2024 has been a big year for desert-based sci-fi epics. First there was Dune: Part Two, an incredibly awesome movie. Then there was The Fall Guy, which chronicled the troubled production of a (fictional) desert-based sci-fi epic called METALSTORM, which was a fun spoof of Dune. There was also the inspired craziness of Amazon’s Fallout TV show, and somewhere along the line Godzilla and King Kong trashed the pyramids.
Now we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel to 2015’s instant classic Mad Max: Fury Road. I am a huge fan of the Mad Max films, and it thrills me to no end that George Miller, the man who originated the series with Mel Gibson all the way back in 1979, is still making these movies. Miller is currently 79 years old and the dude is still absolutely crushing it, directing dynamic action epics overflowing with creativity and completely bonkers energy.
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In my humble opinion, Fury Road is one of the best action films of all time, and I would even say that it is one of the best films of all time, period. It holds up beautifully nine years after its release (hard to believe it’s already been that long) and I could go on for a long time about how great it is, but I already did that back in 2015. One of the best characters in that film was Imperator Furiosa, played brilliantly by Charlize Theron. Furiosa was an instantly iconic character, possibly making even more of an impact than the film’s title character, Max. I mean no offense to Tom Hardy, who was very good as Max, but it was really Furiosa who left the most lasting impression.
Now, we finally get to see Furiosa’s story, and although she’s played by a different actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, (because this version of the character is quite a bit younger), Furiosa is thematically and stylistically consistent with Fury Road, and enhances the viewer’s appreciation of Furiosa as a character by seeing all the hardships she had to go through in order to get to the position she’s in by the time we first met her in Fury Road.
We got hints of Furiosa’s background in Fury Road, and it’s thrilling to get to see her story play out. We learned in Fury Road that she was from a utopia known as the Green Place of Many Mothers, but by the time Fury Road takes place the Green Place is long gone. In Furiosa we get to see it, and it is beautiful, and you immediately understand why Furiosa longs to return there. At the beginning of the film Furiosa is abducted from the Green Place by raiders, and Furiosa’s mother immediately sets off in pursuit, both to rescue her daughter and to kill the raiders so they can’t lead anyone else to the Green Place.
Furiosa’s mom is pretty damn awesome, but despite her best efforts she is unable to save her daughter from the biker hordes of the warlord Dementus, played with unhinged zeal by Chris Hemsworth. Dementus recaptures Furiosa and forces her to watch her mother’s execution. It’s a disturbing scene, but George Miller is a director who knows when it is more effective to leave certain details to the viewer’s imagination, so even though Furiosa’s mother’s death is brutal, the scene which depicts it doesn’t feel gratuitous.
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Dementus wants Furiosa to lead him back to where she came from, but Furiosa clams up and refuses to speak. Dementus adopts her as his daughter, hoping that she will eventually tell him how to find the Green Place. Furiosa secretly tattoos a star chart on her left arm to help her find her way home. Fury Road fans will remember that in that film, Furiosa is missing most of her left arm, and this detail will be important later.
Eventually, Dementus and his horde arrive at the Citadel, lorded over by Immortan Joe, the terrifying villain from Fury Road. Immortan Joe is one of my favorite movie villains, and it was great to get to see him again (even though he is, you know, very evil). Immortan Joe is also played by a different actor, both because this is a younger version of the character and because Hugh Keays-Byrne, who originally played the character, passed away in 2020. We also get to see Joe’s henchmen The People Eater and The Bullet Farmer, as well as Joe’s sons Rictus (featured prominently in Fury Road) and Scrotus. Yes, his name is actually Scrotus.
Scrotus was the main villain in the 2015 Mad Max video game, where he ended up with a chainsaw blade embedded in his skull, courtesy of Max. I’m not sure if the game is canon to the movie series, but it ultimately doesn’t matter because the Mad Max series has never had a strict timeline of events. Regardless of whether the game is canon, it’s reasonable to assume that at some point Scrotus got killed which is why he is not in Fury Road. And now I can stop saying “Scrotus.”
Anyway, Dementus tries and fails to take the Citadel from Joe, so instead Dementus takes over Gastown, an oil refinery that supplies the Citadel with gasoline. Gastown was referenced in Fury Road but we didn’t get to actually see it (although I think it was a location in the video game, but it’s been a while since I played it). Furiosa eventually takes us to the Bullet Farm as well, which was another location mentioned but not seen in Fury Road. It was awesome to finally see these places, and the big action sequence that takes place in the Bullet Farm is one of my favorite scenes in the film.
As it turns out, Dementus kinda sucks at running Gastown, and this leads to conflict with Joe later down the (fury) road. While all this is going on, Furiosa is trying her best to keep a low profile, having been given to Joe earlier by Dementus. She helps build the first version of the War Rig, a heavily armored tanker truck built to withstand raider attacks. During a supply run, most of the Rig’s crew are killed, and Furiosa and the Rig’s commander are the only survivors. The commander is a man known as Praetorian Jack, and he recognizes Furiosa’s potential and offers to train her.
