The New Mad Max Is a Welcome Return Trip to Movie Valhalla
Furiosa may not ride as eternal as Fury Road, but it’s still jampacked with visionary weirdness.
Warner Bros. Pictures
The 2015 release of Mad Max: Fury Road, a 30-years-later sequel to the last installment of George Miller’s 1979–1985 action trilogy, occasioned a critical and popular response that was nothing short of rapturous. The reemergence of Miller as a director of pedal-to-the-metal vehicle-chasing action (in the intervening decades he had focused on family films like the talking-pig classic Babe: Pig in the City and the animated-penguin tales Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two) seemed to rekindle the spark, not just of this particular franchise, but of the moviegoing public’s enthusiasm for both practical stunt work and postapocalyptic world building.
The omnipresence of dystopias in mass-produced entertainment over the past four decades began, at some point, to leach the concept of the “bad future” of its imaginative power. All the bad futures tended to look the same, with muddily lit underground bunkers and rag-clad protagonists tromping through bombed-out cityscapes and highways full of abandoned cars. Miller’s vision of the Wasteland (played on film by the crimson-sanded deserts of Australia and, in Fury Road, Namibia) is something entirely different: a colorful dystopia served up with visionary weirdness and an abundance of wit. Stick shifts made of human femurs with screaming faces carved into the joint, a villain in a three-piece suit with a World War I gas mask strapped fig leaf–style over his crotch, motorcycle helmets fashioned from human craniums, and ropes strung together from vertebrae: Such are the steampunk accoutrements of the future according to Miller, which, though it may be a place of lawless cruelty and unfathomable human suffering, is at least going to look thoroughly rad.
Fury Road, which ran exactly two hours, took place in an equally compact time frame, with Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa and Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky first chasing, then being chased in the opposite direction by, the henchmen of Fury Road’s despotic Immortan Joe (played in that film by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who died in 2020). Miller’s latest, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, takes the opposite temporal tack: It’s a two-and-a-half-hour epic that takes place over about 15 years, with the eponymous heroine growing from a traumatized preteen girl (played by Alyla Browne) to a grim-faced young woman in her mid-20s (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Furiosa is an origin story for a heroine who perhaps didn’t need one: Theron’s vengeful scowl beneath that raccoonlike mask of black mechanical grease told us all we needed to know about the past life of this fierce road warrior with a buzz cut and one metal hand. But if it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action. Volkswagen camper tops welded to the bodies of muscle cars, hurtling over the dunes in pursuit of giant tricked-out “war rigs” with stamped-tin ceilings and chrome skulls mounted on the hood. Grand-scale stunts that involve a dozen or more performers on screen at once, pursuing and escaping one another via car, motorcycle, parasail, or a kind of metal footwear best described as “sand skates.” Strange gladiatorial festivals where flaming hulks of cars are lowered by chain off a cliff so as to hover perilously over the milling crowds below. The Mad Max film series is not based on a comic book, though it has inspired at least one of them. But it has a comic book’s manic energy and physics-defying spatial logic. Even Taylor-Joy’s physiognomy, with those wiry, willowy limbs and huge wide-set eyes, seems to have alighted from the world of comics or anime. Miller often chooses to frame the action in bold compositions that play up this graphic style, alternating punchy close-ups with rapid zoom outs that show us the setting from a bird’s-eye view.
The first hour or more of Furiosa focuses on the title character’s childhood. Raised in the Green Place, a hidden matriarchal oasis with abundant food and water, young Furiosa is kidnapped at around age 10 by an itinerant biker gang. They deliver her into the hands of an unstable warlord, Dementus (an all-in Chris Hemsworth), who both grows attached to the little girl and makes her witness acts of horrific barbarity. Midway through the movie, Dementus mentions, with startling offhandedness, that he once had his own children who died; whether by way of remembrance or as his own comfort object, he goes around with a grubby teddy bear strapped to his chest. Furiosa remains mute while Dementus holds her captive, refusing to reveal the location of the Green Place, but her status as a healthy, well-nourished child makes her a valuable piece of property. After Dementus is forced to hand her over to the Wasteland’s absolute ruler Immortan Joe (now played by Lachy Hulme), Furiosa sets about planning her escape, her survival, and her slow-simmering revenge.
Furiosa’s story has an elemental quality that makes it impossible not to root for her as she evades her pursuers; joins forces with a sympathetic fellow traveler, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke); and awaits her climactic encounter with the sadistic, vain, yet oddly self-aware Dementus, one of the more interesting blockbuster villains in recent memory. But with its division into chapters with ponderous titles like “The Pole of Inaccessibility” and “Beyond Vengeance,” Furiosa often feels padded, constructed with a stop-and-start pacing that places it in unflattering relief next to its careening predecessor. I found myself wishing it had taken advantage of its longer running time to flesh out characters and relationships—for example, the implied but barely explored romantic connection between Furiosa and Praetorian Jack—rather than to further drive home the point that, yes, Furiosa is an unstoppable badass in search of some well-earned payback.
To Miller’s credit, there’s never a sense that he is recycling ideas or cynically milking his own franchise. The stunts may be created using a mix of practical and digital effects, but the result still feels handcrafted and personal, with admirable contributions from production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and editor Margaret Sixel (all of whom won Oscars for Fury Road, and the latter of whom is married to Miller). Meanwhile Miller, who recently turned 79, is already pondering a sixth Mad Max chapter, one that would follow Max a year before the events of Fury Road. He has spoken in interviews about how the Wasteland universe, in all its peculiar geography and economy and cultural specificity, has lived in his head for more than 40 years; it would be a crime to let the success or failure of any individual film (the worst one so far has been Beyond Thunderdome) get in the way of the playing out of that internal saga.
At one point in Furiosa, an ill-treated underling, negotiating with his warlord for better treatment, demands that his leader provide “double the maggot mash and the roach rations.” That line, in all its cheerful grotesquery, describes how I feel about the prospect of another installment from the Mad Max universe. It doesn’t have to be perfect—and it will, without doubt, be gnarly as all hell—but even after another two-and-a-half-hours, I’m still hungry for another helping.
Discover more from CaveNews Times
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.