Review: “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” – George Miller’s Revenge Odyssey is Epic to Witness

By Jacob Jones

It’s been nine years since Mad Max: Fury Road roared the once-thought-dead action franchise back to life with one of the most perfect action spectacles ever put to screen, and while there is still no direct sequel to that film (though The Wasteland remains in pre-production), Australian mad lad and franchise director George Miller has resurrected that film’s principle character for an origin story all her own. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Furiosa, a young girl belonging to a place of abundance who is kidnapped from her home by the madman Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Over the course of many years, Furiosa must learn how the wasteland works by way of trade and road war, how to survive its many cruelties and trials, how to rise through the ranks in order to eventually seek revenge on the man who took everything from her, and above all, how to find her way home.
 
The best of the Mad Max films have never been all that concerned with complicated stories, which makes this Mad Max Saga an especially interesting test case in seeing whether or not Miller and company can pull off a slightly more nuanced version of the Fury Road feeling without it seeming like they’re just trying to do the exact same thing again, and to that degree, it largely succeeds. While Furiosa absolutely makes an excellent companion piece to Fury Road in tying everything together in way that doesn’t feel cheap or condescending from the origin points of certain character traits to the introduction of specific vehicles to even some musical motifs from the original Tom Holkenberg score, it is still very much its own movie, with its own ideas, its own story, and its own sense of place. The plot mechanics of our titular character’s odyssey across the desert are decidedly more complex than those of its predecessor, which thrived largely due to its magnificent craftwork overlayed on top of its simplicity, rather than attempting to weave it into a tale requiring more finesse. This movie a tale of the blood-soaked tragedy behind all the rage and resolve our titular character possesses when we meet her in the previous film, which by nature invites further complications into determining how those parts of Furiosa came to be, and its deliberate avoidance of peddle-to-the-metal pacing present in Fury Road – along with the longer runtime – is the clearest indicator that Miller is attempting to paint a complete and all-consuming portrait of who Furiosa is as a character; he is not crafting an action extravaganza, but a revenge epic.
 
That said, the action sequences that do appear in this film – at least most of them – all carry the same visceral adrenaline that those of Fury Road did. There is a chase sequence towards the middle of the film (which is broken up into five distinct segments) which could easily outclass all other action sequences made this year; at one point, the man next to me’s jaw actually dropped in response to one of the fighting mechanics introduced during the scene. It’s the kind of action filmmaking only the truly insane are capable of performing at this level, and despite the fact that it is clearly laden with more visual effects than any singular scene of Fury Road has, the way it’s shot and edited makes it feel like something no one except George Miller ever could pull off. And while that scene in particular was the definite highlight of the film for me personally, there are a few others that deserve near-equal praise in how they utilize the sound design, as does the entire film in that specific respect; you can feel the rumble of every engine, the power of the tires in the sand, the crack of the gunshots across the desert air. It’s the sort of sound design that forces one to realize just how much better great sound can make an already great movie. There are a few admittedly nitpicky areas in which Furiosa falters, chiefly in the visual makeup of the film (some of the green screen is a bit obvious and the color grade doesn’t feel as saturated as Fury Road does, making it less vibrant) and the fact that unfortunately, that epic sense of pace does mean that this movie feels longer than it probably should, despite the fact that everything within that length is working about as well as it can be expected to, but the craftwork in this still operates high above almost anything else being produced in Hollywood right now.
 
A great film can’t rest on craftwork alone, though. All the performers have to step up to the plate, and dear reader, they all knock it out of the park. There are, of course, some familiar faces involved which we get to know later on in Fury Road, and Tom Burke’s character does ultimately feel a tad superfluous when all is said and done despite his admirable performance, but this film truly belongs to the new blood. Anyone even remotely familiar with Anya Taylor-Joy is aware of her immense talents going all the way back to The Witch in 2015, but she gets to turn on a new mode here of feminine rage that feels not so much like a reaction to what was done to her, but an evolution of who she was destined to become; that’s a very hard line to act with minimal dialogue across two-plus hours, and she nails every moment she’s asked to. That said, Chris Hemsworth is the performance everyone is sure to be talking about coming out of this film; he's chewing scenery left and right, clearly having the time of his life playing the despicable (and occasionally hilarious) Dementus in what might be his finest performance to date. I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to hop on that train yet as we can only see how his part in all this stacks up with time, but it’s certainly the most fun he’s been to watch since at least Thor: Ragnarok, and probably ever.
 
In the end, though, this is still very much a George Miller film, and although Fury Road may be a better movie on the whole, this – I believe – is a better-directed piece of work, if only because the direction is more visible without a whole lot of other masters at work sharing the spotlight. It may seem trivial, but refusing to just play the hits again, even if they are hits for a reason, is an exciting thing for a filmmaker at Miller’s caliber to commit to, and despite any shortcomings the film may have, making this a different kind of movie than Fury Road was still absolutely the correct approach to telling this story, which he has rendered into existence with an exciting fervor. It’s so clear he cares about this world and these characters to such a degree no one else has even tried to make one of these, and if I had my way, no one else ever would, even after he’s long passed from this Earth.
 
I’m giving “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” a 9.1/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan