Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Miller, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Over the summer I read Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. It’s not an especially great offering in its own right (if Tarantino follows through on his threats to quit moviemaking and instead focuses on books, we may be looking at a Michael Jordan switching from basketball to golf-level error in judgement), but it nevertheless proved enlightening about the kinds of conditions that were required, and the artistic intent that went into, some of the best and most striking action, thriller and horror movies of the 1970s. At the time, budgets were lower, technology was coarser, and risk-taking was a more viable alleyway for commercial windfall. Directors like Walter Hill, Don Siegel and William Friedkin were setting the tone – in Australia, meanwhile, a young filmmaker named George Miller engineered Mad Max, a violent and scrappy low-budget thrill-ride, out of paperclips, muscle cars and sticky tape. 

Who could have predicted that it would be Max, of all these vivid, unforgettable action pictures, that would grow and grow into the enormous, game-changing action behemoth it is? A series with so strange and idiosyncratic a world, such cartoonishly named characters, and a tone best described as wildly Australian doesn’t necessarily seem like the vehicle for multiple knockouts and yet here we are with Furiosa, the prequel to the now-legendary Fury Road focusing on that film’s most remarkable character – the fiery and striking Furiosa as played by Charlize Theron. Miller’s world, a semi-irradiated post-apocalyptic desert wasteland filled with warped and disfigured psychopaths, is a surprisingly flexible beast, able to reconfigure itself into different shapes to suit the times in which it finds itself. From the exploitation-era original, through to the soaring, epic actioner that was The Road Warrior, the glossy ‘80s stadium piece that was Beyond Thunderdome, and the blistering, unforgettable apex that was Fury Road, the series always manages to look different, feel different, and yet remain undeniably Max no matter the era.

Australian auteur George Miller follows up his miraculous action masterpiece, Mad Max: Fury Road, with this stunning prequel about the film’s breakout character – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Though it may lack the sleek bombast of its predecessor, this sprawling, sombre effort bursts at the seams with jaw-dropping action sequences, elaborate worldbuilding, and a thrumming, heady miasma of rage.

The same is true of Furiosa, an astonishingly accomplished prequel that bears the DNA of Fury Road and yet, once again, finds itself shapeshifting into new imaginings. Here, the role of Furiosa is taken by Anya Taylor Joy, a promising young actress who hasn’t quite found a role (outside of, perhaps, The Queen’s Gambit) to match the sheer intensity of her work in The Witch back in 2015. It’s also portrayed in younger years by Australian actress Alyla Browne, whose face has been digitally altered to create a striking, seamless similarity to both Joy and Theron, just another remarkable example of this series’ consistent technical mastery – both practical and digital. Miller, 79, has long been a fearless and unswayable filmmaker, but the pressure is surely at its peak with this new film, which follows on from as certain an action masterpiece as the 21st Century has produced, a work of utterly ruthless, sleek design, a marvel of stunt-work, world-building and propulsive storytelling. Any film purporting to continue that story has one hell of a shadow to work beneath. 

Unlike many that would try to recreate the magic, however, Miller has instead opted for a different tack, creating a film that is slower (though that is a relative term here), yet more expansive, meditative, and profoundly uncompromising. Furiosa features plenty of chase scenes but is not crafted in the shape of a chase, as Fury Road was. Instead, Furiosa is closer to those works of the Seventies, films that took their time shaping the parameters of story and character to pack an emotional wallop in the third act. Furiosa is an epic in a classical sense, too, drawing on the likes of films like Gladiator and Ben-Hur, even Planet of the Apes, in its methodical pacing and rhythm. The film’s extended opening sequence, in which a young Furiosa is stolen from the mythical Green Place of her childhood by roving marauders, gives way to a lengthy pursuit scene, as Furiosa’s mother (a memorably stoic Charlee Fraser) tracks the marauders across the wasteland on a souped up motorcycle, carrying a sniper rifle to pick them off one-by-one. It is not a chase like the ones we see in Fury Road, trading the immediacy of the smash-em-ups of that film for a menacing, seat clawing distance, ratcheting the tension sky-high. It sets the scene for a darker, more brutal offering than the already dark, brutal Fury Road. We know that much horror and trauma will be meted out upon this young, flinty Furiosa to transform her into the grimacing warrior of that earlier film, but just how and when keeps us watching in mounting anxiety. 

Furiosa eventually finds herself in the hands of Dementus, a monstrous, charismatic warlord with a cult-like following who is desperate to discover the location of the Green Place in order to claim it for himself. Miller has cast Chris Hemsworth in the role, an actor too easily dismissed as a lunk-headed action muscle-mutt who, in the hands of the right director, reveals layers of vulnerability that are deeply compelling (Michael Mann’s Blackhat is the strongest of these offerings, but further evidence lies in films like Rush, Spiderhead and, of course, his appearance in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek). Hemsworth seems hungry to tear into a role of genuine complexity here, and his performance is among the film’s best. Clad in a cape, goggles and hawkish prosthetic nose, and wielding a truly authentic, nasal Australian accent, Hemsworth skirts up against the edge of hamminess, but locates a depth of sadness that keeps Dementus from becoming pure cartoon. Dementus, who carries around the teddy-bear of his long-dead child, is a different kind of monster to the other villains traversing the wasteland like Immortan Joe (who reappears here as a younger man) – he’s not a product of this environment, but a man who adapted to the world falling around him. A late-breaking sequence where Dementus oversees a hideous execution focuses almost exclusively on Hemsworth’s face, which seems to be tallying in real-time how much of his soul he’s losing moment-to-moment. Later, there’s a monologue sequence that exposes Dementus’ deep wells of sorrow, one of the highlights of Furiosa. 

Along the way, the film transforms from a story of survival at any cost to one of revenge, and much of the film’s emotional landscape plays out in the eyes of Joy, whose practically silent performance here stands out as one of her best. The horrors of Furiosa’s childhood calcify in the cruel savagery of the wasteland, to the point that new trauma manifests not in expressions of sadness or pain, but in momentary flickers across that unforgettable visage. The sequence in which Furiosa loses her arm in a shocking and brutal way is striking for just how little of a reaction it gets from the woman herself – after all she’s been through, it’s just another day in hell. The story’s progression fills in the expected blanks that were tantalising unknowns in the world of Fury Road – like how Furiosa came to be Immortan Joe’s War Rig driver, for instance – but where Furiosa stands apart in the unsteady realm of the prequel is in the way it deepens the world in ways unexpected but which reveal new layers to the film that came before. One of the most profound is the tragic romance that blossoms between Furiosa and Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a War Rig driver with more than a passing resemblance to Mad Max’s whole deal. The trust that grows between Furiosa and Max in Fury Road, we come to understand, is the result of the tenderness of Jack and the care he showed to Furiosa, a new, heartbreaking context that rewards Furiosa a spine-tingling tinge of poeticism.

It’s probably to be expected that Furiosa, a film packed with astonishing action sequences but which operates in a different emotional register and pitch to the film most people associate this series with, may be met with disappointment by some. Rather than a paltry retread, Miller has instead chosen to create a companion piece, one that echoes Fury Road in fascinating ways but which has other intentions in mind. Whatever comes next for Miller, and for Max (and Miller has already teased a further instalment) will likely be another reinvention, a reshaping borne of twisted metal, shiny and chrome. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas now. 

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