Review Roundup: George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
In 2015, George Miller revived his iconic Mad Max universe with Mad Max: Fury Road, an absolutely rip roarin’ chase film packed to the gills with stunning visuals, a pulse-pounding score, death-defying stunts, and an iconic performance by Charlize Theron as the brave Furiosa. Nine years later, Miller’s back with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel that tells of Furiosa’s life and childhood, and her struggle against the warlords that dominate the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Furiosa — which stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth — had its world premier at the 77th Cannes Film Festival last week. Does Miller’s latest journey into the wasteland hold up against Fury Road and the rest of the Mad Max films? Or does it crash and burn on the side of the road? Read on for a selection of critics’ reactions.
Furiosa sacrifices the runaway-train momentum of Fury Road in favour of slow, digressive world-building. As blockbuster prequels go, it’s nowhere near as indigestible as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but it still might leave you asking why Miller filled in all of these background details, and why anyone who isn’t a Mad Max obsessive should care about characters who remain collections of gimmicks and gizmos rather than three-dimensional people? Did viewers really stumble out of the cinema after Fury Road with a burning desire to learn about Furiosa and Immortan Joe’s early years?
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the fierce heroine originally played by Charlize Theron, Furiosa is the even bigger, more ambitious fever-dream prequel to Fury Road. Miller has always been a maximalist auteur, but he takes his visually bombastic sensibilities to new heights with Furiosa — a spectacular, utterly deranged epic that is unlike any Mad Max movie ever made. Furiosa trades in the franchise’s western vistas and lone-wolf narrative for a heavy-metal riff on Homer’s Odyssey, delivering a sprawling, immersive saga that manages to outdo its predecessor for the most bonkers action that’s ever been injected into your eyeballs.
It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.
Rather than reaching for — and failing to clear — the impossibly high bar that he set for himself, Miller has chosen to do something even crazier and more rewarding: He’s created a symphonic, five-part, decades-spanning revenge saga so immense and self-possessed that it refuses to be seen as the mere extension of another movie, even though it manages to deepen the impact of Fury Road at every turn.
What Miller & Co. are going for here is something akin to a hyperventilating character study — and one that doesn’t make those two elements contradictory. That they manage to pull it off makes the achievement makes it doubly impressive. What this memory-lane trip down the most furious of roads lacks in the shock of the new, it more than makes up for in expanding this particular cinematic universe. More importantly, it gives you a better sense of its main character’s place in it.
The most important thing to say about Furiosa, however, is that what it all adds up to is a movie that can be darkly bedazzling, and that will be embraced and defended in a dozen passionate ways — but it’s one that, to me, falls very short of being a Mad Max home run… In Furiosa, George Miller invests himself so heavily in the Mad Max mythology that he competes with it, tops it, and tears it apart at the same time.
A de facto origin story for its title character, Furiosa is filled with harrowing action sequences and genuine tension. That’s not easy to pull off when most viewers will be cognizant that our heroine is very much alive and kicking ass in Fury Road years later. There is a long list of prequel movies that have failed to even come close to the heights of their predecessors and, trust, Furiosa is not one of them.
So even as Furiosa is inevitably compared with Fury Road, both positively and negatively, put your trust in Miller’s weird, wild filmmaking. He’ll make you root for a near-silent hero in the face of insurmountable odds, and a demented villain who will go down alongside Fury Road’s Immortan Joe as a horrible new addition to Mad Max’s rogues gallery. Innovative and strange in the best ways, Furiosa repays that trust with a trip down a twisted cinematic rabbit hole that’ll likely once again redefine expectations for what an action film can be.
Furiosa is bigger than Fury Road. It has more heart. It has more meaning. And, yes, it has even more bonkers, you-won’t-believe-your eyes action. This time though the set pieces are longer, more visually stunning, and often so wildly over the top, you’ll fight off laughter before exploding into applause. The trucks are bigger, cars are faster, and motorcycles are more plentiful. And though a touchstone of Miller’s films has always been a certain grounding in reality, here he stretches that to its limits with additions like fan backpacks, parachutes, and hang gliders, just to give you a hint of what’s in store.
Furiosa doesn’t sync up perfectly with Fury Road — the biggest issue being that you have to embrace Taylor-Joy as a full-on recasting of Furiosa (Theron does not appear in this film). Yet the only real issue with the connection between these two films it that Furiosa is such a thrilling ride, packed with set pieces that are a masterclass in staging action, that it’s a little sad when the plot veers towards the events of the previous movie — because we know that’s where the ride ends.
Too much of the movie just plays like boys with toys, whereas Miller seems convinced he’s tapping into some kind of fantastical legend. Ambitions of that type already fell flat with the director’s last non-Max feature, the tedious djinn and tonic Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Furiosa is loaded with storytelling, which isn’t the same as telling a story. Miller is going for something majestic here, and Furiosa does at times look imperiously handsome: he and cinematographer Simon Duggan know how to make the movie’s trillion or so mounds of sand look positively silky. But despite its many, many action sequences, and a symphonic cacophony of motorbikes vrooming in the sand, the movie, divided into chapters with droney titles like “Lessons from the Wasteland,” evolves into a slog that’s working hard to persuade us we’re having a good time, though it may not be actually giving us one.
George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga arrives in theaters on May 24, 2024. Watch the trailer below.