Jack is an interesting character. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Max himself, and you can see how Furiosa’s relationship with him helps her to be able to trust Max when she meets him many years later in Fury Road. It’s never made explicitly clear if Jack and Furiosa are in love or not, but it doesn’t have to be. Jack is the first person to treat Furiosa with any kind of respect since she was abducted from the Green Place, and it is clear that at the very least they have a deep respect and appreciation for each other until (SPOILER) Jack meets his grisly end at the hands of Dementus.
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Dementus basically tortures Jack to death, and once again forces Furiosa to watch as he kills someone she cares about. This is also how Furiosa loses her arm. It gets crushed between cars during a chase with Dementus, and he then strings her up by her broken arm while he kills Jack. But while he is distracted, Furiosa cuts off her arm and escapes. This is also the arm that she tattooed the star chart on, so by losing her arm she is also losing her map to her home. It’s tragic, and I admire that George Miller was able to make Furiosa losing her arm more than just a physical injury, it’s a poignant manifestation of the fact that she will never be able to go home again.
Eventually, Furiosa catches up with Dementus and the final confrontation begins. And it is here where the movie really surprised me. Spoiler warning here. Furiosa isolates and subdues Dementus and reveals her identity to him. It has been quite some time since Dementus had last seen her as a child so he didn’t immediately recognize her. She demands he give back the life and the years he stole from her, but of course he cannot. He tells her that they aren’t so different, he too lost his family and knows that revenge does not make a person whole.
“You fabulous thing,” he growls to her. “You crawled out of a pitiless grave, deeper than hell. Only one thing that is going to do that for you. Not hope. Hate. No shame in hate. It’s one of the greatest forces of nature.”
It’s a powerful scene between the two of them, and it’s not at all what I expected. For all of his bluster, for all of his craziness and the many cruel acts he perpetrates throughout the film, at the end Dementus is a shell of a man. And what Furiosa does to him is…honestly pretty haunting. I’m not going to describe it because I don’t want to spoil everything, but it’s an image that’s hard to shake.
What I love about Furiosa as a prequel is that it enhances the viewer’s understanding of and appreciation for the characters. Now when I watch Fury Road, I will know that Furiosa rejected Dementus’ final words to her, and that she resolved to not be like him. Seeing what she had to go through makes her even more sympathetic in Fury Road, and makes that famous moment when she discovers that the Green Place is gone all the more poignant. In both films Furiosa is in pursuit of goals that prove unattainable. In Furiosa she wants her stolen life back, but those years are gone. And in Fury Road she wants to take Immortan Joe’s wives to the Green Place, only to discover that it is no longer there. There is a lot of tragedy in Furiosa’s character, which makes her indomitable will even more ferocious.
Anya Taylor-Joy is great as Furiosa. Taylor-Joy is a very talented actress who has been in a lot of movies ever since her cinematic debut in Robert Eggers’ disturbing 2015 film The Witch. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, she said that she had never driven a car before filming Furiosa, which is…pretty extraordinary. She captures Furiosa’s strength and intensity, much of which is conveyed through her fiercely expressive eyes. Much like Max himself in the other movies, Furiosa doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue, and Taylor-Joy does a great job portraying her.
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I’ve also got to talk about Chris Hemsworth. I’m a big fan of his, even though he is unfairly handsome. In Furiosa he’s still got those Thor muscles, the dude’s arms are like tree trunks (one wonders how he is able to stay so buff in the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland). Hemsworth chews the scenery with aplomb and gives Dementus a voice that makes him sound like a deranged carnival barker, but he’s never so over-the-top that it’s impossible to take him seriously as a plausible threat to the protagonist. He’s not like Two-Face and Riddler in Batman Forever or the Penguin in Batman Returns, all of whom are so flamboyant that it’s difficult to believe they would pose that much of a threat. Dementus is over-the-top but he’s not too over-the-top, and Hemsworth is clearly having the absolute time of his life playing such an unhinged bad guy.
While I like Furiosa a lot, I don’t think it’s quite as good as Fury Road. I know I’ve mentioned Fury Road a lot, but the truth is that Furiosa and Fury Road are very different films. I respect George Miller a lot for this, since he could have made pretty much the same movie as Fury Road but with different characters and whatnot, and I would still have been happy. But he didn’t do that, and the two films are structured very differently.
Furiosa takes place over a much longer period of time, and as a result it doesn’t always have the same sense of urgency that Fury Road did. There are times when it feels like it meanders just a bit, and with a hefty running time of 148 minutes it’s nearly half an hour longer than Fury Road, and maybe could have been trimmed down just a bit. The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus is very unexpected, and some might even say it feels a bit anticlimactic. I felt that way myself a little bit, although that may be intentional to some degree.
But these are minor quibbles. I still enjoyed Furiosa a lot and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s a big, epic spectacle, chock-full of intense action, memorable characters and settings, and completely insane vehicles, with engines so loud you can feel them in your very soul. It delivers everything you want from a Mad Max movie, and while it is perhaps a tad overlong it is still a darn good time at the movies and also delivers plenty of curveballs where you least expect them. It enhances the lore and mystique of the Mad Max universe, and feels true to the spirit of the previous films in the franchise. George Miller is a mad genius and I sincerely hope he gets to add even more to this crazy cinematic world he has blessed us with.
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