Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

A little bit into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, we see a human skull resting in the sand of the post-apocalyptic desert that’s everywhere. A tiny lizard peeks out of the skull’s eye socket. Then the heavy wheels of a vehicle crush the skull and the lizard with it. Crunch! That’s as close as Furiosa comes to poetry. The highlight of this series, which started 45 years ago, is probably 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the predecessor to Furiosa, and that film did pack a considerable amount of poetry in its feral, combustible images. It was pure cinema, and we see some of that here too, in fits and starts. But mostly the panoramic spectacle of roaring engines and carnage, which still looks as though it took a nightmarish amount of effort to pull off, is just a continuation of Fury Road. 

George Miller, who has directed all five of these Mad Max films, is as dynamic and kinetic as ever. His compositions are still rock-solid, orienting us visually so we can understand and enjoy the maelstrom. Fury Road felt inspired, as though Miller were saving up years worth of stunt concepts and insane auto tricks and wedded all that to a story that took full measure of the toll this pitiless future took on women specifically. Having done that, Miller should really have let it rest. But now here’s a prequel, telling the backstory of Fury Road’s Furiosa (played there by Charlize Theron, played here by Alyla Browne as a girl and Anya Taylor-Joy as a young woman), and I’m not sure it’s a story we needed to see. 

Furiosa is captured by an evil Biker Horde led by the evil Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who takes Furiosa as his daughter. The Biker Horde gets into it with the Citadel, led by Immortan Joe and his War Boys, who were more entertaining in Fury Road. A lot of the time, we’re squinting through dust and smoke at shirtless beef gesticulating at each other like goony wrestlers, and we’re also trying to piece together what they’re saying, because they mostly communicate in guttural Australian accents that make their words come out like hostile belches. Blah blah bloo, one opines; Bloo blah boo, another ripostes; and Furiosa sits stoically (she poses as a mute boy and gets in with the Citadel crew) and keeps her counsel.

Taylor-Joy brings some zest to her big scene at the end, and Hemsworth, wearing a prosthetic beak, chews his lines like steak. But mostly this isn’t an actor’s movie, and the action we’re there for isn’t much fresher than it was in 2015. Did Miller run out of new things to show us? The violence gets monotonous — there are only so many ways you can do cars crashing, guys pancaked under tires, stuff blowing up. Miller seems to have made Furiosa not because it was burning a hole in him but because the money was there to make it. I don’t know what to think about the semi-romantic subplot pairing Furiosa with the decent-enough fellow who drives the War Rig for the Citadel. It didn’t really make me feel one way or the other about her or them, except as a source of more anguish. The film has a lot of anguish, and almost no downtime except when Furiosa and her guy touch foreheads.

Miller has, of course, made many other kinds of movies, but why does he keep returning to post-nuke Australia with all the rough-trade bikers and freakazoid warlords? It was early on, with Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior), that Miller started wanting the Mad Max stories to pack mythological weight, and maybe he likes having stumbled into his own Middle-earth or Mid-World, where he can bash action figures and Matchbox cars together when he wants to. Furiosa is, in this context, an avatar of female rage in a society that crushes humanity under its wheels. In that respect she’s a valuable character, but she has already been down this road with Miller, and so have we. 

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