Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Review – Wasteland, Want Not

Finally, they found all the plot parts that were missing from Mad Max: Fury Road.

That’s not intended to sound facetious, although if what you liked about Fury Road was its relative lack of characterization and plot, you may take it that way. Critics and commentators often insist that it’s bad form to call a film “overrated,” because to do so is implicitly questioning the motives and judgment of people who have just as much right to their opinions as anyone. That said, it’s been mighty lonely thinking that Fury Road was neither God’s gift to pure cinema nor an ultimate masterpiece of action that shows the rest of the peons how it should be done. Sure, the choreography and the aesthetics were great, but the characters were barely there, and the villain dispatched so quickly and offhandedly you need freeze-frame to catch it.

Missing: Inaction

For those of us in that club, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga provides everything that felt previously absent, except maybe a personality for Tom Hardy’s Max, who’s not a factor here. It’s all of the world-building and motivation you need leading up to the events of Fury Road; a story that clearly already existed in creator George Miller‘s head, but required a hit proof-of-concept first, since its canvas is significantly larger.

Side note: yes, again Mad Max remains a franchise that ought to be insanely marketable and action figure-ready, yet rarely licensed for such. Midway through Furiosa, there’s a setpiece that all but screams out for a LEGO set it will never get. Probably.

If Fury Road had you wishing we could actually visit Gas Town and Bullet Farm, now you can. If it never quite made sense how a rebellious feminist like Furiosa (Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy, replacing Charlize Theron) ended up in the service of a repulsive abuser like Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, replacing the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), now it will. You arguably never needed to know she might have a thing for guys in leather jackets with shoulder pads, but that’s part of her origin story too. Theron arguably has more star presence, but Taylor-Joy is given a lot more to work with.

Nuclear Family Values

Following a similar intro to Fury Road, with disaster audio clips and nuclear test footage, Furiosa begins in the Green Place before its destruction, an incongruous ecotopia in the middle of nuclear desolation, complete with modern windmills and solar panels that would look more at a home on a Microsoft campus than in a Mad Max movie. Young Furiosa discovers some skull-masked biker intruders, and gets hauled away, with her mother in hot pursuit. Nobody can know where the Green Place is, or inevitably the scum of the Earth will descend upon it. Alas, we’ve seen the story that comes next, lending the whole adventure a layer of fatalism that adds to the apocalyptic ambience like never before.

Furiosa’s origins are surprisingly similar to She-Ra’s, setting the bar quite high if that movie ever gets made. She’s kidnapped and adopted young by an evil horde, raised by a warlord as his daughter, and caught in an uneasy peace between him and a skull-faced warrior who lives in a monstrous mountain. George Miller’s the wrong generation to be a Princess of Power fan, so thankfully Mad Max doesn’t turn out to be her secret twin. Her taste in vehicles and guns, however, runs strangely parallel to his (which is probably just Miller’s).

Thunder Road Warrior

The movie is divided by intertitles into chapter headings, which help denote the passage of time between young Furiosa and young-adult Furiosa, the latter of whom polishes her survival skills under the handsome, Max-like Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who discovers she’s a woman disguised as a boy, and doesn’t take advantage. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing between the three primary leaders of the wasteland: Joe at the Citadel, The People Eater (John Howard) at Bullet Farm, and Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the biker leader who abducted young Furiosa and took control of Gas Town.

Dementus is a new kind of Mad Max foe, who’s destructive but uncharacteristically needy. Giving lip service to a more egalitarian society, he too easily loses control in the social Darwinist wastelands by not being as dictatorial as he could be. Hemsworth clearly revels in no longer having to be a godly hero, making Dementus appropriately, well, demented, while character actors from Fury Road like Howard, Nathan Jones, and Angus Sampson get more to do. Burke is in some ways the unexpected heart, and would probably have made a better Max replacement actor than Tom Hardy.

Balls to the Walls

Though there are plenty of the expected vehicle clashes throughout, the biggest action setpiece isn’t held until the climax this time, but rather the midpoint of the movie, leaving the ending for more personal stakes. By then, Miller trusts us to care enough about the characters and their personal issues that he can therefore trust the actors more than their equipment to tell his story. This is especially important when one of them gives a speech about how emotionally numbing bigger and bigger action escapades can be, which feels as mildly incongruous as James Cameron preaching world peace in the Terminator movies. With full hindsight, though, it also helps defend the sudden demise of Immortan Joe in Fury Road.

Like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome more than The Road Warrior, Furiosa offers a much wider glimpse of a world that could go in any direction from here — after it goes in the obvious one via Fury Road, of course. It’s an unapologetically R-rated realm, full of enough crucifixions and tortures to make Mel Gibson regret he’s no longer part of it, the deadliest “truck nuts” ever, and characters who make declarations like “I am Scrotus!” In some ways it’s ridiculously adolescent, but it puts on such a show that there’s little time to let that sink in too far. Mercifully, Miller remembered this time that spectacle alone can be bludgeoning if we don’t care about any of the folks being crushed under-wheel — like Cameron, he always was better at the sequels.

2 Film 2 Furiosa

Furiosa leads very directly into Fury Road, and one suspects that a combined edit, or double-feature, might yield even more satisfaction than the sum of its parts. The final credits simply tease Fury Road highlights, daring you to pop the disc back in the moment you get home. Even a mild cynic on it like me is tempted to do that right now, and that’s just how good Furiosa is.

Grade: 5/5

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens in theaters May 24th.