Note: There aren’t exactly twists or anything to spoil in FURIOSA, but this is all spoilers. You really should see the movie first. This review the discussion afterwards.
There are over one million things I’ve always loved about the MAD MAX movies, and one of them is that they’re separate tales. There’s no continuity, no narrative references to or consequences from a previous chapter, and other than Max Rockatansky and his Last of the V8 Interceptors there’s never been a returning character, location or faction. They don’t necessarily take place in any order, and they’re so separate that some people think Tom Hardy’s Max is a different character from Mel Gibson’s. I’ve always thought of them as more like the Man With No Name trilogy than, say, STAR WARS.
But FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA isn’t a MAD MAX movie. Says it right there in the title – it’s a saga. And we knew it was the backstory of Furiosa, written in conjunction with MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, shown to Charlize Theron to help her performance, at one point supposedly considered to be shot back-to-back, at another to be done as an anime movie directed by Mahiro Maeda (director of the Second Renaissance episodes of THE ANIMATRIX and animator on NAUSICAA and KILL BILL VOL. 1). So FURIOSA is a traditional prequel in the sense that it depicts an earlier stage of the specific world and characters of FURY ROAD.
Fortunately that movie is so spectacular, and there is so much going on inside of it, that god damn is it thrilling to be back there and have a chance to look around and find out a little more about life in the Wasteland: what Gas Town and the Bullet Farm are like, what goes on in those holes people crawl out of outside of the Citadel, what happens when someone tries to attack the Citadel, what sort of psychotic warlord leadership is most effective for business.
And of course, we see where Furiosa grew up, where she fought so hard to return to: The Green Place. Before when I pictured young Furiosa being abducted from her home I think I assumed she’d be a pretty normal little girl and we’d see what her life was like, we’d learn about some of the things she mentions in FURY ROAD (her clan Swaddle Dog, her mother Mary Jabassa, her Initiate Mother K.T. Concannon), until tragedy struck and she was forged into the fierce warrior we know her as.
No, not exactly. Instead, FURIOSA gives us about two seconds of normal life – young Furiosa (Alyla Browne, also young Tilda Swinton in THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING) picking peaches with Valkyrie (Dylan Adonis) – before they notice masked raiders cutting up a horse in the forest and Furiosa immediately sneaks over to cut the fuel lines on their motorcycles. It may be that all Vuvalini children are taught to defend their home in this way, but Furiosa seems to excel – she doesn’t get scared, doesn’t hesitate, just tells Valkyrie (who we know is a total badass when played by Megan Gayle in FURY ROAD) to “sit still as a rock” while she takes care of them. But they snatch her and take off with her as if she’s loot, just like the meat they stole.
The genius of this particular Mad Max Saga is that while FURY ROAD takes place over a few days, its prequel spans 18 years, and is divided into five chapters as Furiosa grows up, switches between different captors, moves through different jobs – and yet it still feels similar to FURY ROAD’s almost-like-one-long-car-chase approach, because Furiosa never stops fighting, never stops trying to escape, from the second they grab her to her last frame. That lady never gives in.
The details of clan Swaddle Dog and Initiate Mother K.T. Concannon remain a mystery, but god damn do we get an impression of Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser, ANYONE BUT YOU). Moments after Furiosa’s captors hit the desert her mom’s already giving chase on a horse – I believe it’s the first horse riding we’ve seen in the MAD MAX series. The movie literally hits the ground running when a Vuvalini General (Elsa Pataky, INTERCEPTOR, in one of her two roles in this movie!) jumps off and keeps shooting.
They agree that none of these trespassers can survive to tell the tale of this place, and if you think just because Mary’s on a horse and looks real natural barefoot and wearing a nice blue dress that she can’t handle something like that, think again. Her race across the dunes is my favorite section of the movie, tied with all the other sections of the movie. She hits a few of the bikers with her sniper rifle and chases them for days on a motorcycle, leveling up by switching to other, better ones from the guys she kills. I couldn’t believe it when she hopped down and, as if in a pit crew, quickly transferred a wheel to a better bike left behind but sabotaged. She also steals a helmet made out of skulls. The skull is designed to protect the brain but it’s not enough for a motorcycle crash, so you just gotta get an extra layer of skull.
