augmentation, has not dropped the ball here at all and the action scenes are as thrilling and jaw-dropping as ever. The high point is the central sequence in which the War Rig being driven by Jack and with Furiosa hanging from its undercarriage, is attacked by a seemingly endless array of warriors, a number of whom wind up attacking from above via parachutes guided by giant fans.
Strictly taken on a technical level, the sequence (which clocks in at around 15 minutes, not that you will be looking at your watch at any second during it) is a breathless wonder—the kind of sequence that will amaze even the most jaded of moviegoers with the amount of excitement and ingenuity packed into that quarter-hour. However, the reason that the scene works as more than just a mere stunt sequence (albeit one that puts anything from that ostensible love letter to the stunt industry, The Fall Guy, to shame) is because Miller has invested so much time, energy and care into creating and developing Furiosa as a character that we become equally invested in her as she tries to make her way up to the truck’s cab while hurtling at top speeds and being attacked from all sides—we know that she will make it, of course, but thanks to Miller’s careful approach, we are still fully invested in what she is doing throughout. Needless to say, this is not the kind of movie that you want to hold off on until it comes to streaming—this is the kind of grand-scale cinematic event that deserves to be experienced on the biggest screen possible in order to fully appreciate the magnificently choreographed chaos that Miller & Co. have packed into virtually every scene.
Another reason why we care so much about Furiosa and her journey here comes from the performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, a turn that is far tricker than it might seem at first glance. In Fury Road, Charlize Theron so fully embodied the character of Furiosa that the idea of anyone, even an actress as gifted and compelling as Taylor-Joy, could step into her shoes seemed like an impossibility. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of this hurdle, Miller keeps Taylor-Joy on the sidelines for the first 45 minutes or so while charting Furiosa’s painful childhood and her early relationship with Dementus (Alyla Brown is quite good in these scenes as the younger iteration) but when she finally does appear on the scene, it proves to be more than worth the wait. Her performance is fascinating because while it does dovetail with a number of the things that Theron did with her take on the character, Taylor-Joy manages to make the role her own as well with a turn that brings a certain touch of humanity and vulnerability to the character (especially during her scenes with Praetorian Jack, a relationship that does not develop along the expected lines and is all the better for it) while remaining fiercely and frighteningly convincing during the big action beats. She is not necessarily playing the Furiosa that we know from Fury Road but through her smart, thoughtful and quietly nuanced work (which is all the more impressive when you consider that she says so few lines of dialogue over the course of the film that she makes Charles Bronson seem like a chatterbox by comparison), we can get a sense of how that Furiosa came to be.
Just as impressive as Taylor-Joy, albeit in a wildly different direction, is Chris Hemsworth as Dementus. Although blessed with the looks and build of an action hero ideal, he is someone who has done some of his best screen work when allowed to demonstrate his considerable flair for comedy. (Recall how he was kind of a stiff in his early goings as Thor until the decision was made to loosen the character up.) With Dementus, he has a role that allows him to indulge in his ability to get laughs without ever letting you forget that the character is also one of unapologetic and unrestrained menace. Like the film as a whole, his performance may seem at first glance to be unapologetically over-the-top with his ranting and raving, not to mention his undeniably unique stab at pronouncing the word “piquant,” but it contains surprising degrees of subtlety as well. Although Dementus is undeniably and unapologetically evil, Hemsworth has some quieter moments as well that let us get a sense of both the person that they used to be before the downfall of society and the journey that they went through in order to become who they are. As the film builds towards its inevitable climax, you will almost certainly be in Furiosa’s camp but, thanks to Hemsworth’s work, you will also feel an odd pang of sympathy for Dementus as well.
Furiosa clocks in at nearly 2 1/2 hours but as far as I can tell, the only time it steps wrong comes at the very end, when Miller officially connects its narrative with that of Fury Road, offering up a judiciously-edited highlight reel of some of that film’s most memorable moments. Those bits are great, I admit, but the inclusion of them is somewhat distracting—it is kind of the same effect that you get when you watch a biopic of a famous figure and then the film includes footage of the actual person at the very end, a move that almost always ends up undermining the performance that preceded it. That flaw aside—and my guess is that most audience members will be so shaken, stirred, and thrilled with what they have seen that they will hardly register it—Furiosa is a beautiful, bruising spectacle that is not to be missed. Unlike so many blockbuster epics of late, you never get the sense that you are watching the kind of filmed deal that is more interested in selling Happy Meals than in stirring the souls and imaginations of viewers. It is a symphony of deftly controlled chaos conducted by a man who has the rare ability to tell stories that are epic in their scope and ambition but strikingly personal and intimate when it comes to the emotional beats. With the summer movie derby kicking into high gear this weekend, there will be a lot of films—mostly big-ticket items—that will be hitting multiplexes between now and Labor Day. Some of them will hopefully be good, some of them will be disappointing and some of them will no doubt be unspeakably awful. However, when all is said and done, my guess is that Furiosa is the one that people will be remembering and coming back to for a long time to come.