Review: "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" is ferocious, brilliant, and challenging
A prequel, but also the second-half to George Miller's masterpiece
I would never have thought that Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the few truly undisputed masterpieces of the 21st century, would ever come to feel in any way ‘incomplete;’ yet the grand achievement of George Miller’s long-awaited follow-up – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – is that it manages to retroactively make Fury Road feel like one half of a much larger, even more ambitious work than that which appeared in cinemas nine years ago. Narratively, thematically, emotionally, and formally, Furiosa boldly expands the horizons of Miller’s universe, less a conventional prequel to Fury Road than the earlier film’s other half, its shadow, a distorted reflection that complicates, extends, and enriches everything that came before. To make a comparison few reading this will probably understand – though I would love to be friends with those who do – Furiosa is to Fury Road what Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels is to Chungking Express: two films that stand beautifully on their own, but are positively transcendent when combined (as a double-feature, I think they’re the best ‘movie’ of the 1990s). Like Wong’s duology, Furiosa and Fury Road are two journeys through the same world created by the same group of artists, but with mostly different bodies on screen and a very different affect to the entire presentation. Each is a major achievement in its own right; put together, they are not just dynamic complements, but two pieces of a whole unlocking something fundamental in the other.
All of which is to say that Furiosa is a very different movie than Fury Road, and those expecting a straightforward sequel playing the hits with a few variations will almost certainly be disappointed. Miller makes his intentions clear from the beginning, with an opening credits sequence that intentionally mirrors Fury Road’s beat-for-beat, and then zigs right as we expect it to zag when the first actual shot in unveiled. Instead of Max standing next to his car overlooking the vastness of the wasteland, seconds away from the beginning of a car chase that will continue, in various permutations, for the next few hours, Furiosa fades in on an old man standing alone in a moonlit desert reciting the first lines of a story – or, perhaps more aptly, giving an invocation to the Muse – and then fades out to a title card telling us we are in ‘Chapter 1’ of the story (there are 5 in total, a device Miller hasn’t before used in the world of Mad Max). The film that follows is longer, slower, and bigger than its predecessor. Fury Road was a concentrated, breathless burst of kineticism, a nearly unbroken two-hour chase sequence, with individual shots lasting an average of just 2.6 seconds. Furiosa is, by contrast, an Epic, in the truest sense of the word, spanning many years and locations, with longer and fewer cuts and even several elaborate ‘oners.’ There is more dialogue, but also more moments of quiet, haunting reflection. The primary mode of its action and set-pieces is slow-burn tension, and its most spectacular ‘road war’ chase sequence comes midway through the movie in chapter 3, leaving room for a much quieter, more provocative climax. Structurally, the closest comparison might be Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, which delivers its most elaborate action at the end of Volume 1 and gives us something simpler and thornier in Volume 2. I suspect that will disappoint some viewers of Furiosa, as Tarantino’s finale did upon release. Give it some time to sink in, though; Miller’s final act is not bombastic, but it is incredibly potent.
Formally, Furiosa plays like a visual expression of epic poetry, like an adaptation of The Iliad or The Odyssey – one could make good arguments for either – but with Ancient Greece swapped for post-apocalyptic Australia. There are no literal Gods, but one senses a divine hand sweeping its way through this barren, brutal world all the same; Chris Hemsworth even drives around in a makeshift chariot, a would-be Achilles for the end times. Furiosa employs quite a bit more digital VFX than Fury Road, but with clear intent and to great effect, conjuring massive, ambitious, awe-inspiring images of places and feats that feel truly impossible, like the dreamscapes of the mind’s eye hearing a story passed down, embellished, and exaggerated through the ages. The film is a monumental feat of world-building, akin to the first great digitally-inflected blockbusters of the 21st century – namely Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels – and adjacent to Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune duology. But Miller’s world is even more mythical, heightened, and bizarre than those, a gonzo hellscape with a sly sense of humor.
That sense of self-aware mythmaking is one of two major elements Furiosa brings back from the original three Mad Max films before Fury Road. The first, to my delight, is the presence of flying vehicles in the big chases, since the only real fault in Fury Road might be that it lacked anything like the gyrocopter from The Road Warrior. The second is the idea of these events as narrated myth, a central tenet of both The Road Warriorand Beyond Thunderdome, each of which ultimately situate Max as a mythical figure passing through someone else’s memory, his feats passed down in an oral tradition. Here, Furiosa is that mythical subject, and as a prequel, the film is aware we already know her legend. Those who dismissed the film Miller made in-between Fury Road and Furiosa – 2022’s criminally underrated Three Thousand Years of Longing – undervalue, I think, how much that movie zeroes in on the act of storytelling as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Miller’s career. He is a man who makes films that are aware they are ‘tales,’ that are self-consciously larger than life, that combine and play with a wide array of existing iconography even as they create their own, desecrating sacred images and elevating the detritus of literal junkyards to religious Icons. Miller’s stories are almost always mediated, and therefore tacitly aware of the space between the screen and the viewer, the idea that the person watching will take this story in turn and let it live on inside them. More than any film he’s ever made, Furiosa seems designed to linger, to worm its way into your mind and grow, its hypertextual relationship to Fury Road making us participants in the construction of a legend.
