The Plot: Long after society has descended into chaos, Young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is taken from her idyllic home by biker marauders. She’s brought to their boss, the supreme master of the desert Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Furiosa is the key to a better life for Dementus and his gang, but she’s keeping quiet about her home. Dementus trades her for an uneasy alliance with warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Now older, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) rises up the ranks in The Citadel. However, she’s driven by a burning fury and goes on a roaring rampage of revenge against Dementus…
The Verdict: George Miller has done it again. He may be pushing 80, but he continues to show a youthful vitality in his direction that puts most action directors half his age to shame. This is how it’s done boys. Go madder, go badder and keep on burning a rubber road right to freedom. Now 45 years deep into the Mad Max franchise that he co-created with Byron Kennedy, there are no signs of him slowing down with his latest entry Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. After wowing the cinema world with his new-look entry Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, he was already working on an origin story for that film’s controlled agent of chaos – the tragic but driven Imperator Furiosa. And now we finally have it in the beat-up but defiant form of Furiosa which fills in all that backstory and successfully acts as a companion piece to its predecessor.
It would be fair to say despite its eye-popping visuals and spectacular stunts, Mad Max: Fury Road had a bit of an identity crisis. It was not so much a Mad Max film but a Furiosa film, with Max riding shotgun into The Wasteland. That made for an interesting contrast of characters, along with reported on-set friction between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron that perhaps only added to the tone of the film. There’s no such similar situation here. The focus is firmly on Furiosa from the opening sequence right through to its drawn-out but breathless climax. Taken from her home and with every passing day it becomes further out of her reach, she must prove herself worthy to survive in a male-dominated, dog-eat-dog world where desert warfare is always just a day away.
Miller’s script with Nick Lathouris plays out like a vast desert-set Shakespearean tragedy, divided up into five theatrical acts rather than the usual three for a film. One chapter is titled ‘Beyond Vengeance’ which is a summation of what’s driving Furiosa. It’s a good while before the older Furiosa is introduced, but until then the young Alyla Browne does a highly commendable job of setting up Furiosa’s early drive and determination. She then passes the shotgun to Anya Taylor-Joy, who neatly aligns her performance with Theron’s later contribution (digital de-aging wasn’t an option for Miller here). With just 30 lines of dialogue, Taylor-Joy’s performance is therefore lean, stripped-back, intensely physical and with a lot of the work done through her haunted eyes. It works a treat.
Chris Hemsworth’s broad villain is a surprisingly similar creature of the desert, scavenging in the dirt to survive and find a better life. Although, the brash Dementus has an ego the size of Sydney – or at least what used to be Sydney in this world (briefly glimpsed in Beyond Thunderdome). It’s an often funny performance, but there’s no doubting that Dementus is suitably named and unpredictably dangerous. This is where Miller really delivers on the action front, finding new and gloriously over-the-top ways to top even what even came before. What about bikers with parachutes descending for an attack on Furiosa’s war rig? There’s a propulsive drive to these exhilarating sequences, with a lengthy war rig chase in the mid-section in which Furiosa comes to prove her mettle.
Miller certainly has it in him to make it epic, holding his nerve through multiple action sequences to make it the longest entry in the series to date. There’s no narrative fat here though. This is one lean beast of a film that moves like a Fast & Furiosa bullet and is fairly merciless in its appetite for vengeance, car-nage and its resulting destructive cost on Furiosa’s soul. This is far more than just the usual prequel churned out to make a quick buck or a jerrycan of guzzolene. It’s a fully-formed film that moves to its own distinctive desert rhythm, which co-exists with Fury Road but also exists just fine on its own. How often can that be said of a prequel? Only Miller could move his iconic world forward by going backwards. It will be interesting to see if he returns to Mad Max himself at some point. For now, Furiosa is all the rage and all the better for it.
Rating: 4 / 5
Review by Gareth O’Connor
In short: Fast & Furiosa
Directed by George Miller.
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme, Angus Sampson