Furiosa and Furiosa

Do not expect maximum madness from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a worthy though slightly less febrile prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road that trades high-octane action for vengeance-is-mine world-building. Instead of barnstorming through the Wasteland, Miller’s girl-becomes-a-trucker bildungsroman tours the hellscape of poisoned bodies and sour earth with a more studied lens, letting its cruelties simmer and boil throughout a longer running time and an expanded cast of characters.

FURIOSA ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Nico Lathouris
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme
Running time: 145 mins

The fifth film in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise—and the first not to feature Max Rockatansky, despite a brief, late-inning cameo—Furiosa still conjures feverish delirium more than studied rumination. But it’s not a 3-day/2-night extreme exercise in pedal-to-the-metal road warring, choosing to slow its roll and tell a tale stretching over 18 years. 

The subject this time is Imperator Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a child, Anya Taylor-Joy as a young adult), a role Charlize Theron so vividly originated. Though Browne and Taylor-Joy bring a feral intensity to the role, Theron leaves a big prosthetic arm to fill. Then again, Furiosa is not as much about her as it is about the various post-civilization tribes that Fury Road introduced: The Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gas Town, all of which Miller gives extended screen time to showcase deeper peeks into their respective operations.

Added to the list of adversaries is a roving band of marauders whose chieftain is a bearded beefcake named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). He’s a wily, impulse-driven bully who uses words like “piquant” so he sounds smart. Dementus’ goal: take over the bartering triad of resource-rich communities and rule supreme with his Congress of Destruction, hundreds of bike riders he leads in his three-chopper chariot.

The action begins in the Green Place of Many Mothers, the home of the female-centric Vulvalini where windmills and solar panels are the main energy resources keeping their peaceful enclave so lush and verdant. That’s where Furiosa first stumbles upon a few of Dementus’ bikers, who kidnap the pesky kid as proof of the abundant, sequestered Eden and its well-nourished “full-life” people. After a brutal chase scene across the desert that ends in fire, wind, and sand, with Furiosa’s mother tortured to death, the orphaned child is now alone to fend off death and hopefully find her way home.

Furiosa’s survival demands a few leaps of logic, not to mention a long stretch in mute drag, which presumes that her intrepid nature translates to proficiency as a gearhead technician in the Citadel. Does anyone even notice her boyish frame becoming a girlish figure? It’s all in service of a plot that hopscotches to her eventual emergence as a baadasssss driver of war rigs for Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).

 Her determination to seek revenge on Dementus is persistent, and their eventual face-to-face is satisfying in a solid, inevitable way. But the real thrill of Furiosa is watching Miller bring back all his oddball creations: not just Immortan Joe, but his sons Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and Scabrous Scrotus (Josh Helman), as well as other bit players like The People Eater, the Organic Mechanic, the Bullet Farmer, and all those Valhalla-obsessed, white-skinned War Boys. Add to the list new flavors like long hauler Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a black-horned baddie named the Octoboss (Goran Kleut), and a wizened elder covered in small-font tattooed text named the History Man. 

To paraphrase Dementus, Furiosa is a film lathered in righteous perversity and nifty mutilations, where people trade gazzoline for 2,000 tits of mother’s milk, where thundersticks and flame throwers and peach pits are the coin of the realm. Miller, pushing 80, once again proves Hollywood’s dearth of imagination with this savage return to a wildly subversive, thrillingly anarchic world.