Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga starts out so good, I knew within minutes I’d want to see it again. Then, half-way through, during an attack on a big rig, I realized I was viewing one of the best action sequences I’d ever seen. When the film ended, after 2.5 brisk hours, I was merrily exhausted — yet energized. Director George Miller made this grumpy old cynic feel like a kid again.
Quick personal story: The first Mad Max film I ever saw was Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982), in which Mel Gibson helps a community of post-apocalyptic desert dwellers protect their oil refinery from a savage band of testosterone-drunk vehicular punks. Not only did it set the high bar for what I consider a quality action flick, it’s also a fond memory because my grandpa took me to the movie during a summer-vacation visit in which I’d been feeling so neglected I ended up throwing my sister’s clothes out of her luggage. I remember my grandpa leaning over to me during a disturbingly violent scene and saying, “Are you okay?” He might have regretted his R-rated risk, but I did not.
The Road Warrior is a formative film memory because of how fully it drew me in and made me care about the fate of its simple but well-sketched characters. The gritty action finale resembled the fake-out ploy of a football game. That is, if the game were acted out by armored, high-octane vehicles, vying for territorial control and then racing to a goal line and bittersweet “win” — an inverted metaphor given that football is abstracted war. (Not impressed by football-like action? There’s also a steel boomerang.)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth of its series, reminds me of what I loved about that much earlier film. Like the best sequels, it delivers expected thrills but finds new approaches to keep them surprising, and it expands its ingenious world without retreading it. It’s been 45 years since the first Mad Max (1979), a low-budget Ozploitation breakthrough, and somehow Miller’s vivid, mythmaking exuberance and fascination with war on wheels has deepened.
Furiosa is, of course, a prequel to the more recent, thrilling Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and designed so its ending leads directly into that film’s opening scene — matching its tone, verve, and foreboding cello chords. The character of Mad Max, already minimal in the earlier film, is almost entirely absent this time, but his standoffish demeanor is replicated by Furiosa, who like Max prefers to survive in stealthy silence.
The previous film’s Furiosa (played then by Charlize Theron) was enigmatic but heroic, teaming with Mad Max (Tom Hardy) to save a group of concubines from an oxygen-masked, rictus-toothed, walrus-like totalitarian named Immortan Joe. This time we get Furiosa’s origin and coming-of-age story, as a child depicted smartly by Alyla Browne and then later by the beguiling, butterfly-wing-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy, whose quiet concentration here recalls her performance in The Queen’s Gambit if she’d traded in her chess board for a long-range rifle.
Refocusing on a female-energized version of the Mad Max series’ Western-style, lone-hero archetype works far better here than it did when the Star Wars movies swapped girlish Rey in place of boyish Luke for The Force Awakens (2015). George Miller, who co-wrote the story with Nico Lathouris, layers myths upon fables upon allegories upon backstories while somehow keeping Furiosa propulsive rather than cluttered, a kitchen-sink-juggling feat he refined, oddly enough, when he directed the kids’ film Babe: Pig in the City (1998).
Furiosa‘s opening scenes reference Eden and forbidden fruit, make callbacks to details in other Mad Max films (such as the whistle used to disarm a villain in 1985’s uneven Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome), and Miller even seems to be tipping his hat to the films he inspired, such as the tattoo-map in Waterworld (1995), or Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006) — which also begins with a young innocent seeking home-turf paradise after being thrust into a cruel, culture-shocking outside world.
Furiosa somehow hides an art film inside pure action cinema. Most of its characters are developed via wordless action, though it freely dabbles in odd slang such as “No one’s gonna scum us anymore.” When Furiosa’s mother chases the scavengers who have kidnapped her daughter, we see the resourcefulness and quick-witted decisions that we’ll also see in Furiosa later on: She’s a chip off the ol’ engine block.
I lost count of all the historical and literary references the film drops, but at one point there’s a Joan of Arc-like burning, a Trojan Horse invasion scheme, a motorcyle-harnessed riff on Ben Hur’s chariots, and recurring symbolic totems such as a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk like seed and a treasured stuffed animal progressively tattering like a lost chidhood memory.
The fulsome filigree around Furiosa‘s edges makes amusing pop-culture spectacle (I barely flinched at the tearing of a character’s nipples), but details eventually build to over-arching themes about violence and toxic masculinity, complete with giant, spinning truck nuts. Yes, truck nuts. More on that later.
