Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Directed by George Miller (2024) ***

Could George Miller have imagined, filming the first Mad Max film in 1977, that movies portraying his post-apocalyptic world would be in theaters forty-seven years later? Civilization descending back into barbarism doesn’t sound any more far-fetched now than it did in ’77, so the making of Mad Max films may transcend Miller’s lifetime. The fact that Miller, now age 79, has made another movie, with more punk energy and chaotic thrills than filmmakers a fourth of his age, is a cautionary commentary on elderly people much younger than him who consider their productive years over.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to Miller’s previous Mad Max: Fury Road (the best realized of all the entries in the series). As such, it tells the story of the physical and emotional growth of Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road, Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa). As opposed to Fury Road, which took place over three days, Furiosa covers fifteen years, as the young girl is kidnapped from a green and safe land by grizzled followers of the demented biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, relishing playing a very talkative villain). From there she meets Immortan Joe, the crazed cult leader of The Citadel (as seen in the previous film).

How is Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa? She doesn’t have the physical stature of Charlize Theron, but she makes up for it in body language and her bright, expressive eyes. This is particularly important because she’s willfully mute throughout much of the film. When making the first Mad Max film, Miller described it as “a silent movie with sound”, indebted to the energetic imagery of the great silent comedians and his young Furiosa is another example of the technique. What dialogue there is, often in thick Australian accents, wasn’t always discernible to these ears and I may sometime watch a subtitled version.

Furiosa is a more modestly paced film than Fury Road; it’s less epic, but still powerful. It’s the most expensive film ever shot in Australia ($233 million) and you can see it foremost in a sequence which took 78 days over nine months to shoot (one of several amazing action sequences the film has to offer). Furiosa has stowed away on a colossal war rig driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). An attack on the rig by hand-tilted poles and gliders may remind you of Ben-Hur‘s chariot race (for that matter, so will Dementus’ motorcycle chariot). The set designs and costumes are astonishing in vision and detail; they make the movie look like a 2000 AD comic book come to life (the dystopian British sci-fi anthology series perhaps tellingly began its life in the late ’70s, the same time as Mad Max). One of the more noteworthy aspects of the film for me is that, despite the large budget, this is still bizarre, indie, renegade filmmaking, made apart from prying Hollywood executives and audience market testing.

Furiosa does utilize GCI more than its predecessor and is the first time I’ve become aware of AI enhancement in a film. I found the transition between Alyla Browne playing Furiosa at a young age and Taylor-Joy, playing her elder, to be seamless (whereas usually one can easily tell when one actor is out of the picture, and another takes over). It turns out AI was used to make the fluid transition. One would like to think this technology will only be used in genre fantasy, horror or sci-fi films, but history says this sentence will read hopelessly naive in ten years or less.

—Michael R. Neno, 2024 June 16