Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
★★★★½
“The darkest of angels. The fifth rider of the apocalypse.”
George Miller gifted the world the greatest action film ever constructed with “Mad Max: Fury Road” — a propulsive, metal-spitting feature-length car chase of operatic proportions, in which a manic red-jumpsuit-clad guitarist named the Doof Warrior shreds a fire-breathing double-necked electric guitar atop a monster truck retrofitted with a wall of speakers. How do you top that? The greatest accomplishment of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — Miller’s electric prequel origin to Charlize Theron’s iconic character — is that it doesn’t, rather, it retroactively makes “Fury Road” even better than it already was.
Tracing the story of Furiosa (Alyla Browne/Anya Taylor-Joy) from childhood, when she is torn from her family and home by the twisted warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), through to how we initially met her as Imperator to the vicious Immortan Joe (played here by Lachy Hulme), Miller’s sprawling tale forges a path of fire and vengeance for Furiosa against all who have done her wrong.
Where “Fury Road” ripped across the screen with the roar of a thousand engines, a relentless thrill-a-second action showcase, “Furiosa” operates on a register closer to a great Biblical epic. Honed in on a central figure but widely encompassing in its vast scope, Miller’s prequel world-builds and myth-makes with jaw-dropping intensity and scale. The story covers ground across decades, traversing the wasteland from the Bullet Farm to Gastown with the reverence usually only afforded to real ancient empires. The characters that orbit Furiosa’s story come in and out of the film unexpectedly; like folklore passed down across generations, these characters possess a similar larger-than-life glow. Even Miller’s wonderful choice to split the film into five titled chapters only accentuates its unconventionality, its near-religious worship of the barren wasteland and the metal gods that streak across its horizons.
The action is sparser; influenced by action flicks of the sixties and seventies, the film enjoys laying the foundation of story and character to give the eventual release of violence and carnage even more weight. Moments of vehicular intensity are sprinkled throughout, but Miller notably gives long stretches of the runtime to conversation, to war meetings and negotiations. There’s a methodical, considered approach to contextualizing each of the core action set pieces, and through this, the film truly does feel born from a different time. Much more so than its predecessor, “Furiosa” feels in its rhythm and pace and careful unravellings like precisely how Miller would have made it had he done it in the seventies.
When the action does strike, though, it is magnificent. A euphoric, thunderous sequence in the middle of the film follows an assault on the War Rig, defectors of Dementus pursuing the hulking machine and the accompanying War Boys with motorcycles, flaming spears and rattling gunfire. Vehicles collide, spraying car parts like metallic intestines across the desert. Pursuers hang-glide off the back of their bikes, circling the Rig like vultures to swoop up War Boys. I wanted to leap out of my seat. Another sequence sees Furiosa and her ally Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) circling the mayhem at the Bullet Farm during a surprise assault. Fire engulfs the screen, crumbling structures crash into one another. No one does it like George Miller.
The sheer visual audacity is arresting. “Furiosa” is vibrant, colourful, striking. Forged in blood and chrome, built from metal, drenched in gasoline. There’s such expressionism in how Miller visualizes the wasteland — a strange, tragic beauty. The film’s extensive VFX work (for how tangibly real most of the film’s stunts and sets are, naturally, visual-effects work is still present) is bright and garish in an effectively stylized way, lending a hyperreality to the insanity on display. There are some unbelievable transitions here, as well. I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. A young Furiosa witnesses the most traumatic event of her young life, and the camera lets us view it in the reflection of her iris, before we transition through her pupil into the next scene. My cheeks hurt from grinning.
And then there’s Anya Taylor-Joy. She imbues Furiosa with something distinctly her own, bringing unspoken complexity and nuance to a role she inherits not just from Charlize Theron but also from the young Alyla Browne, who portrays the character through the film’s first hour. But at times, the most noteworthy aspect of Taylor-Joy’s performance is purely the bewildering accuracy with which she channels Theron’s physicality and vocal intonations. “I need a vehicle,” she commands to a group of mechanics in the Citadel. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got Theron herself to dub the line over. Meanwhile, Chris Hemsworth channels an old-timey carnival barker in a gloriously unhinged performance as Dementus. He’s endlessly watchable, and any time he’s not on screen his absence is deeply felt. His expressivity plays beautifully against Taylor-Joy’s interiority, and the sense of free-play Hemsworth is exploring as a performer is infectious.
Ultimately, the greatest strength of “Furiosa” is that it is not simply a good prequel, or even that it is one of the greatest prequels ever made. What’s most impressive is that it is so its own beast that it doesn't feel like a prequel at all. It makes “Fury Road” a retroactive sequel. It deepens and enriches every facet of one of the greatest films of all time, while serving on its own merits as a jaw-dropping epic of fantasy action. A breathtaking cacophony of grumbling, sputtering engines; a cinematic feast of practical stuntwork and spectacular visual imagination; a textured exploration of the most instantly-iconic action movie character of the twenty-first century. Remember her, indeed.