During the film’s five chapters, we find wasteland ruggedness strewn across blue-lit nighttime sand dunes, desert enclaves that at a distance resemble giant armpits, and the pseudo-civilized triangle established in Fury Road: the high-walled governing Citadel, the moat-encircled Gastown, and the mining-pit Bullet Farm. Passed around as a prisoner, and escaping subjugation as a breeder or milker, Furiosa (pretending to be male) finds work as a driver delivering resources from one hub to another.
A female lead gives the Mad Max series an excuse to explore a topic it only hinted at (and tragically for Virginia Hey‘s headbanded, crossbow-cranking “Warrior Woman,” cut short) in The Road Warrior: What would a post-apocalyptic hero’s romance look like? We get a glimpse when Furiosa meets the equally terse Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), commander of a massive chrome War Rig so elaborately phallic it does everything but vibrate.
Their upper faces grease-painted like noir fatales shadowed by invisible fedoras, the duo earn each other’s respect while defending the shiny semi from attack. This riveting action sequence is loaded with a progressive series of offensive contraptions and defensive counter-measures: Claw cranes, propeller-loaded parasails, a hang glider that rains fuel fire, and a boss-level weapon called a Bommy Knocker that’s launched by a powder-skinned dwarf sitting atop a cache of cabbages (apparently the malnourishing staple food of the “pocky-clypse”).
At this point in Furiosa, it’s apparent the chief antagonist is not Immortan Joe and his established hegemon of venal generals and strategists. The movie’s real villain is Dementus, played by Chris “Thor” Hemsworth with a much fuller range of subtle character traits than one would expect from such an over-the-top, prosthetic-schnozzed bad guy.
Dementus reminded me of a high school jock so full of himself that he shows up at a poetry slam to bark self-amused, half-assed verse he’s convinced himself is brilliant. The first time we see Dementus he has veiled himself like Christ, then soon pivots to the style of a Roman guard plotting a crucifixion. Far from a standard villain trope, Dementus is a wily, slippery style of creep, so off-kilter you could be easily lulled into not hating him.
Which would be a mistake, because Dementus’s showmanship (broadcast via the kind of boxing-announcer microphones villains like the Humongous or Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity wielded in earlier films) masks both self-loathing and a disregard for loyalty. Not only does Dementus challenge the status quo of the story’s other villains, he kills his own men for kicks, wearing bits of their clothing as if longing to be someone else. He’s ambition without principle, malignant power-climbing as a salve for emptiness.
This is a problem for Furiosa, because her strong purpose and competence give Dementus a fun target to chase. Furiosa and Praetorian Jack fight off Dementus in the mine-pit Bullet Farm, and that’s where the film’s metaphoric action is fully realized. Usually the Mad Max films’ action is linear (and mostly gun-free), but here combat-entangled male characters travel in a semicircle while Furiosa attempts to snipe from a distance, with every shot seeming like her assertion of love. Dementus gleefully responds with a priapic rocket launcher, one of several times the coordinated interplay of would-be lovers is contrasted by toxic-masculine brute force.
And again: There are truck nuts. Spinning, massive, lethal truck nuts. Okay, maybe the Bommy Knocker isn’t technically truck nuts, but I’m watching the War Rig’s massive bludgeoning orbs on chains and I’m thinking, “No way does George Miller not know what he’s doing here.” Sure, there’s juvenile indulgence to this stuff, but it’s wielded with serious dedication, and the film is often tactful in what it doesn’t show.
For added measure, two of the dumber villains are named Scrotus and Rectus (talk about a tainted duo), the first of whom resembles Beavis in a Caesar outfit. The levity of such characters balances out a necessarily bleak finale, which takes a huge risk by indulging in more dialogue than the rest of the entire movie, and yet it’s somehow a welcome and fitting closing scene.
Artful themes and uneven storytelling aside, Furiosa is superbly entertaining, and you sense that even briefly seen characters could form the basis for whole other movies. George Miller, one of the few directors with a skill set worthy of the term “mad genius,” has revved up, rebuilt, refueled, and amplified everything originally great about The Road Warrior and Fury Road into a sensational new machine.
