By Jake Wilson
FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA ★★★★
(MA) 148 minutes
Talk about a hero’s journey. In all Australian cinema, no one has had a more extraordinary career than 79-year-old George Miller, who in his original Mad Max trilogy managed to build his own fantastical cinematic universe out of spare parts, back when the fashion for referring to film series as “franchises� was but a gleam in a merchandiser’s eye.
Furiosa fills in the origin story of the character, now played in somewhat less commanding fashion by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Decades on, he capped that achievement with the 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road, widely and rightly viewed as setting the bar for 21st-century action filmmaking. With Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, he’s back in the wasteland once more, while returning home: where Fury Road’s locations were in Namibia, Furiosa was shot primarily around Broken Hill, reportedly the most expensive Australian production of all time.
In another sense, this is a departure, the first Mad Max movie without Max as the reluctant hero. Replacing him is the comparably surly Furiosa, introduced in Fury Road as a one-armed avenging angel incarnated by Charlize Theron, who often gave the impression Tom Hardy’s Max was the one along for the ride.
A prequel, Furiosa fills in the origin story of the character, now played in somewhat less commanding fashion by the saucer-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy (and by child star Alyla Browne for much of the first hour). Abducted as a child from the matriarchal Place of Abundance, little Furiosa falls into the hands of a post-apocalyptic bikie gang led by the hulking Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), whose cherished teddy bear serves as a reminder of the family he lost long ago.
Chris Hemsworth almost steals the show as gang leader Dementus in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
His stony heart touched, Dementus adopts the stoically mute Furiosa, while forcing her to witness the death of her mother (Charlee Fraser), a trauma that defines everything to follow. From there she becomes a pawn in the turf war between Dementus and rival deranged warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), who you’ll remember from Fury Road as the pale-faced loon with the oxygen mask and army of War Boys with chrome-painted teeth.
The action sequences are as exhilarating as ever, with the essential touch of burlesque that reads as pure high spirits. But where Fury Road rarely paused for breath, here the storytelling is more leisurely: the plot spans a decade, letting Miller go to town with lurid world-building while indulging his philosophical side. The desert landscapes sometimes recall Monument Valley in John Ford’s Westerns; the plot could be a petrolhead’s fever dream of the Old Testament, albeit with no credible divinity in sight.
To a greater extent than anticipated, this is Hemsworth’s movie: parallel to Furiosa’s rise is the decline of Dementus, who goes from preening potentate to flailing demagogue without losing his ruthlessness or his gift of the gab. Ultimately, everything comes down to the face-off between these two. It’s here things go a little awry, as if Miller couldn’t entirely decide whether to subvert genre conventions or affirm them with a vengeance.
The broader problem is one that only a few prequels have managed to surmount: strictly speaking, the film doesn’t need to exist. Furiosa is not a complex character, and where her personality and motives are concerned, Fury Road told us everything we needed to know.
Indeed, you could make a case something is lost when the blanks are filled in. For instance, when we learn how she lost her arm and acquired an artificial one, rather than getting to imagine this for ourselves. But in today’s despoiled blockbuster landscape, the fact filmmaking this energetic, ambitious and sheerly eccentric remains possible is no cause for complaint.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is released in cinemas on May 23.
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