I love the scene where we switch to the perspective of the kidnappers. They hear “the Thunderbike” coming for them and it terrifies them. Bullets start hitting from out of nowhere. Mary Jabassa is coming after them like an unseen force in a horror movie. We enjoy their terror but we also hear their conversation about how bringing horse meat won’t be enough for the warlord they’re trying to please, Dementus. They have to bring him this girl and tell him about the “place of abundance” she came from. If they do that, “no one will scum us anymore.” In the woods they seemed like such scary monsters, but now they’re pathetically human – losers doing evil to satiate a guy they’re scared of.
While Mary is picking these guys off, little Furiosa is also putting in work, chewing through the fuel line, stealing a knife, cutting herself loose, making a run for it. One great cinematic moment among hundreds in this movie is when one last guy has managed to slip into the biker camp before Mary could get him and she’s wondering what the fuck to do now but then she sees her daughter take care of it and says, “Good girl.”
Various marauders fight to be the one to bring her to Dementus (Pataky’s husband Chris Hemsworth, CA$H), “King of Bikerdom” and leader of the Biker Horde, which when seen above appears to at one point number in the thousands, at least. He never learns Furiosa’s name, but claims her as his daughter and acts like she should like him even after he crucifies her mother in front of her.
Dementus is another cruel maniac showman like Immortan Joe, but pretending to be a man of the people instead of a god. That’s an aspect of him that’s very true to real life autocrats. He tells the people of the Citadel to turn against their leaders for treating them unfairly – he’s basically co-opting the true and righteous, because they really are being mistreated, but of course there’s no chance he would be any better to them if he was in charge. And when he later takes over Gastown he’s said to be “running it into the ground” – tyrannical and incompetent. I feel like I could name a few guys like that.
That’s a really cool scene because Dementus discovers the Citadel and just assumes he can handle them. He threatens the Immortan (now played by Lachy Hulme, KILLER ELITE) and friends while they stand up on their balcony and we’re put into the strange position of kind of wanting to root for the People Eater (John Howard, RAZORBACK, YOUNG EINSTEIN) and the War Boys to show him who’s boss. Then, as Dementus struggles to keep them from hoisting Furiosa’s trailer cage into the sky he looks like a dashing swashbuckler, and we know what horrors await her in the Citadel, so it kinda makes him seem vaguely heroic for a second. Meanwhile there’s the character credited as “Corpse Minder” (Dawn Klingberg, THE DRY) trying to pull her into the ground, and I want to believe she’s trying to rescue her, but it seems very likely she has some other bizarre thing in mind. So Furiosa is this unstoppable badass but for the moment she’s stuck in a tug of war between all these freakos.
I realized I was a Hemsworth fan the first time I saw BLACKHAT, and then he cemented it with EXTRACTION and EXTRACTION II, but I think this is his best performance so far. Dementus is such a good villain – extravagantly sadistic, funny and weird, has hilarious turns of phrase, goes through phases and changes his costume and nickname (the Great Dementus, the Red Dementus, the Dark Dementus). He self identifies as an “evil bastard” but either forgets sometimes or thinks he might convince somebody else to. For example he talks sweetly to young Furiosa to make her feel safe, talks about his own “little ones” who he lost. He’s trying to use her to find the “place of abundance” she comes from, but also he might really believe in that moment yeah, I’m a good person, I had kids, I know how to talk to them.
In a way Hemsworth is the lead, because Furiosa stays young and played by Browne for what seems like nearly half of the movie before handing it over to Anya Taylor-Joy (THE NORTHMAN). Incredibly, Browne doesn’t look as much like Taylor-Joy as she appears to – her face is digitally altered to increasingly resemble her as she ages in the story. I had no idea!
Theron as Furiosa in FURY ROAD is one of my all time favorite characters and performances, but one of the things that makes FURIOSA so exciting is seeing Taylor-Joy in the role. A less experienced actor, but similarly impressive so far, equally distinctive, and here proving herself up to the task of inhabiting the role, of echoing Theron while putting her own spin on the physical ferocity and non-verbal simmering of the character. Also I think it’s cute that they almost did this as an anime, then cast an actress with enormous eyes.
