Review - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Mad Max: Fury Road is probably the best action film of the 21st century. Here is its prequel: good and technically impressive, but not even close as an achievement.
The first thing you need to know is that you don’t need to know a lot about the Mad Max franchise to be able to enjoy this film. It does reference its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road quite a bit, but not in a way that alienates new viewers. In any case, watch it in theaters if you can.
Also of note: this review doesn’t spoil the film, so don’t worry if you care about spoilers in any way.
Witness Her: George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Production from Australia and the United States. Released in 2024.
Much of what made Mad Max: Fury Road work so well nine years ago was its deceptive simplicity. Any viewer could go in completely blind to what happened in the previous films, and with just voice-overs of newsreels in the opening credits, we had everything we needed to know regarding the state of the apocalyptic world. The rest was relatively straightforward, women longed to escape to a better place, only to realize that the only possibility towards peace, tranquility and redemption were in toppling the structures of power that threatened their freedom, all in the span of two days. Couple the simple story-telling and strong thematic content with probably the best technical work for a film in the century (with top notch sound design, edits, frames, colors, sets, costumes, choreography and practical effects) and you had a film that defied all kinds of definitions and boundaries, becoming an event action film and winner of six out of the ten Oscars it was nominated for. Suffice to say: Miller’s prequel Furiosa had big shoes to fill, and while it set out to do something completely different in a formal sense, I do feel the necessity to reference Fury Road led to some choppy filmmaking decisions that made Furiosa less enjoyable than it could have been.
Furiosa starts similarly without wasting too much time. The protagonist Furiosa (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) is kidnapped from her homeplace by a band of scavengers connected to Dementus, the film’s main antagonist (played by Chris Hemsworth), and throughout the film the viewer gets to witness her grow in strength, skill and grit until she becomes the Imperator under the Citadel’s leader Immortan Joe. She starts wanting to get back to her home, but eventually it morphs into some kind of a revenge fantasy thrill ride, as she changes her objectives two thirds of the way through.
The first thing to note is that in a technical sense, Furiosa maintains Fury Road’s level of craft. The world still feels very lived in and real despite its post-apocalyptic setting, the sets and costumes are equally disgusting and mesmerizing, almost like a Cronenberg film about radiation’s effects on the human body, and the sound design and music still match the high-octane energy that it’s going for. Some of the sets elements are as ingenious as they are funny, like Dementus for example, who rides what can only be described as a bike chariot. The practical effects, likewise, are very good, though not as central to the film as it was with Fury Road, where the endless choice gave way to endless spectacle.
The greatest part, however, is still Margaret Sixel’s (and Eliot Knapman) editing, which has the challenge of cutting frenetically in each scene to put viewers in a constant state of alert and dynamism, while keeping the action coherent and understandable. It would have been easy to cut it like a Marvel film, devoid of personality and using movement to trick viewers into dynamism instead of feeding into it. Here, every zoom from medium shot to close-up, the quick cuts, the fades to black after important events close, even in the use of chapters to divide the story, everything makes sense and adds to the experience. I almost feel like Sixel’s work is a version of Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s work but on MDMA.
While the film’s cut was very impressive, the big downside -which I attribute to the script and Miller’s structure- is the film’s length. When the film is not in high octane action set piece mode, and settles into building story through other means, it slows the film down significantly and has many scenes that could have been omitted from the final product. Particularly, the film’s focus on worldbuilding using information viewers already had from Fury Road felt like a cheaper experience. It reminded me of the supervillain prequel films I dislike, which have a ton of effort put into callbacks from previous projects and signaling to fans. I don’t think it would have been necessary here to continue building the lore, it was already simple enough to understand and process. I felt this particularly with many scenes within the Citadel, like Immortan Joe’s introduction and an exchange that occurs early on with Dementus, the building of the war rig, the meeting the wives, among others.
Other scenes also felt unnecessary, like Furiosa’s budding connection with Tom Burke’s character Jack. The best moments of Furiosa were where Miller’s built character through action sequences: we learned more about Furiosa in her lack of trust in others by hiding away, her grit by always finding ways to escape captivity, her rage through loud bursts of emotion, and her control in slight movements of her car. Moments that took viewers away from the action ultimately felt like an obligation from Hollywood execs to make her seem more palatable.
The one element I feel most ambivalent towards is Chris Hemsworth as Dementus. It does seem like the role he was born to play, with an emphasis on action and pathetic comedic energy, and his delivery seems to be exactly what the film asks of him -brash, childish, enraged, unhinged- but something about a lack of interiority made the final moments of the film stick the landing a bit less, which is made all the more jarring by his humanization and juxtaposition with Furiosa. Dementus always has something to say, almost to a fault. Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy works with the little words that she has and acts mainly through her gaze and gives a wonderful performance. She has exactly what Hemsworth lacked: interiority. Despite certain moments with Jack that weren’t all that necessary to me, she always delivered more than what the film needed of her.
My nitpicks of the film are not to say that Furiosa was bad in any way. Far from it, it is better than a lot of blockbuster action films I’ve seen from recent years. It was always going to be a challenge to follow-up Fury Road, the bar was just too high. Its intentions were in the right place, opting for epic storytelling instead of a fast-paced action story, but by giving too many unnecessary details of worldbuilding, falling into prequel pitfalls, focusing on non-action sequences to build character, and overstaying its welcome in terms of length, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not a great film, but rather a good one. I think I’d rather just watch Fury Road again, and I think Furiosa agrees with me.