Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
“As the world falls around us, how must we bear its cruelties?”
These are the first words uttered in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. We hear them over footage of nuclear fallout and societal collapse. You know, a post apocalypse prologue. We’re used to them by now. But where most films about what comes after the apocalypse tend to focus on humanity rising from the ashes of the old to create some semblance of a new society, Miller’s action epic never lets us forget that initial question. It haunts every frame like a ghost. Furiosa stands as a prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, arguably the greatest action film ever made. It’s so successful at what it does that it’s easy to forget of the fact that it too takes place after the collapse of mankind and people only really survive through savagery. Furiosa is a reminder that no matter how popular movies, tv, and video games about the post apocalypse get, the setting and subject matter is far from cool. This is a film about people living at the end of the line where death is the only future.
The film begins with young Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne) kidnapped by a group of Dementus’s (a perfectly hammy Chris Hemsworth) motorcycle marauders, who are then chased by her mother (Charlee Fraser), a member of a matriarchal tribe. Intending not just to save her daughter but also to make sure no outsiders learn of the Green Place, the tribe’s verdant little oasis, Mom takes the riders out one by one. What makes this early chase so striking is the way Miller presents it as a relay race of dwindling resources: Everyone constantly scrambles to conserve what they have, transferring fuel tanks from one bike to another as soon as one rider goes down. Everything in this movie is always on the verge of running out and dying out.
This was a key idea behind the earlier Mad Max pictures, particularly 1981’s The Road Warrior, which unfolded as a terse thriller about people fighting over their last drops of gas and water. The first Mad Max film focuses on the very beginnings of societal breakdown. Even before things are at their absolute worst Max tragically loses his family. Miller uses the loss of close loved ones to signal the end times which widens the scope of Mad Max from personal tragedy to one about all of society losing a worthwhile future. Now, in relating the story of Furiosa’s coming-of-age — first as a prized captive of Dementus, next as a potential bride for Immortan Joe (the villain of Fury Road, here played by Lachy Hulme, in slightly younger, less pustule-filled form), then as an apprentice to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), one of the Immortan’s War Rig drivers — Miller finds another personal angle on his postapocalyptic saga. Until now, the characters in these films have arrived mostly fully formed, their minds and attitudes shaped by this dead world. In Furiosa, however, we watch a bright, young innocent lose everything that has ever meant anything to her, and her heart hardens. Watching this version of the character, we can understand why Miller recast her, beyond mere issues of age. Fury Road star Charlize Theron’s tough, quiet confidence has here been replaced by Taylor-Joy’s anxious watchfulness. We see Furiosa go from a scrappy fighter just trying to survive to a more calculating figure, hellbent on revenge. Theron’s performance will still be the yardstick, but it’s hard not to be moved by Taylor-Joy’s transformation.
Miller’s work (including his non-Max films) has often featured characters trying to find, or maintain, surrogate families. Dementus makes bizarre gestures toward the same, treating Furiosa with a bizarre mixture of paternalism and savagery. Hemsworth plays him as a peacocking incompetent, which in most movies would drain the character of danger. But in the Mad Max universe, such buffoonery is often a prelude to unspeakable evil. All this adds to the pall of hopelessness that hangs over the movie as we absorb the lessons of the wasteland along with our growing heroine.
That’s not to say that Furiosa isn’t thrilling in its own right. Action sequences charge forward and build and build, casually leaving all manner of bodies in their wake. Miller still tosses in his beloved bits of makeshift technology — attack gliders with propellers, parachutists on skates, chariots made of motorcycles, the works. The director also indulges his fondness for yarn-spinning, as he did in his previous film, the much-maligned but masterful Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), which fused A.S. Byatt and the Thousand and One Nights into a nesting doll of interconnected myths. With its use of disguises, its fanciful depiction of the passage of time, and the fabulistic shorthand with which it portrays certain characters, the occasionally episodic Furiosa feels of a piece with that earlier movie.
So, what will people think? The look of the film has a storybook quality that might bother those viewers who like to complain about fake-looking visual effects. To be clear, Furiosa looks fantastic. It also looks fantastical: The endless stretches of desert, the forbidding fortresses rising out of dead expanses, the raging sandstorms that turn characters into hazy Turner-smudges — none of these seem particularly real because, surely, they were never supposed to. Who knows what this will mean for the movie’s box-office fortunes, the kind of conversation our own apocalyptic discourse demands nowadays. This wouldn’t be the first time Miller has taken a big franchise sequel and turned it into something strange, sublime, and potentially off-putting. He is, after all, the man who almost ended an entire Hollywood studio with Babe: Pig in the City. Still, whether the new movie is deemed a hit or not, it’s nice to know that, after all these years, George Miller seems determined to stay true to his mad self.
