‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ movie review: Another worthy trip to the Wasteland
There aren’t many franchises in Hollywood history that boast multiple classics, but Mad Max is definitely one of them. The 1979 original, its thunderous sequel The Road Warrior, and the spectacular Fury Road are each all-timers in their own right, and while Furiosa doesn’t quite enter the same pantheon, it’s another worthy trip to the Wasteland from director George Miller.
The single biggest obstacle facing the fifth instalment was Fury Road, which raised expectations to an almost unreachable height. The ‘Best Picture’ nominee is one of the 21st century’s most dazzling works of cinematic auteurship, but the obligatory downside of almost every prequel is that everybody knows where the story is heading, which automatically reduces the stakes.
That means Miller has to take a completely different approach, with Furiosa unfolding over decades and following a more conventional narrative structure than its predecessor/chronological successor. Split into five chapters, the result is frequently spectacular and undeniably glorious to watch on the biggest screen possible when it sings loudest. However, an occasionally meandering quality seeps in to rob momentum away at several key points.
Star Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t even appear until almost midway through, either, but Alyla Browne makes for an equally compelling substitute. Tracing Furiosa’s origins from a sheltered and bountiful life, the youngster ends up separated from her family before spending years under the ambitiously watchful eye of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus.
Furiosa is larger in scale than Fury Road and expands the Wasteland through the introductions of the Bullet Farm and Gastown, but the relationship between the two leads remains fundamental throughout. Both Browne and Taylor-Joy bring a quiet intensity and iron-willed determination to their respective performances that establishes a neat line between the pair and Charlize Theron, but fortunately, never does it feel like they’re explicitly trying to connect dots Miller had already planned out in advance.
Meanwhile, Hemsworth is having a blast hamming it up and devouring the scenery, perfectly reflecting what audiences have understood the Wasteland to be. In fact, Dementus is basically what Mad Rockatansky could have become had he processed his own tragedy and trauma in different ways, and while the ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ shtick has long become cliché, it’s easy to buy into with Furiosa‘s hero and villain because of the way their bond was literally forged in fire.
Of course, Miller has hardly pivoted in the direction of character-driven drama, and it’s unsurprising that Furiosa is at its best when all hell breaks loose. An extended opening set piece, an ill-advised assault on Immortan Joe’s forces at the Citadel, and a showstopping extended chase scene involving an armoured War Rig and all manner of assailants are nothing short of spectacular, but the chaptered nature of the narrative injects everything with a stop/start quality that forces things to be repeatedly jumpstarted in order to recapture the pulse-pounding excitement intrinsic to Mad Max that only appears in fits and starts.
Furiosa is a good movie, a very good one in fact, but it falls short of being a great one. On paper and in execution, it’s the largest-scale Mad Max yet, but by expanding the focus, Miller inadvertently stretches himself too thin. The action is staggering, the performances from the key players are ferocious across the board, and it’s an epic in every sense of the word. And yet, it constantly feels as though classic status would easily be in reach with a couple of minor alterations or the trimming of some extraneous narrative fat. A regularly excellent film, then, but perhaps one not quite worthy of Valhalla.
