Movie Review | ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’
George Miller’s long-awaited return to the Wasteland has all the parts but can’t get up to gear
In 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road was unleashed upon the world — a non-stop action extravaganza forged in blood, chrome, and guzzaline. It was a lean, efficient ass-kicker of a movie loaded with propulsive, explosive, face-melting production, a gorgeously rendered desert wasteland, and arresting, minimalist performances by Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron that anchored the gonzo post-apocalyptic world of director George Miller’s long-running (and long-dormant) franchise. It was a film of ambitious creativity and deceptively delicate balances chained together with some of the most kinetic and ferocious filmmaking I’d seen. Furthermore, it created almost overnight an iconic character in Imperator Furiosa (Theron) due to her striking design, committed, visceral performance and the lean yet effective story driving her. Naturally, a prequel could be expected.
I’ll come out and say it: I’m not the biggest fan of prequels. It’s not that I hate them; rather, I find that they are in the unenviable position of having to justify their existence more so than any other type of film — even the oft-bemoaned and lamented remake. Though their genesis as creative vectors (usually) stemming from a desire to put a microscope over a piece of lore, character history, or other storytelling granule is admirable and — being a fiction writer myself — largely understandable, there is very little necessary about such affairs. And while I’m a firm believer that art earns its “necessity” simply through the very act of its creation, it’s also hard to argue what any prequel actually offers beyond an excuse to revisit a treasured universe. That’s not to say they can’t be entertaining or even outstanding — Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Thing (2011) are two personal favorites — but rarely do they enhance or enrich our understanding of the characters or events from the prior films of which they took their rise. Prequels also rob their fictional worlds — and thus the viewer — of precious, alluring mystique, a key storytelling element under threat in today’s seeming cinematic fixation on knowing how every little thing fits together.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga manages to avoid some of these pitfalls — the world-building is as vague as ever — but its attempts to flesh out Theron’s beloved antiheroine nonetheless struggle to reach any point of justification.
Set decades before the events of Fury Road, the movie wastes no time setting up Furiosa as a child (played by Alyla Browne) living in the coveted Green Place, from which she is taken by scavenging bikers to their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who seeks to gain its location to exploit the bountiful resources within — a rarity in the blasted wastelands of post-nuclear Earth. However, the girl has been followed by her mother, who systematically hunts down the scavengers in an effort to retrieve her daughter — an admittedly healthy and interest-building opening. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say things go awry to put Furiosa on the (long) road to revenge.
As in Fury Road, Miller wields visual storytelling and silent statements of intent to help establish Furiosa; she speaks rarely, simmering with a quiet, feral rage that echoed in ways Dafne Keen’s Laura from Logan (2017). Except, where James Mangold’s superhero neo-Western gave us a visceral window into Laura’s character, much of Furiosa’s runtime burdens its fiery protagonist with an unwieldy passivity that transmutes her into a side character in her own story. Furiosa simply… exists throughout much of the movie, glaring with an intention that is steadily obfuscated as the plot shuffles through the odyssey of her early life. We learn almost nothing about her we didn’t already know from Fury Road, and what new insights are gained feel like filler and lend little in the way of essential knowledge.
Anya Taylor-Joy, committed as ever, nonetheless struggles to right the ship once she takes over as the younger shade to Theron’s smoldering Imperator, her vengeance quest and all the torrid emotions contained therein undermined thanks to odd narrative prioritizations and the general toothlessness of many of the film’s most pivotal — and tragic — sequences. Furiosa rages, largely silently, yet there is a detachment present in her design that locks her woefully in neutral. She doesn’t shift into gear until the back-end of the film, by which the race is already lost. Even Hemsworth, for the promise he brings in those crucial early minutes, ultimately fails to generate enough of a believable villainy and menace as the marauding Dementus — a near-requirement for any revenge story — despite wielding enough charisma to power Furiosa’s war rig.
The resulting effect is a movie that, while performed admirably and boasting Miller’s singular creative energy, ends up feeling like the cinematic equivalent to a lore read on the Mad Max Wiki. Nothing feels personal in spite of the circumstances we’re shown; everything unfolds with a matter-of-fact vibe that feels surprisingly rote from a team that delivered on such kinetic fare in the past. Sure, we get to see milestones in Furiosa’s life and how she acquires the look Theron made iconic nearly a decade ago, but without a focused and satisfying journey tethering those everything together, the whole thing drifts off the road. Buttress that against the decision to depict Furiosa in a near-constant state of disassociation at almost every tragic turn, and it saps away the emotional heft needed to give those moments any real meaning. Even the movie’s late-game tie in to Fury Road feels superfluous and unearned, as the story we’re given offers no lingering setup or motivation for the choice she makes that leads into that particular journey.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all this is that the pieces are otherwise there for a visceral exploration of Furiosa and how she went from zero to robot-armed antihero. The cast is ready and able, with Miller hardly bereft of the generative chaos that helped empower Fury Road. If anyone could have delivered on a prequel with purpose, it would be Miller and his Mad Max universe. Instead, what should have torn across the dunes of entertainment with reckless, shining glee ends up stalled in a wasteland of meandering narrative and underwhelming characterization, leaving Furiosa’s simmering, explosive saga feeling more like a drawn-out footnote.
