Furiosa is a leaner, meaner Mad Max story

Fury Road jolted the Mad Max franchise back to life with concentrated doses of high-octane, practically produced spectacle ripped directly out of director George Miller’s twisted imagination. The film framed its titular hero as more of an idea than a man and, by doing so, created space for one of Miller’s most riveting new characters to shine. 

Furiosa: A Mad Mad Saga — Warner Bros’ new Fury Road prequel — attempts a similar kind of mythologization as it jumps back in time to a point when green things still grew in the apocalypse. Compared to Fury Road’s deranged bombast, Furiosa feels like a leaner, more artfully realized vision of raw humanity struggling to survive in spite of itself. But the new film has a tendency to treat its namesake as the fulcrum around which a story is happening instead of someone participating in it, which is a shame considering how she’s the big draw.

Whereas previous Mad Max films have essentially been snapshots from a war-torn future, Furiosa chronicles the entire young adulthood of Furiosa (Alyla Browne in flashbacks and Anya Taylor-Joy closer to the present), one of the last people to know what it was like to grow up in the fabled Green Place of Many Mothers. Furiosa is just one of many kids able to truly thrive in the Green Place thanks to its natural abundance (read: fresh food and water) and relative seclusion within the treacherous Australian wasteland. But for all the safety Furiosa feels in her early years, she’s also keenly aware of how tenuous that security is. When her people are ultimately attacked by raiders, she knows the Green Place’s survival in secrecy hinges on the outsiders’ deaths.

By opening Furiosa in the Green Place and foregrounding it as the environment that first shaped Furiosa herself, Miller establishes early on how interested he is in using this film to illustrate the durability of ideas. As Furiosa’s snatched away from her idyllic home and enslaved by sadistic warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the film spotlights how life in the wasteland can turn people into their most monstrous selves. But Furiosa’s memories of the Green Place, and its impact on how she sees the world, are part of what make her so well-suited to deal with the outside horrors.

Whereas Fury Road often felt like a gasoline and piss-soaked lucid dream punctuated with guitar riffs and the roar of flamethrowers, Furiosa unfolds much more like a stage play told in bookended acts that all crystalize how Furiosa became a warrior. Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris emphasize the importance of Furiosa’s perceptiveness as the film fleshes out the cast of weatherbeaten ghouls who serve Dementus. These include The History Man (George Shevtsov) and interpretive dance proclaimer Smeg (David Collins). Though none of Dementus’ goons can make sense of why the enslaved girl won’t speak, through them, she’s able to learn what it means to live among predatory strongmen who harness fear as a weapon.

It’s interesting to see more of Max Max’s dystopian world from the perspective of Dementus’ gang — a band of motorcycle-riding maniacs who frequently turn on one another both out of spite and necessity. 

Though Furiosa can’t initially perceive it, there’s a distinct difference between the cultures of Dementus’ horde and that of the Citadel where Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) rules his fanatic War Boys and enforcers like Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). In Praetorian Jack, you can see shades of Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky, which brings a narrative poetry to the larger Furiosa story Miller has been telling with the franchise’s last two films. But from the moment Furiosa meets Dementus, you can almost immediately hear Miller and Lathouris struggling to lock in on what kind of presence they want their mad biker king to be.

Similar to Fury Road’s Immortan Joe before him, Dementus is another font of absurd masculinity whose cartoonish effects contrast with his bloodlust and penchant for torture. Through a face full of prosthetics that distract more than transform, Hemsworth tries to bring Dementus to life with an energy that’s meant to read as unhinged but tends to play as scatterbrained. You can see the spark of a complicated altruism in the paternal shine he takes to Browne’s haunted, adolescent Furisosa toward the beginning of the movie. But as the film brings the Biker Horde and the War Boys together in a prolonged power struggle, Dementus starts to feel more like a character stitched together from leftover ideas for Immortan Joe that didn’t make it into Fury Road or the 2015 Mad Max video game.

That feeling of Dementus being an echo of Mad Max villains past intensifies as the younger Immortan Joe — a more level-headed, cautious version of his Fury Road self — becomes a bigger part of Furiosa. The characters’ similarities feel like two expressions of what kind of archetypal tyrant would crave and attract power in the wake of society’s collapse. They’re both macabre brutes whose rages frequently seem to mask deep-seated insecurities about their places in the world. But Furiosa’s characterization of Immortan Joe and his mutilated failsons Scrotus (Josh Helman) and Erectus (Nathan Jones) does so much more to make the movie feel like an organic extension of Fury Road rather than a fancy new limb grafted on in response to the earlier film’s success.

Immortan Joe and his War Boys are also an important part of how Furiosa brings Taylor-Joy’s Imperator-to-be into the picture. And while the older Furiosa continues to say so little that she often feels like the latest example of the silent / deadly girl trope, she also becomes the focal point of some of the movie’s most impressive set pieces. Furiosa’s action sequences — chases through the desert and battles in places like the oil-rich Gas Town — all feel smaller in comparison to Fury Road in a way that actually helps the film establish its own identity. 

The sequences’ scale and the way shots of explicit carnage are obfuscated by clouds of smoke and sand almost make it seem as if Miller’s reminding you how much more dire things become for Furiosa in the future. But the steely-eyed determination with which Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa moves through the film’s last third is mesmerizing — at least in moments when the movie just lets her be the star rather than the person who’s forced to step up when the men around her can’t quite get the job done. 

For all of Taylor-Joy’s ability to command attention when she’s on-screen, Furiosa still makes its heroine feel like a supporting character in her own movie. This happens essentially right up until its final act, which comes closer to Fury Road than you might expect. And while the two films connect in a way that makes them work as a double feature, watching them back-to-back highlights just how much more the 2015 film gave Furiosa to do.