Where are you going, so full of hope?
Everyone in the wasteland is already dead. Half-lives living on borrowed time, irradiated by the sour earth and eroded by the whipping sand. Hope chewed up by rusty blades and burnt rubber, sanity slipping away into a woozy haze while the world slowly drains the blood from your flesh and the love from your soul. In a desolate landscape where opportunists scavenge like rabid dogs for scraps of survival, few heroes remain. Turned into mythological fables by abstracted history, they are tortured by grief, haunted by everyone they couldn’t save from the extant nightmare. They are all that is left to hold on to, perseverance through the apocalypse. We don’t know who killed the world, but they might just be able to save it.
Of course, they can’t – that’s the enduring tragedy of George Miller’s Mad Max, that hope is but a temporary bastion of humanity in a doomed world. It doesn’t make Miller a pessimist; in fact, the desperation of the poisoned dirt on which his characters walk is matched only by the reverence with which he paints it, as if every time one of his protagonists looked to the stars with a born-again glimmer of hope it contained the entirety of mankind’s everlasting yearning for a better future. But until the day that future appears at the edge of the burnt orange horizon – everyone, like Tom Hardy’s sun-beaten and shaggy Max Rockatansky in Fury Road (2015), has been reduced to a single instinct: survive.
It’s reflective of Miller’s directorial fervor, a powerful vigor that remains steadfastly determined in the face of adversity. Films decades in production, forged in the fires of studio litigation and pushback, idiosyncratic masterpieces that have endured; Miller is a survivor determined to create by his rules at the risk of all else. So really, it comes as no surprise that Furiosa is simultaneously everything and nothing like you expect. Fury Road is a nonstop adrenaline pumping thrill ride, a film that hits the throttle moments in by erratically removing frames to create a sense of chaotic urgency, only to hit the nitrous minutes later and never let up on the guzzoline-burning madness for the next two hours. Furiosa is a five chapter odyssey of wasteland legend, so ambitious in its epic scope that its titular protagonist isn’t even played by lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy until chapter three.
Miller isn’t foolish enough to imagine he could live up to – let alone top – the dizzying heights of Fury Road’s thrill ride, but he also knows that wouldn’t be any fun anyway. Instead, Furiosa reconstructs the mythology of the wasteland so effortlessly that it’s strange this piece of the puzzle has been missing for nearly a decade, feeling less like a reverse engineered prequel and more like a lost beginning that was always there but never seen. Where most prequels are plagued by a stifling determinism, Furiosa doesn’t look to explain Fury Road so much as it seeks to enrich it, and Miller producing a whole new $170 million epic with the express purpose of taking his previous masterpiece to an even higher level of intensity is, simply put, one of the most baller things a director has ever done.
That’s not to say Furiosa isn’t a masterpiece in its own right, because the sprawling odyssey is full of both expressive wasteland intimacy and mind-boggling, death-defying stunt sequences that stand up handily to their Fury Road counterparts. It takes its time to establish colossal setpieces, wielding a refreshed dynamism and electrifying new action design among the scattered factions it introduces, further extending the world’s philosophy of reclaimed scrap and ingenuity. Cackle with glee as sand skiers take flight and become vultures scanning the skyline, sailing on pitch black hang gliders or industrial fan-powered billowing eldritch clouds. Witness the reverent construction of the Citadel’s finest war rig, a glistening chrome behemoth that wields a cyclone death machine on its tail as it hurtles between the three fortresses of the wasteland. Look in awestruck horror as full scale war erupts through the dusty flats, as bikes hurtle up mountains with raging ferocity, as warlords bicker and lay waste to everything and everyone.
Familiar characters are abundant, from the hulking mass of Rictus Erectus to the grimy grin of The Organic Mechanic the film’s journey also effortlessly enriches the narratives of each and every player in Miller’s game without ever calling attention to it. Some actors return, others don’t, some performers return in new roles. It’s the perfect blend of scattered changes in a franchise that feels like lost scraps from the whispers of a desolate future history, each tale slightly altering and iterating, mythologizing its figures through generations of madness. The only thing that feels missed is the booming roar of the late Hugh Keays-Byrne’s Immortan Joe, a performance so impossibly towering that nobody could ever match its imposing gravitas, though Lachy Hulme does a damn fine job of stepping into Joe’s menacing physicality.
Anya Taylor-Joy takes charge of the film’s propulsive energy with a ferocious performance, channeling an animal rage and an undying will, a Furiosa not yet ready to accept loss and seek hope but one operating on pure primal revenge. Her tenacity is matched only by the insanity of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a formidable new member of the Mad Max rogues gallery who wears a billowing cape and drives a chrome V8 motorcycle chariot, a power hungry warmonger sailing across the dunes with the destiny of a limitless army in his eyes. Their lifetime of conflict pulls the entire violent vortex of the wasteland into a central whirlwind, a constantly escalating battle that explodes into a heart-pounding climax; only to remind you that this is only the beginning of a two hour orgiastic action ecstasy finale that Furiosa will soon drive into.
What might be the film’s greatest trick is its dialed in visual language, inventive and refreshing but never eclipsing the construction of Fury Road so as to not make it feel lesser by comparison. It is still a dazzling feast of oranges and blues, the sun’s haze and the moon’s cool glow, billowing skyscraper explosions and visions of endless skies blended together like a dream, revving its engine between electrifying, high speed action and the low growls of quiet reflection. Its flashes of filmic artifice are a feature, not a bug; another way to embody and embrace the inherent silliness of it all as it races across the desert towards a dusty showdown. A great injustice that Miller has to fight so hard to realize these vibrant visions, but if there’s anything worth fighting for, it’s more Mad Max, and Furiosa lives up to every expectation. A shiny and chrome masterpiece to join a filmography of virtuosic brilliance.