Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Film Review

It’s no Fury Road, but I still enjoyed going back to George Miller’s mad post-apocalyptic world in this audacious if somewhat unnecessary prequel.

I held out for a while on Furiosa, a common sentiment judging by the movie’s lackluster box-office performance. My own reasons were manifold. Back in 2015, along with many other people I was left with my jaw on the floor after watching Fury Road, one of the most visceral and awe-inspiring cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. I also loved the hell out of Charlize Theron’s gritty, soulful performance as Furiosa, easily the standout character.

One thing Fury Road never made me do however is want more of Furiosa’s backstory, or wonder about how she ended up with a shaven head and a prosthetic arm. She worked just fine as a haunted, driven character with a mysterious, potentially morally ambiguous past. The trailers for Furiosa did very little to dispel my general feeling that the whole prequel thing looked misguided: the glaringly obvious special effects, Anya Taylor-Joy looking miscast as an action heroine, and Chris Hemsworth’s ridiculous prosthetic nose. In the end, I decided to check it out simply because I was in a mood for some full throttle action and spectacle, and with a true visionary like George Miller at the helm you’re at the very least guaranteed something genuinely idiosyncratic.

Perhaps wisely, Furiosa makes no attempt to replicate the adrenaline-charged pace of Fury Road, instead telling its story in chapters over a few years. We begin with a very young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) growing up in the Green Place, a lush bucolic paradise tucked away somewhere in the Wasteland. One day she gets kidnapped by a gang of bikers who come to forage the land, and taken to the hideout of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a messianic, cape-wearing, chariot-riding warlord with a teddy bear fixed on his back. Furiosa’s ferocious mother (Charlee Fraser) ventures out to save her daughter, but in the end she’s killed on the orders of Dementus in a way no child should ever witness.

As mentioned before, Chris Hemsworth as he appeared in the trailers made me cringe, but Dementus with all his preening and scenery chewing turned out to be my favourite thing in the movie. As a villain he’s both hilarious and chillingly sadistic, cunning and calculating yet, as demonstrated later, much more suited to marauding and waging war on his enemies than actually ruling a place. He gets the movie’s best lines and Hemsworth clearly has a ball delivering them in his native Australian accent. This role really makes the most of his charisma, commanding physicality and underrated acting chops.

Dementus has a strange sentimental streak and takes to Furiosa even as he makes her an orphan, but his fatherly affections don’t last and he trades her into the hands of Immortan Joe, a familiar face from Fury Road. The familiar characters and settings were in fact another reason I was sceptical about the prequel: the Citadel, Immortan Joe’s hideous mask, the chalk-skinned War Boys were all new and exciting in Fury Road, but did I really need to see them again? Thanks to the imagination of George Miller and his creative team, the world of Wasteland never felt repetitive. It is still full of colourful characters, stunning vistas and quirky, hair-raising details. It expands the world seen in Fury Road with locations like Gas Town and Bullet Farm, and we get more sense of how this cruel, crazy world operates.

I didn’t really expect the action scenes to rival or even match the intensity and inventiveness of Fury Road, and predictably they don’t, even though its centrepiece, a thrilling, unbroken 15-minute assault on the War Rig, comes pretty damn close. The use of special effects didn’t stick out as badly as in the trailers, save for a few forgivable moments.

I’m sad to say that the biggest disappointment to me was Furiosa herself, even though on paper she’s the reason this film exists at all. This is no fault of either actress who play her. Alyla Browne in particular is fantastic as young Furiosa who has to deal with the traumatising events that lay foundation for the older, hardened Furiosa. She however feels weirdly sidelined for the long stretches of the expanded prologue that is at times more interested in world-building and exploring tensions between Dementus and Immortan Joe, to the point where it’s easy to forget that this is her movie.

Anya Taylor-Joy can’t really compete with the memory of Theron’s Furiosa and is overall a colder, more distant figure. She does acquit herself as a lithe and agile action heroine, and the movie certainly makes use of her extraordinary, expressive eyes that can blaze with the fury of a thousand suns. She also gets to express vulnerability in her dynamic with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a driver for Immortan Joe who becomes her mentor. Jack and Furiosa’s relationship clearly had a chance of turning romantic, and ten years ago I’d probably have rolled my eyes if it did. But I can’t say I’m loving the new persistent trend of sexless heroines either.

My problem with Furiosa has more to do with writing that turns her into a far more reactive character than she was in Fury Road. Then there’s a question of her motivations. The prequel creates Dementus in order to make it more of a self-contained story, but for most of the time taking revenge on Dementus feels like an afterthought next to Furiosa’s desire to return to the Green Place. Unfortunately this storyline can’t get a satisfying resolution here because it continues in Fury Road. At the same time, there’s no sense that Furiosa is utterly consumed with revenge in the way required to make a revenge tale soar: think John Wick or the Bride from Kill Bill and their single-minded focus. The film simply tries to do too much, to the detriment of its protagonist.

Even if Furiosa is not as great as I’d have hoped in my heart of hearts, it’s much better than I expected and I’m happy I made an effort to see it on the biggest screen in Melbourne. I’d take a flawed work of a singular vision over corporate blockbuster filmmaking any day.

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P.S. I understand why you’d want to avoid Immortan Joe’s nauseating interest in fertile young women as much as possible, but I couldn’t really buy the idea that Furiosa would remain unclaimed once her true identity was revealed. In fact there are a few aspects of Furiosa’s survival in the Citadel that aren’t very convincing.