Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne's portrayals as the eponymous protagonist are more intriguing the less they appear like Charlize Theron.
Twenty-five years after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace popularized the term “prequel,” has there still not been an excellent film in that category? George Miller is the latest filmmaker to attempt with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, his much-anticipated prologue to the masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. But even as he and his team produce distinctive visuals and action setpieces that stand head and shoulders above the rest of the blockbuster throng, Miller and co. are still constrained by the inherent shortcomings of the prequel form.
Furiosa begins years before the events of Fury Road — in other words, like all prequels, it takes place before the story you know, with only a few characters you remember and whose destinies are already assured. In this case, the advantage is that this all helps Furiosa feel as essential a character to this fictional universe as Max Rockatansky, whose diverse characterizations from one Mad Max movie to the next have built him into a larger-than-life mythological figure worthy of folktales and campfire stories.
But since Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris (returning from Fury Road) are attempting to simultaneously tell a new Furiosa narrative and a recognizable one in accordance with the previous film, the character is actually most fascinating when she’s younger and more unknown to us. As the movie continues on and protagonist Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance recedes more into a direct impression of Charlize Theron, the movie loses vitality. It's almost a disappointment when she shaves off her surprisingly long tresses to appear more like the person we expect to see.
But Taylor-Joy doesn’t even appear in Furiosa for about an hour. Until then, the character is depicted by adolescent actress Alyla Browne, who previously played a younger version of Tilda Swinton in Miller’s underrated and underseen 2022 romantic fantasy film Three Thousand Years of Longing.
With her spike of ginger hair and wide expressive eyes, Browne looks very different from the Furiosa you remember. We even encounter her initially in the renowned Green Place of Many Mothers, which was only briefly glimpsed in Fury Road after its abundance of trees had already withered away beneath incalculable pollution. Not even Furiosa got to stay too long in paradise. After the young girl is abducted by barbarian motorcyclists and spirited away to the wasteland, Browne makes a compelling point-of-view performer for our reintroduction to Miller’s post-apocalyptic hell world. She’s no defenseless damsel either, managing to murder one of her captors in a comically vicious fashion. True to the ethos of Mad Max, she only requires a chain and a tire.
This is around when Dementus, the new adversary portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, enters the scene. After the decade Hemsworth just spent as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s resident thunder deity, it would be great to state that he demonstrates more range by delivering a villainous performance for the ages. Alas, the character has a little too much distracting business going on. He speaks too much, particularly by Mad Max villain standards, and shouts even more than that.
The idea, evidently, is to disrupt your expectations around the familiar characters from Fury Road by introducing a chaotic agent into the equation. But though Dementus adds texture to the world in some ways, answering queries you may not even realize you had (ahh, so that’s where the motorcyclists originate from and how they operate! That’s how economically interlinked the Citadel is with Gastown and the Bullet Farm…), his storyline ultimately detracts from the force of Fury Road.
That film’s adversary, Immortan Joe, is here too, now portrayed by Lachy Hulme in lieu of the late Hugh Keays-Byrne. But since all of the main checklist items you’re expecting to see from Furiosa’s backstory (her captivity, the loss of her limb, the formulation of her ultimate plan to escape) now derive exclusively from Dementus, it’s hard to see what her problem even is with Immortan Joe. All the terror and oppression intimated by Theron’s red-eyed delivery of “remember me??” as she wrenched Joe’s face off and overturned an autocrat now seems way more abstract and less personal. That’s the peril of prequels!
There are other franchise temptations that not even Miller can resist. For at least half of Furiosa’s running time, you’re inclined to question if the director finally figured out how to tell a Mad Max story without Max, where so many attempts at doing “Batman without Batman” have failed… but then Tom Burke steps up. His character is named Praetorian Jack, but with his black leather jacket and sad-eyed charisma, he inexorably calls up recollections of the male hero previously portrayed by Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy. Ah, well.
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At this juncture, it should be evident that Furiosa does not quite measure up to Fury Road — but what does? Miller’s 2015 film now clearly stands as one of the singular cinematic achievements of the 21st century, its simple structure (a cast of characters who drive in a straight line and then turn around and go back the way they came) overlaid with powerful political resonance and some of the most complicated and rewarding action scenes ever committed to screen. Furiosa can’t possibly be as mind-blowing as its predecessor, but it does enable us to spend a little more time in this world and Miller’s psyche. No other working action filmmaker perceives the world the way he does.
Furiosa has car pursuits and biker legions and searing death, but almost more impressive are the minor moments of loveliness that you won’t find anywhere else. As Furiosa stands against an assault from Dementus and his minions, there are a few seconds of Taylor-Joy standing against an iron gate, with fire streaming all around her — stunning! When the army of motorcyclists first approaches Immortan Joe’s Citadel, the camera lingers on a reptile slithering out the eyehole of a human cranium — just before they’re both pulverized underneath the indifferent tires. And after Furiosa shears off her hair for the first time, the subsequent passing of several years is creatively conveyed by a time-lapse of that mass of hair on the branch that captured it, accumulating dust and twigs and the other detritus of nature. Even in the desolation, it can always be a delightful day. Grade: B+
