Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

#2 in my ranking of the Mad Max franchise.

Born of the wide-ranging world-building George Miller and Nico Lathouris created in preparation for Mad Max Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is, I believe, a much more purely George Miller experience than any of the other films he’s made in The Wasteland. I’m not exactly a student of Miller’s work, but I’ve seen enough, in particular his previous film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, to understand that one of Miller’s primary concerns with the actual act of storytelling and people using stories to come together, especially in relation to myth. Fury Road felt like a pent-up fever dream, but Furiosa feels more like a considered epic. Also, it works extremely well.

So, the story is obviously about Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a child and Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult) being stolen from the Green Place and her mother, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser), by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and her nearly twenty-year quest to return home which doesn’t actually come to full fruition until the events of Fury Road. Where the sequel had this propulsive energy that almost never let up, Furiosa feels different from the very beginning. It’s significantly more sedate in its presentation, one of the reasons I kept recalling Three Thousand Years of Longing, and that allows a much tighter focus on this one woman’s journey through the Wasteland and her competing desires of vengeance and return. For Dementus brutally murdered Furiosa’s mother, trying to get the information out of her and Furiosa about where the Green Place is, and captured Furiosa for his own pet of a sort. She’s harboring resentment, as it were, but she is very small and must grow.

And that’s the journey she goes on, finding ways to become stronger and find the resources necessary to either go back to the Green Place, using a star map that she tattooed onto her left arm, or finding a way to murder the man who murdered her mother. Her journey takes her from Dementus’ pet through the political scene of the Wasteland as Dementus arrives at the foot of The Citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), retreats in the face of Joe’s blindingly dedicated War Boys, and takes over Gastown, using it as a perch from which to gain power, but only if he gives up Furiosa to Joe, hoping to make the girl one of his wives when she grows in time. Through a series of events involving Joe’s son Rictus (Nathan Jones who has…he’s gained a lot of weight in the past 9 years), Furiosa ends up hiding among the mechanics, learning a trade, disguising herself as a boy, and refusing to speak. On a supply run to Gastown, when the great new war rig Furiosa helped build is attacked by dissidents from Dementus’ camp, she proves herself and comes into the confidences of Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) who teaches her further while allowing her to live as a woman in the open.

Throughout all of this, Furiosa is mostly silent, barely speaking, Taylor-Joy’s eyes doing most of the communicating about her single-mindedness for getting home. I’m not entirely sure if this approach to directing his main actor was an asset or not, though, for Miller. I understand this need for Furiosa to be reserved just from a survival point of view, but there’s this barrier between the main character and the audience where the only way through is her eyes. And Miller doesn’t let her do too much with her eyes. What drives everything are the events that surround her, and those events are where most of the fascination is. I don’t mean to imply that Furiosa’s actual emotional journey is dead on arrival. I think it works, but it could have worked more deeply presented differently.

Where there is a tangible emotional setting for Furiosa is in her relationship with Praetorian Jack. The two obviously fall for each other, but it’s delivered in this understated way where he provides her with not only knowledge and skills but a quiet bit of emotional support as she reaches a point where she could simply go back. She could leave it all behind, but her attachment to Jack keeps her around when danger pops its ugly head in the form of Dementus striking against the Bullet Farm.

And that takes me to the action. The overall feel of Furiosa is more sedate than Fury Road, but that’s not to imply that the film is bereft of action. There are two very large action sequences that define the center of the film: the trek to Gastown where Furiosa and Jack meet as well as the ambush at the Bullet Farm which ends up defining the final path forward for Furiosa, cementing her choice to pursue vengeance rather than going home. The action has that massive, ever-changing quality that really has defined the action throughout the Mad Max franchise, but this is the first time it really has a digital sheen. Fury Road had more than its share of digital touchups, but they were well enough utilized so that people have, for years, insisted that it was entirely shot practically. Here, that digital application of effects seems to have been stretched very, very thin across the whole film (the whole thing opens with young Furiosa picking a fruit from a tree, and it’s most obviously almost entirely digital which I found very weird), but it’s all in service to character-centered action. This isn’t empty spectacle. This is spectacle rooted in story, so the digital sheen becomes less important to note.

That focus is vital in regarding the film’s final act (or chapter, I guess) where Furiosa is finally able to track down Dementus, but she completely skips this grand 40-Day Wasteland War at the same time. Injured, she builds her mechanical arm (the arm that held the tattoo showing that Miller loves his use of images while also not dwelling too much on the fact that he’s using images), and sets out on the final confrontation: a small encounter in the desert where she discovers the limits of vengeance, leading us towards the final moments leading up to the start of Fury Road.

There’s so much love and craft put into this, Miller’s ability to finally create a cohesive vision for The Wasteland, that it’s failure at the box office is something of a real blow to me. I largely don’t care about box office returns, but the abject failure of Furiosa to make back any real money means that the other background work that Miller had worked on with Lathouris, detailing the year of Max’s life leading up to the events of Fury Road, will never see a big screen adaptation. Maybe we’ll get the novella or some kind of comic book adaptation, but the movie version is deader than dead. Furiosa is not Fury Road, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a surprisingly quiet look at vengeance, storytelling, myth, and the insanity of Miller’s vision of a post-apocalyptic Australia that, I think, will only grow in appreciation over time as more people discover it through streaming and home video.

Rating: 3.5/4