Furiosa becomes currency exchanged in a political dispute between Dementus and Joe, swapped (along with the Organic Mechanic [Angus Sampson, INSIDIOUS]) to maintain control of Gas Town, which they’ve captured through a psychotic trojan horse trick. And we can’t get into that without mentioning the greatness of “the Octoboss” (Goran Kleut, REVENGE OF THE SITH, GODS OF EGYPT, HACKSAW RIDGE, ALIEN: COVENANT, WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE), the weird dude with the black mask and giant horns we keep seeing and wondering about before Dementus bosses around a biker who insists on first getting permission from the Octoboss. It would be worth putting in the movie just for the laughs, but it tells us there are tensions with other gangs subsumed by Dementus’ Horde, and this incident foreshadows what will soon be the warlord’s complete failure of leadership in Gas Town, as the Octoboss has gone rogue and attacks a Citadel gas run in the prequel’s most FURY-ROAD-like action set piece.
That could be a transcendent sequence for the action alone – when we see that the guys chasing the tanker are called “mortifliers” because they open up their paragliders and attack from the sky, it inspires that hearty this-is-some-next-level-shit laughter only the most inventive action can achieve. FURY ROAD’s Guy Norris returns as stunt coordinator (with the freshly minted “Action Designer” credit that debuted on THE FALL GUY) along with long time Cynthia Rothrock co-star Richard Norton as fight choreographer and Grand Imperator. But FURY ROAD d.p. John Seale went back into retirement, so his enormous shoes are filled by Simon Duggan (KNOWING, THE GREAT GATSBY, 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE). I think Miller’s experience and advancements in technology allowed the camera to be an even better dance partner for the ridiculously complex battles between multiple speeding vehicles.
But figuratively and sometimes literally beneath the spectacle is a whole lot of good character drama. Furiosa is hanging from the bottom of the truck in an attempt to escape the Citadel, so she’s confronted with attackers and has to strategize to help fight them off for her own safety. I love that there’s this dynamite I kept expecting her to toss but when she gets to it she casually clips the fuse and saves it for later. Then she ends up on the hood and in the passenger seat alternately helping and fighting off the driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, ONLY GOD FORGIVES).
(By the way, I love that since this is a saga there’s room for a montage of the truck being built. Man, I gotta get a clear look at that chrome Immortan Joe tableau on the side. What a beautiful, horrible machine.)
Furiosa’s relationship with Jack is another prime example of Miller’s economical storytelling. Through relatively few scenes we become invested in his subversive act of recruiting Furiosa to his crew to train her in “road war” and allow her to escape. He says he’s from a military family, he shoots like an elite special ops dude, he’s the epitome of a certain type of soldier: charismatic and noble, fights bad guys, tries to do right but can he really do that when he’s working for a fascist organization? Anyway, he and Furiosa learn from each other and when she embraces him in that way she did Valkyrie in FURY ROAD, which we now realize is a cultural thing, and he goes along with it, it shows that he’s respecting her specific identity and background and not just what her talents offer to the Citadel.
And of course there’s a whole other Furiosa and Jack action set piece that’s thrilling and mythic and a huge character moment – he sets her up to escape, gives her the green light, but she goes back to help him. Although it lacks the element of saving someone trying to kill you, I see it as a cousin to the scenes in BABE: PIG IN THE CITY and HAPPY FEET TWO where the protagonist has every right to only save themselves by leaving but turns back to save someone else. In this case it’s monumental that a person who has been forced to dedicate most of her life to one single-minded goal has the capacity to trust someone enough to risk herself to bring him along. Unfortunately in this Wasteland that’s worse than Babe’s city she’s forced to instead ally herself with the Immortan in order to get her revenge on Dementus. This puts her in place for the beginning of FURY ROAD, where she’s helping the wives escape but she’s a little terrifying to them.
