‘Furiosa’: A Backstory George Miller Wrote While Making ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
In 2015, “Mad Max: Fury Road” was a pure shot of movie adrenaline. Director George Miller’s vision deftly combined stunt choreography, computer-generated imagery, and practical effects. That, along with the introduction of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), broadened the appeal of the post-apocalyptic world of “Mad Max” beyond the cult following, which his 1980s B-movies had enjoyed.
Miller’s craftsmanship was more than enough reason for moviegoers to eagerly anticipate a “Fury Road” prequel. Yet while “Furiosa” once again demonstrates the technical prowess of Miller and his Australian production team, the second and third chapters of the film feel protracted. It also lacks the kind of frenetic elements that made it hard to take your eyes off of the two-hour chase in “Fury Road.”
It is well-known that Miller had the concept for “Fury Road” in 1987. Due to a number of circumstances, development did not begin until the late 2000s. While working on the film, his team wrote a backstory for the character of Furiosa as well as Tom Hardy’s Max. They shared the origin stories with the cast and crew.
“In order to tell the story of ‘Fury Road’ we had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle,” Miller said at CinemaCon in April.
“We wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in ‘Fury Road,’” Miller added. “We wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one was a novella. We did it just for the actors and the crew so they could understand it.”
Sketching out the backstory for Furiosa may have aided the production of “Fury Road,” but details from the backstory were largely excluded. In fact, without Furiosa’s backstory, the character had intrigue that enhanced the movie’s captivating thrills.
But “Fury Road” was a box office success. The budget was $150 million. It grossed nearly $380 million worldwide. Naturally, Warner Bros. said yes to Miller’s prequel.
“Furiosa,” which stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the titular character, shows audiences that when the feminist road warrior was a child the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) kidnapped her from her home in the “Green Place.” Furiosa’s home was one of the last remaining areas in the Australia wasteland that could grow crops and had fresh water.
Dementus captured Gastown and negotiated with Immortan Joe, the warlord in control of The Citadel (a setting that featured prominently in “Fury Road”). He agreed to trade Furiosa as part of a deal. Furiosa lived among the captured women who were Joe’s wives and Breeders until she escaped.
Disguised as a boy, Furiosa helped build the “War Rig,” which she attempted to steal only to be stopped by the rig’s commander Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke).
While watching Furiosa and Jack drive around the wasteland, it became difficult to ignore the question of whether we were seeing anything that substantially adds to our understanding of “Fury Road.”
This question stemmed from something that film professor and storytelling guru Howard Suber wrote about backstories in his book “The Power Film”:
Drama is built upon cause and effect. When backstories cause events in the present, they can be powerful elements in the story. But when they are simply events that happened earlier, and the audience doesn’t really need to know about them in order to understand the present, backstories can be a waste of time.
“Furiosa” is not necessarily a “waste of time.” However, it does feel like Miller and Nico Lathouris, who wrote the screenplay, are simply telling the audience that these are events that happened earlier in Furiosa’s life. None of the events are crucial to understanding the pivotal moment for Furiosa when she frees Immortan Joe’s wives, steals the “War Rig,” and flees across the wasteland while Joe and his army pursue her.
Throughout the prequel, Furiosa generally observes the exploitation and sexual slavery that Joe imposes on women forced into serving his cult. Yet there is no point in the story where Joe specifically targets Furiosa in a manner that would lead her to seek revenge in the way that she must seek revenge against Dementus, who is the main antagonist.
Nothing that transpires with Dementus matters all that much to the sequence of events in “Fury Road.” By focusing on Dementus, Miller and Lathouris miss an opportunity to provide at least one confrontation between Joe and Furiosa that could add a “powerful element” to Furiosa’s revolutionary act.
(Note: There is one scene, where Furiosa basically demands that Joe let her kill Dementus. In “Fury Road,” Joe clearly prizes Furiosa as an imperator. Still, it is unclear if Joe realizes that she is the child that Dementus traded to him to someday become one of his wives.)
“Fury Road” had Mad Max as a Blood Bag for the War Boy named Nux (Nicolas Hout), the Doof Warrior shredding guitar in Joe’s convoy, a Breeder going into labor as three war parties approach, crow-like creatures on stilts where the “Green Place” once flourished, and the Polecats.
What if anything gives “Furiosa” a similar edge and inventiveness?
“Furiosa” is an enjoyable spectacle, but as a prequel, the epic hero’s journey that is depicted is overwrought. All too often that takes away from the simple thrills of war parties and their guzzling beast machines roaring across the Australian wasteland.