In that vein, Furiosa complicates its predecessor in several ways. The film’s most interesting thread, to me at least, might be how it questions the title characters gender presentation, which goes unremarked upon in Fury Road – she is smuggling Immortan Joe’s ‘wives,’ but she does not look or act like any other women in the society Joe has built – but is expanded upon here as a vital survival mechanism, a way Furiosa weaponizes her own body and the severing of its component parts – not just her arm, but perhaps even more importantly her hair – to reinvent her identity in the dark, violent Kingdom where she’s been stranded. It also digs into the root of the empathy and emotional intelligence that is her real superpower in Fury Road, where she turns the tide of the narrative by making a feral Max trust in her (and her righteous mission) by treating him like a human. Here, we see where those impulses come from, in part through an encounter with another Max-esque figure.
In fact, one could argue there are three versions of ‘Mad Max’ in this film. The first is that aforementioned figure, Praetorian Jack, who, in Tom Burke’s performance and costuming, looks and sounds a lot more like Mel Gibson in those first three films – rugged but handsome, slyly aware of his own iconographic figure – than the much more savage, animalistic incarnation Tom Hardy gave us in Fury Road. The second is Dementus, the film’s main antagonist, played brilliantly by Chris Hemsworth in an all-time-great villain performance of the same caliber as Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. He leads the violent band of nomads who ruin the young Furiosa’s life, and is revealed through the teddy bear memento he carries to be a dark twist on Max’s original backstory: a man who lost his family as society collapsed. Instead of becoming a reluctantly noble road warrior, roaming and surviving and helping those he encounters before eventually moving on, Dementus conquers, plunders, and destroys. The third Max is Max himself, glimpsed in a brief cameo and played by Tom Hardy’s Fury Road stunt double, Jacob Tomuri (though we only see him from the back). Max, of course, has always been a shape-shifting symbol. Other than in the original Mad Max and The Road Warrior, he has never made much sense as a single ongoing character, and the timeline, particularly after Fury Road, cannot possibly link all these adventures through a single human lifetime. ‘Max’ is an idea and a set of iconographic signifiers more than he is a single coherent character. Furiosa takes that idea and runs with it, multiplying the concept of ‘Max’ out through the wasteland. This film and Fury Road are joined in part as stories about Furiosa encountering multiple ‘Mad Maxes:’ She loses one, she destroys another, and she redeems a third – and is redeemed in turn. The path of her legend is laid with the echoes of Max’s archetype.
Furiosa too becomes something of a shape-shifter here, in that the film gives us two new performances to complement Charlize Theron’s work in Fury Road: Alyla Brown as the child Furiosa, in the first two chapters of the film, and Anya Taylor-Joy as her young-adult form, in the final three. The gradual transition between them all is quietly astonishing, with Brown’s form seamlessly giving way to Taylor-Joy’s (some VFX wizardry was apparently involved here, but it is invisible), and Taylor-Joy’s makeup, costuming, and physical posture echoing Theron to an eerily perfect extent. As always, though, the greatest special effect is the actors involved: Brown is a revelation, an active driver of action in the first chapter and a quiet observer of the world’s moral and material desolation in the second. Taylor-Joy has been too great for too long to be revelatory, but her work is no less extraordinary, and of the three Furiosas might be the most powerfully, viscerally human embodiment: a figure caught between a child’s inability to grasp the world’s injustice, and an adult who has survived by making herself more capable and more adaptable than everyone else she meets.
Fury Road arrived in theaters nine years ago this month; that feels like a lifetime ago. We were basking in the relative stability of the Obama presidency, with a strained but seemingly sane body politic and a still-intact Europe across the pond; Donald Trump wouldn’t come down the elevator for another month. The world today looks a lot more like the original Mad Max – recognizable as a modern civilization, but quickly spiraling out of control – than it did in 2015. Yet watched today, Fury Road feels more prescient than ever, a movie about and for our times, about weak men in thrall to a pathetic strong man, about women fighting for basic bodily autonomy, about characters seeking salvation in the ‘Green Place’ only to learn the best they can do is make the most of the ecologically ravaged world they’ve inherited. Furiosa is about all these things too, and feels immediately finger-on-the-pulse. It is a movie about characters moving through a world that is ending all around them, choosing where they will draw lines and where they must capitulate to survive – and what pieces of themselves they will cling to as the apocalypse rolls along. And it is, of course, about a young woman trying to extricate herself from a society where freedom has been snatched from her, caught between the individualistic goal of revenge and the higher calling of liberation.
From now on, I imagine Fury Road and Furiosa will be best appreciated as a double feature. One could go with the narrative chronology, starting with Furiosa and following it with Fury Road as the spectacular, extended climax. Or one could watch them as they have been presented to us across nearly a decade, with the satisfaction of Fury Road subsequently chased by the challenges and complications of Furiosa, which also turns the entire experience into a sort of mobius strip: the ending leads back to the beginning, which takes us back to the ending again, and so on – a cycle that feels in and of itself like a statement on the nature of our apocalyptic (or, if we’re being optimistic, near-apocalyptic) present. There will surely be debates for years to come as to whether Fury Road or Furiosa is the ‘better’ movie – a debate I absolutely refuse to weigh in on for at least a few more years – but what matters in the end is that they are, ultimately, two sides of the same coin, two films that are of, and for, the times in which we live.
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