Like any prequel, FURIOSA explains certain things that you’d expect it to, like of course we find out what happened to her arm. But for me, at least, it never felt like that was the point of thing. It felt like that was just something that organically happens within a story about so many other things. After Furiosa tattooed the star map on her forearm I had this goofy moment of questioning whether or not she had that in FURY ROAD before realizing oh… duh. When her arm is crushed between vehicles it seems like a horrendous enough explanation of how she could’ve lost it, but it’s much more fitting that she twisted it off herself to escape handcuffs. Of course she did.
Listening to interviews with Miller there seem to be many touches people love – Jack’s resemblance to Max, for one – that he swears didn’t consciously occur to him while making it. So I’m not sure if he meant anything by it or not but I love that Furiosa’s ultimate feat of tenacity echoes the cruel choice Max gave to Goose’s killer Johnny at the very end of MAD MAX – to cut off his own foot or blow up. (He seems to choose the latter.)
In fact, the finale – with our vengeful protagonist tracking her enemy, having him on the ground trying to talk his way out of it, then suffering a sadistic fate – mirrors the original MAD MAX instead of the spectacular battles of its bigger, badder sequels. Here the ending is the part I find most puzzling and enigmatic. MAD MAX was an energetic elaboration on a pretty straight forward revenge movie formula. Max is a feared cop in a crazed near future, but he’s also a husband and new father and regular guy. When his partner is killed he’s disillusioned, quits the force, goes on a road trip with his family. When the same group of bikers who killed Goose run over his wife and kid it pushes him into madness so he hunts and kills them all.
Not much more to it except the style and tone. In a rave review in Time Magazine, Richard Corliss likened Miller to Spielberg, Pakula, Scorsese and Carpenter, directors who “speak eloquently in the special language of the cinema.” He non-judgmentally described MAD MAX as “a movie without a single liberal impulse” and “not a ‘people picture’” but “an action movie whose subject is machines, and the sophisticated killing machine man could become. The hardware is the star here.”
But after his debut’s runaway international success Miller started to look at Joseph Campbell and consciously followed archetypes of mythical heroes in the sequels. ROAD WARRIOR is explicitly a legend told by the grown up version of the Feral Child, and FURIOSA by the History Man (George Shevtsov, “The Old Storyteller,” THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING), who was there for some of it but points out that there are different accounts of Dementus’ death, with varying levels of brutality.
I love the discomfort the story gives me. I’m rooting for Furiosa’s badass revenge but also thinking that Dementus’ jibber jabber is kind of correct. That they both responded to tragedy with savagery to survive the Wasteland is a false equivalence, but doing some fucked up Mad Max shit to him doesn’t feel like the way to be better than him. I love that it echoes MAD MAX because it forces me to confront how I feel about a similar scenario when it’s a character who’s less of a blank, who I have more emotional investment in, and who represents hope. Even Max, in each of his sequels, journeys from harsh self interest to selfless heroism. He wouldn’t have lasted if he just got revenge each time.
So what does it mean for Dr. Miller, 45 years later and with a full portfolio of humanistic masterpieces to his name, to return to this type of scenario? And how should we interpret the symbolism of the imaginatively fucked up way Furiosa chooses (according to what the History Man says she told him) to dispatch Dementus? The peach stone her mother gave her, and made her promise to plant, becomes both the weapon to kill him and the literal seed for a new Green Place. A peach grows from him and she ritualistically shares it with the wives before they begin their journey. So is it a symbol of renewal, a wish for something good to come out of all this horror, a sign that the good things of the past are not all dead and there’s hope for the future? Or should we consider this fruit to be forever tainted, since it’s literally borne from death and violence, and now it’s being fed to the next generation? Is this a half empty/half full type thing?
Here’s something I find interesting about the way Miller works. When FURY ROAD came out there was a 4-issue comic book tie-in with stories written by Miller and his co-writer Nico Lathouris (the mechanic from MAD MAX!). After seeing FURIOSA I dug out the issue about her, wondering if it would contradict the movie or make any reference to its events, since they’d already written some version of this back then. The issue is about Furiosa being given the job of protecting the wives (except from Immortan Joe, they point out) and, after spending time with them, deciding to help them escape. Early on the wives are reading books, and learn what a peach is. So I read it thinking “There’s no way she’s going to give them that peach at the end, is she?”
