There’s not a lot of greenery in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, but we get a few flashes of a more abundant way of life as, at the very start of the film, we meet the heroine of Fury Road in her childhood days. This is the mysterious Green Place, then, and it’s somehow been concealed from all of the marauding fuel heads until now. As they play, and eat! Fruit! a young Furiosa and an even younger Valkyrie spot a group of bikers, who have seemingly just stumbled upon this place. Furiosa (Alyla Browne) tries to sabotage their bikes – they can’t be allowed to carry word of what they’ve discovered elsewhere – but she gets caught and kidnapped.
These bikers – or ‘Roobillies’ as they’re known (one of the film’s lovely coined words) want to ingratiate themselves with petty gang leader Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), which they wager they can do by bringing him a living, breathing, pathfinder. Resources in the wasteland are scarce. A little girl who can lead them to her home? Perfect. They’re right to guess that Dementus will be intrigued; we see him at his momentary most hinged moment here, if people can be hinged: he’s clad in a parachute-silk vestment, like a religious figure. It’s interesting to watch his cowl change colour as the film progresses, with a darker hue for every increasingly unhinged stage. But for now, he’s happy to treat the child well, then on the next day, to follow her trail. However, the trail runs both ways: Furiosa’s mother has tracked them to the camp, and wants her daughter back. The rescue attempt does not go very well, but she does at least extract a promise from Furiosa to make it home one day. So here we have purpose and key enemy: locked in.
We get to spend some quality time with Dementus’s gang, just before they move on again. There are some interesting dynamics and world-building to enjoy here, and the casting of Hemsworth, who was pipped to the post to play Max in Fury Road, is an inspired choice: forget Thor; what a damn good villain he makes. Later down the line, a chance encounter with a War Boy – for this reviewer, the War Boy phenomena is still the most intriguing aspect of the Mad Max universe – alerts the Dementus gang to the presence of the Citadel, as of course being run by a …comparatively rather healthier-looking Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Dementus’s merry men sense an opportunity to grab some of this power for themselves, pushing for a food, water and guzzolene deal, once they’ve overrun some important Immortan territory. Quid pro quo.
One of the quirks of this film is that Immortan Joe comes across as a rather measured figure compared to Dementus, who – though choc-full of ambition and pluck – is exactly what happens when people get overpromoted. A message for our times, perhaps. As a result, when when Joe asks to retain the mysterious child in Dementus’s party, seeing her as a would-be wife of the future, the Citadel still seems less awful than the chaos which soon begins to unfold elsewhere. Come to think of it, Miller definitely enjoys playing around with the ghosts of bureaucracy in this film: it’s Dementus’s failure to turn up for a scheduled meeting which really pushes Joe over the edge later on. Dementus reluctantly agrees to part with his ‘daughter’ Furiosa, but she doesn’t really think much of the easeful, but horrific lifestyle which threatens to unfold before her, and as soon as she’s able, she escapes, making herself too useful as a mechanic to be sought for elsewhere. So that’s another big question answered. As Furiosa grows up (with a super-subtle segue from Alyla Browne to Anya Taylor-Joy) and as she gets entrusted with more and more responsibility for Joe’s beloved war rigs, she never loses sight of her desire to avenge herself on Dementus.
It’s a fairly simple set-up, just as the glorious (and it has to be said, vastly superior) Mad Max: Fury Road is essentially a drive out and back again, and so at its absolute best Furiosa is another high action, high drama road movie, with massive pursuits and disasters, and sustained, engrossing sequences. There’s so much to recommend it: George Miller clearly eats, breathes and sleeps this universe, and so the little touches (the props, the costumes, the finer points of the script) are incredible. That being said, one thing that the Mad Max films have never needed is ample explication. In fact, they’ve made an artform of doing the opposite. The same script which can draw a laugh in Furiosa can also overstay its welcome in other moments; we know the world has been killed, and we’ve never really needed to know much else, so why talk things through so much here? Of course, the argument could easily be that this isn’t a Mad Max film – except it can’t quite decide if it is or it isn’t. Max is shoehorned in as a kind of token gesture; excerpts from Fury Road bring us full circle, and he’s right there in the title, too. From the outside looking in, things don’t quite hang together without him, and Miller seems to know that – or else, there were some difficult chats at the planning stage, which is of course, more than possible.
There are some other puzzlers and problems in Furiosa. The film is at its absolute best when the physical spectacles it offers are most plausibly real, with sustained live action and stunts. In other aspects however, things are almost entirely derailed by great, clumsy dollops of CGI, not just at scale, but in the detail, too: bringing these extraordinary scenes to life probably necessitates the use of CGI, but when used, it has to be beyond reproach, or else the brain checks out: this happened a few times, unfortunately. Then there’s the length of the film: at just shy of two and a half hours long, it still feels like the timeline gets rather squashed at the end, with the rush to line everything up for Fury Road affecting the pace, which had grown quite uneven by the last chapter, and as ever, we don’t need the bloody chapters: the audience are always capable of working out that we’ve moved on in time and place without text to explain this.
But, look. A few flustered moments don’t mean I’m not glad to revisit this world: George Miller, still working, with maybe another Mad Max film in him, gets held to a high standard because of the work he’s done throughout his career. And Furiosa herself is an engaging character, worthy of her own story: Anya Taylor-Joy, despite her current ubiquity – popping up in any interesting epic – does a good job in this very physical role. It’s Charlize Theron’s part. We know that. But Joy is a close second, and that’s no insult at all. With its high colour, visceral sound design and roaring vehicles, there’s a lot to love about Furiosa, and a few misfires don’t derail the appeal of the film as a whole.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is in cinemas now: go and support it, or get more and more superhero films until you reach a lethal dose and can no longer walk away.