George Miller Continues to Prove His Mad Genius with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Shout out to Pissboy, Scrotus, Erectus, and all the rest of my friends in the wasteland.
“As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?”
This is the question seemingly asked of the audience at the start of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, writer/director George Miller’s long-gestating prequel to his bonkers reimagining of his own Mad Max franchise Mad Max: Fury Road. In that film, Max Rocktansky crosses paths with Imperator Furiosa—one of the lieutenants of warlord Immortan Joe who presides over the Citadel with his army—who is mounting an escape mission with Joe’s Five Wives back to her homeland known as The Green Place, which would be one of the last vestiges of prosperity within Miller’s hopeless post-apocalypse, if it were still enduring.
Of course, that turns out to not be the case, leading to the now-iconic shot of Charlize Theron as the embittered warrior on her knees in the sand, desperately crying out in her grief in sorrow for what she’s lost. There’s a whole world built around Furiosa’s past and the inhumanities she’s been stricken with in Fury Road, from the loss of her home, to her missing arm, to her desperation to save the women Immortan Joe has forcibly taken as wives in a bid to produce a healthy heir. In Furiosa, the character’s traumas and afflictions are excavated, taking us through the steps it takes for a young girl snatched up from her flourishing home of women to survive in a wasteland of marauders and inbred, brutalizing men.
But everything in Furiosa goes back to that beginning question. That is to say, this is not the non-stop, propulsive ride of unrestrained action set-pieces in the same way that Fury Road was. It’s not meant to be. How foolish Miller would have to be to try and recreate the same lightning-in-a-bottle, revved-up punch of the best action film of the century. To directly compare Furiosa and Fury Road feels inevitable but also like an exercise in futility, one that will leave you constantly expecting something that Miller won’t provide you. Certainly, Furiosa has its own share of breakneck, audacious vehicular mayhem and full-throttle stunt work, and its worldbuilding is right in line with the strange visions of inhumanity that Miller inhabited Fury Road with. But he returns to the wasteland with a more somber undercurrent riding beneath the disorder than before, eulogizing a world that existed before its downfall to tyrants and warlords. It may be the Mad Max movie that’s most actively wrestled with the world at the current moment of its release.
In this approach, Furiosa takes shape as a feminist death dream, told as a messy, indulgent, multi-chapter revenge opera, fueled by explosions and covered in gasoline and war paint. Contrary to the eruptive momentum of Fury Road, Furiosa finds its power within the sorrow and anger behind the eyes of its largely silent protagonist, out for a very personal revenge that nonetheless acts as a stand-in for a much bigger quandary: the death of all good things in the world by brutish men of savagery. It’s Miller at his most grandiose, and occasionally at his most haphazard and erratic. It’s also excellent, and a prime example of a prequel that takes care to honor the legacy of the beloved material it's building off of while creating its own entire contained universe of compelling conflict and character building. Also, there’s a guy named Pissboy in it. He pisses.
Doled out in five distinct chapters, Furiosa’s odyssey begins with her as a child, portrayed by Alyla Browne. She’s plucked up from her sanctuary by a crew of bandits, escorting her via motorbike to their outpost out in the desert while getting picked off one by one by her mother (Charlee Fraser), in pursuit with a sniper rifle in a subdued but striking chase sequence that highlights Miller’s ability to make even a simple extended tracking scene into the stuff of exhilaration. Soon enough she’s in the hands of clan leader Dementus, portrayed by Chris Hemsworth whose performance could maybe be described as warlord Jack Sparrow (it’s refreshing to see Hemsworth really going for it having been unshackled from the restrictive chains of the MCU).
She’s traded hands again when Dementus attempts a failed takeover of Immortan Joe’s (Lachy Hulme assumes the role from Hugh Keays-Byrne who passed away several years ago) Citadel, who nonetheless agrees to allow Dementus to take ownership over the territory of Gastown in exchange for his participation in the shipments of the valuable guzzolene back to the Citadel, and also on the condition that Joe can take Furiosa and house her with the other women he uses as breeders, hopeful that one day she’ll make a worthwhile wife herself. Furiosa is still very young but quick-witted and keen enough to know that accepting such a fate is to resign herself to a life of torment, so she shaves her head and passes as a male, going to work with all the other War Boys on the more perilous tasks that come with running a war brigade at the end of society.
It’s nearly a full hour before Alyla Browne morphs into Anya Taylor-Joy, having masqueraded as a mute man for well over a decade, waiting for the right opportunity to make a break for it. When she finally does, she finds herself paired with the more morally righteous rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who agrees to teach her the ways of becoming a road warrior, and eventually positions her for revenge against Dementus, as he continues mounting an ineffectual attempt for his takeover of Joe’s empire.
Whereas Fury Road was a bare-bones there-and-back-again affair of light plotting and constant action, a full-blown chase movie—not dissimilar from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior—Furiosa is an entirely new beast: a decades-spanning saga detailing the emotional and situational plight of this one character at the fall of the world, much higher on plot detail and with denser world-building. The cracks occasionally show in Miller’s construction of this story. He seems to have a fickle relationship with time as events progress, as several major developments occur either with a break to the next chapter, a simple cut, or in one instance, a montage and voice-over narration that explains the events of a major battle the film was seemingly building to. Furiosa’s relationship with Jack is similarly more of something you’re meant to glean the gist of rather than being offered a film’s worth of development for their friendship, and even the meat of her rivalrous relationships with both Dementus and Joe can sometimes get lost within the way Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris try to compress the dense enormity of Furiosa’s journey within the span of the runtime.
And yet, that quality is merely a byproduct of Miller’s monumental vision of magnificent anarchy. He leans into every spare idea he can imagine and continues to prove himself as one of the best action directors to ever grace the silver screen in the process. If Furiosa can occasionally feel a little all over the place, it's because it's being broadcast straight from the psyche of a wonderful madman.
Too much commentary about how different this is from Fury Road is sure to disquiet that film’s fans but, for as much of a swing structure and story-wise Furiosa is, its sense of setting and atmosphere is so of a piece with Fury Road that they could have been filmed at the same time. Not only do you have the return of the likes of the War Boys, Immortan Joe’s bureaucratic cronies, general creeps and freaks—and some other notable faces best left unmentioned—but it’s the over-the-top action sequences and stunt work laid bare across Miller and cinematographer Simon Duggan’s canvas that will have you floating out of your seat like its 2015 again. A shipping rig battle that involves paragliders launched off of motorcycles, a monster truck chase across the sands, cars crushed, demolished, and destroyed in various methods of pandemonium—Miller’s vision of the end times often takes the form of a demolition rally. The CGI integration into the location and stunt work is sometimes more forward here than before, but that just gives Furiosa its own cinematic flavor, further amplifying the ludicrousness of life at the end of the world.
Among everything, Taylor-Joy is the element that breathes the soul into the spectacle. She commits herself fully to a role that’s nearly all physicality, bearing the atrocities she has endured across her face and imbuing that fury into her actions. She locates that persona of buried sorrow and subdued ferocity that Theron had established in Fury Road and makes it her own, giving Furiosa an aura of formidable and fearsome prowess. Her leverage over Dementus is almost laughable, but I would reckon that to be the point: a feeble, feckless man out to destroy anything and take over everything, and feeling like he’s important enough to do so. As Furiosa stands over him—head shaved, dirt covered, and far beyond offering forbearance—the idea of making those responsible for suffering pay their dues seems to bear mighty fine fruit.