She doesn’t. But she says, “None of you are prepared for this journey, and there are no guarantees. There is one thing I want… to plant this peach stone at the other end,” and she holds out a peach pit.
So it seems like at that point Miller didn’t have quite the same idea about the tree growing out of Dementus. But he had a peach pit. He liked the idea of Furiosa carrying around a peach pit with the intent of planting it. And at that point she assumes The Green Place still exists, so it must have a significance to her other than scarcity. Maybe after fully developing Dementus and getting to know him Miller decided he deserved a terrible end. But it wasn’t the death the story carried with it over the years, it was the seed.
I have not yet returned to FURY ROAD in a post-FURIOSA world, but I’m excited to see how they play together. I can see ways that FURIOSA deepens the story of FURY ROAD. If little Furiosa hadn’t tried to stop the raiders she wouldn’t have been kidnapped, but the Horde would’ve been led to The Green Place and maybe they’d all be dead. If she or her mom hadn’t stopped the raiders from blabbing, or had given in to threats and told Dementus the location, the Green Place still would’ve eventually gone sour, but the aging Vuvalini of FURY ROAD probly wouldn’t have been around to help take the Citadel and turn it into a new Green Place. If Praetorian Jack hadn’t helped Furiosa she might have never helped the wives, or trusted Max. I’m sure there are many other connections to make.
Although FURIOSA is the first Mad Max related movie to open at #1, it was a record low #1 for Memorial Day weekend, causing its “failure” to be the main topic of FURIOSA discussion for entertainment reporters. To me, coming out of a movie so amazing, so brimming with scenes and characters and ideas to discuss, but to focus on that fucking topic again is a strong example of how much we’ve allowed the inane chatter of soul-less business-minded weiners to replace actual appreciation of the arts. Pointing that out, of course, summons well-meaning fans to lecture me that if this doesn’t do well then Miller probly won’t be able to make the Max-related FURY ROAD lead-in he has said he might be interested in doing. True, but we’ve just covered everything there is to say about that topic.
Not enough time has passed for us to be done celebrating the current miracle. If you waste a miracle fretting about not getting another one, maybe you don’t deserve it. Fortunately around here that’s not a problem. In my circles FURIOSA is the biggest event movie in years. Everyone I’ve asked has already seen it and launches into a long and excited discussion of all their favorite aspects. I think I’ve had five conversations like that already, and I foresee more soon. One friend beat me to seeing it twice and the rest plan to follow. Even on one viewing I’m obsessed with the thing, my review is getting out of control so I resisted going into a million other things I loved like the War Pup’s excitement for “the bommyknocker” or the Smeg getting to choose a random War Boy or the character of Scrotus or the source of Furiosa’s new arm or…
The first time I saw MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, before it was even over, I thought it was as good as any movie I’d ever seen. It felt premature to say that at the time, but enough years and viewings have passed that I don’t have to feel silly about it anymore. So it’s saying something that right now I feel like FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA might be as good. We’ll see if that lasts. But it’s definitely in the same neighborhood, which makes it an all-timer.
My other George Miller related reviews:
THE ROAD WARRIOR (reviewed in 2007)
MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME (also reviewed in 2007)
HAPPY FEET TWO (reviewed when it came out in 2011)
MAD MAX (reviewed in 2015)
THE ROAD WARRIOR (reviewed in 2015 because I forgot I already wrote about it)
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (reviewed when it came out in 2015)
“Righteous Fury,” a second piece inspired by the FURY ROAD discourse, also from 2015
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (reviewed in 2015)
BABE (produced and written by Miller, reviewed in 2015)
BABE: PIG IN THE CITY (reviewed in 2016)
MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME (revisited in 2020 as part of a summer of ’85 retrospective)
THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (reviewed when it came out in 2022)
May 30th, 2024 at 6:25 pm
I will be thinking of Dementus essentially looking up things on Wikipedia in his spare time for a long time to come. Great movie.