An adrenaline rush and an furious allegory (pun intended) on the state of our world on the brink, George Miller‘s post-apocalyptic road movie continues with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), almost a decade after its near-perfect predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) hit the cinema screens — itself a long-awaited sequel of the Mad Max trilogy of the late 1970s and 1980s. Miller made other films, some of them exceptionally entertaining, like The Witches Of Eastwick (1987), but his legacy is Mad Max, and it was to be expected that he would always aim to deliver.
The weaknesses of the new Furiosa film (narratively a prequel, or rather a spin-off) are mostly of the thespian kind, as the acrobatics of the mise-en-scène are as diabolically fascinating as ever, and hardly skip a beat in the red dust of the post-Australian Wasteland. As dedicated as the actors are in it, their delivery simply cannot compare with the depth that Tom Hardy (Max) and Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa) brought to the set in Fury Road, the tension between their roles, and the power play of the dual charismas, entwined in battle, aligned in victory. An additional difficulty is a more flattened script, firmly locking the versatile Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa and a very game Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (the MVP of the film), in a protagonist-antagonist dyad, throughout, with little room for ambivalent human interaction to occur amongst the sand, chrome and diesel — a necessary ingredient in all the apocalyptic steampunk barbarism. The moving yet short-lived professional alliance between the young, silent Furiosa and her equally tight-lipped teacher of road-war skills, Tom Burke, as Praetorian Jack, does not quite reach the emotional impact of the Mad Max/Furiosa combo. Perhaps because there was no inner obstacle to overcome, they blended in seamlessly. However, the dark humour and psychological nuance as hallmark of the Mad Max universe is still in there, a distinctive voice amongst all the stereotypical CGI action that aspires to surpass it in shock and awe, and fails.
Despite all this, I could not take my eyes off the screen, following this origins story of the Imperator Furiosa, from feisty girl abducted, forced into slavery, through her daring escape and gender-fluid embrace of the high art of auto mechanics, emerging as a fierce warrior, avenger of the acid soils of Earth, yearning to return home, to The Green Place.
Which, as we know from Fury Road, is only a place of memory.
In a world of pure survival, devoured by greed and colonised by brutal men, each clinging to their piece of dying turf, Furiosa traces the stars tattooed on her forearm — willing to sacrifice both life and limb (literally) to get back where she belongs — a place very much a visual template of the Garden Of Eden.
“Who killed the World?”, indeed.
The Mad Max franchise, in its entirety, is one of the best cinema depictions of the destructive nature of capitalism I ever saw — although I am not quite sure this was meant to be an ideological point with Miller. Yet, that insatiable hunger for pillage, the relentless charging forward with incredible speed, acolyte frenzy decoded as mere psychotic stylistic choices of the dreaded Immortan Joe (a terrifyingly on point Lachy Hulme), perfectly fits into the pattern of the reduction of everything and everyone as resource to be owned and exploited.
A power-ride with only one destination.
★★★☆☆
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 