More than just about any prequel I can think of, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga understands the assignment.
This is, of course, an origin story for Imperator Furiosa, the breakout character played by Charlize Theron in George Miller’s impossibly good 2015 sequel Mad Max: Fury Road. We do indeed learn more of Furiosa’s backstory: we learn how she lost her arm and got her bitchin’ haircut, and how she came to be the most fearsome warrior in the post-apocalyptic wasteland (amusingly, we do not learn how she earned the name Furiosa– in Miller’s world that’s apparently just the sort of thing you name a baby). We see the young Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Brown and as a young adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) enslaved first by biker warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and then by the villainous Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, stepping in for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne). We learn more of Joe’s cult of pallid War Boys, and witness the construction of his fearsome War Rig. We even get a little more shading to some of Fury Road’s colorfully named tertiary characters, like Rictus Erectus and the Organic Mechanic.
All of this is suitably thrilling, and does effectively add dimension to Fury Road. But Furiosa understands something that few blockbusters do in this age of “shared cinematic universes”: nobody is actually asking for this information. We haven’t been clamoring for a Fury Road follow-up these past nine years because we need answers; we’ve simply been desperate for a return to Miller’s gonzo world of maniacs and muscle cars, and to the director’s uniquely unhinged brand of action filmmaking. Furiosa is a triumph not because it provides us with additional lore, but because it gives us another two hours of one batshit visual, character, and action set piece after another. Like its predecessor, it’s so far ahead of its blockbuster contemporaries that it’s almost embarrassing, and it’s an easy lock for one of the best pictures of the year.
Just as wisely, and perhaps more surprisingly, Miller does not attempt to replicate the breakneck pace of Fury Road; even if such a feat were possible (and I suspect it isn’t), it would run the risk of repetition– the Mad Max franchise’s cardinal sin. The story of Furiosa is told far more deliberately, divided into chapters with suitably portentous onscreen titles like “Lessons in the Wasteland.” Characters actually stand still and talk to each other here, which occurs in Fury Road only fleetingly and when absolutely necessary. But rather than sap the film of its energy, this new leisurely pace allows Miller to pack even more crazy stuff in. Each frame is staged as a gorgeous tableau, and benefits from being seen on as big a screen as your theater can provide. What’s more, we have time to take in the insane nuances of the production design: we can see, for example, that a one-eyed henchman’s towering rat’s-nest of George Clinton hair is actually someone else’s scalp being worn as a hat, or that loathsome bureaucrat The People Eater (returning from the last film, and still blissfully unexplained) wears a dangling gas mask as a grotesquely suggestive codpiece. By slowing down a tic, Miller proves to us that, yes, his world really is that filled-in.
Physically, Anya Taylor-Joy only really resembles Charlize Theron inasmuch as both are striking and angular blonde movie stars (and even then, Theron’s head is buzzed in Fury Road, and Taylor-Joy spends most of Furiosa in a wild auburn wig). But I strongly suspect that George Miller did not cast Anya Taylor-Joy because she looks like Charlize Theron; he cast her because she looks like Buster Keaton. Keaton, of course, in addition to being one of the silent cinema’s greatest clowns, was the forefather of Miller’s brand of escalating action sequences, and Fury Road’s there-and-back-again structure is clearly lifted from Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece The General. The visual similarities between Taylor-Joy and Keaton are far from obvious, but they are undeniable here: the large, wide-set eyes, the ethereal good looks, and, most crucially, the ability to maintain a stone face in the most extreme and dangerous of circumstances. Taylor-Joy’s face and frame are both practically made for silent film, and she spends much of the film in silence, telling her story with a contortion of her body or a subtle shift in her expression (it’s almost jarring when she does speak, not because her approximation of Theron’s low rasp isn’t up to snuff, but because we forget that she can). Casting Taylor-Joy as an action star is just the latest left-field Miller decision which seems, in retrospect, completely obvious.
Equally surprising is Hemsworth, who gives a joyful just-got-out-of-a-contract performance for the ages. Hemsworth sheds every last vestige of the Norse-god stoicism he’s been bound by for the past 13 years, and celebrates by playing to rafters on planets that haven’t been discovered yet. He’s got a big fake nose and a big fake beard, and even though he doesn’t have his Fat Thor paunch he still kind of moves like he’s wearing it. Hemsworth’s Dementus is one of those great scenery-chewing villain roles where you smile every time he swaggers onto the screen. He’s Ozploitation incarnate, and while he’s probably too silly to gain much traction on the mainstream awards scene, he’s instantly shot to the top of my own personal Best Supporting Actor ballot.
The downside to Furiosa’s (relatively) restrained pace is that it sags a bit in the middle stretch, particularly with the introduction of Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who provides Furiosa with both a mentor and a potential love interest. Burke does a fine job filling his post-apocalyptic leather chaps, and he commands the screen with the same sort of Aussie charisma that Gibson brought to the original Max trilogy (he’s probably a closer match for Gibson’s presence than Tom Hardy, all told, but Hardy was still probably the right choice for the Max we see in Fury Road). The problem is that Imperator Furiosa doesn’t need a male mentor or a potential love interest; by the time she meets Jack she’s already more or less fully formed, and since he isn’t so much as mentioned in Fury Road we know not to get too attached to him. It feels like hedging, which is especially odd because the film is so fully assured otherwise.
But Furiosa is so packed with ideas that it’s tough to begrudge it when one or two don’t entirely pay off. Miller, like David Lynch in the third season of Twin Peaks, has used Hollywood’s current mania for reboots as a loophole to unleash every wild impulse he’s had bottled up for decades. Furiosa doesn’t quite match the mad inspiration of Fury Road (what movie could?), but it complements it beautifully, a painterly yang to its predecessor’s screaming yin. Together, they make a strong case for themselves as perhaps the greatest fantasy films of the 21st century, not least because they allow their viewers room for imagination without filling in every last narrative crevice. They are also, to the best of my knowledge, the only Hollywood blockbusters to contain characters named “Piss Boy” and “Scrotus,” and if that doesn’t sell you I don’t know what will.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
2024
dir. George Miller
146 min.
Opens Friday, 5/24 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, and pretty much everywhere else
