Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s relentless, raging post-apocalyptic epic from 2015 was that rare thing – a blockbuster which made almost $400 million, won six Oscars from its 10 nominations, and provided as many truly jaw-dropping stunts and set pieces as it did moments of genuine heartbreak and anguish.
There was also something delightfully tongue-in-cheek about its title: while the film opens with Tom Hardy’s tormented road warrior, Max, as the story goes on, he eventually takes something of a backseat to the women he finds himself travelling with, the wives of the monstrous Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) as played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoë Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton, but especially Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, their buzz cut-sporting, grease-smeared, laconic protector. In the final shots of Fury Road, it’s they who are proclaimed the victors, they who stand above the masses while Max, having aided them, simply nods and disappears into the crowd.
Over the course of the film’s two-hour runtime, Furiosa says very little, but she speaks volumes in the clenching of her jaw, the furrow of her brow, and with her eyes, which overflow with grief, fear, regret and longing mingled with steely determination. This is a woman who’s endured the unimaginable, wrenched from her lush, idyllic homeland as a child and forced to grow up in the barren wasteland, serving a tyrannical warlord. For her, driving these women away from their oppressors isn’t simply about safeguarding their future—it’s about trying to turn back the clock, to reclaim a lost innocence, and undo a historic wrong which, ultimately, can’t be undone. And yet, we’re left to glean all of this from her faraway looks and pregnant pauses—Furiosa’s dreams, her passions, her darkest secrets remain tantalisingly out of reach.
So, naturally, the prospect of getting to delve deeper into this fascinating, thorny character almost a decade later through an equally nerve-jangling prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was thrilling. And it begins well enough: we meet the wide-eyed young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) plucking an apple from a tree in her Edenic forest home, before being kidnapped by a gang of hapless bandits. Her fierce mother (Charlee Fraser) gives chase, in a nail-biting sequence which has some of the magic of Fury Road, and when the pair are torn apart for good, the effect is genuinely gut wrenching.
We know how this loss will shape Furiosa, how she’ll be haunted by it, but it is at this point that the film appears to lose interest in our scrappy heroine—instead, the focus shifts to her captor, Chris Hemsworth’s swaggering, volatile bike horde leader Dementus. Dressed in leather trousers and a billowing Superman-esque cape, with a teddy bear chained to his crotch and his hair dyed red from a flare gun shot as he munches on “human blood sausage”, he’s a classic Mad Max-ian villain – darkly funny, larger than life, frequently inept—and the actor embodies him with relish as he faces off with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).
In this portion of the tale, Miller revels in reacquainting us with this unforgiving landscape—with Gas Town, the Bullet Farm, and the vertiginous and eerie Citadel – and letting his eclectic supporting players run riot, including Immortan Joe’s sons Scrotus and Rictus, a dystopian Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But, this playful world building also brings with it a lack of focus. While Fury Road had a breathless, hell-for-leather momentum, aided by its more straightforward, linear narrative, Furiosa feels a little overloaded with ideas, its engine sputtering as it moves forward in fits and starts. And, all the while, Furiosa herself becomes an afterthought.
When she is remembered, it is as a pawn to be traded between Dementus and Joe, and she’s brought to the biodome, the place where Joe’s breeders are locked away. Her escape is exhilarating to watch, but then, as Furiosa finds freedom in the Citadel, we jump forward in time to see her again as a more hardened, experienced construction worker rubbing shoulders with War Boys. Where did she go in the meantime? Who did she meet? How has she been raised? These are not questions the film cares to explore.
Soon after, almost halfway into the film, is when Anya Taylor-Joy—she who is splashed across every billboard, and front and centre in every bus advert for the movie—makes her first appearance as an adult Furiosa, silently hatching a plan to return home. But, before we can get under her skin, another man enters the frame: Tom Burke’s brooding Praetorian Jack, who is in the driver’s seat for the film’s central action set piece. The visuals are spectacular enough, but the stakes never feel quite as high as they did in Fury Road, which, at least for me, brought a strange inertia to what ought to have been the movie’s crowning glory. Then, once Furiosa finds herself stranded on the roadside, instead of setting off alone on an odyssey to reunite with her community, she accepts Jack’s offer of help, stays in the Citadel and rises through the ranks.
Their slow-burning romance is one which places Furiosa in the passenger’s seat—often literally—and once he slips out of view, an enraged, scenery-chewing Dementus returns. You get the sense that the film doesn’t entirely trust its formidable heroine to hold the audience’s attention all on her own. Taylor-Joy, who has been excellent in nearly everything she’s appeared in over the past decade, brings a stoic ferocity to the character, but is never given quite enough space, resulting in a Furiosa who feels more impenetrable than Theron’s. We gain few new insights into her beyond surface-level nods to Fury Road (one sequence reveals how exactly she lost her arm), and her motivations feel somewhat muddled. In the previous film, Theron’s silences were affecting because her companions—the shifty Max and the terrified wives—were similarly silent, but here, forced to compete with Dementus’s grandstanding and Jack’s wistful monologues, Furiosa’s reticence feels far less impactful.
It doesn’t help, either, that Furiosa ends with a credit sequence which provides a recap of Fury Road—zipping through shots of Theron, Hardy and co taking down their opponents, until you’re filled with regret at the fact that you’ve just spent the last two hours watching this film and not its predecessor. It feels destined to forever live in the latter’s shadow.
That is not, however, to say that it’s without merit—Furiosa, with its explosive action and epic scale, is infinitely watchable. It just isn’t quite the grand feminist saga it thinks it is.
This article was first published in British Vogue.
