Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Man, I fuckin' hate origin stories. Nine times out of ten, they do little more than strip away the magnificently imagined backstory created by their original source and replace it with something pat, simplistic and contrived. Still, I had high hopes for George Miller's follow-up to his magnificent legasequel reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). That film introduced us to a new Max (Tom Hardey) and a thrilling new action hero, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), as well as a host of other pretty great supporting characters worthy of the original Mad Max series. This latest picture tells the story of how Furiosa (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy) came to become a lieutenant of the warlord Immortan Joe, living in his massive citadel and driving his armored war rig. It also covers how she lost her arm and hints at why she developed a kind of guarded trust with Max in the prior film.

The film starts out in much the way I expect most terrible prequels to begin. A little kid who looks just like Taylor-Joy is growing up in the fabled "green place" spoken of in Fury Road. Her little friend says something along the lines of, "Hey Furiosa, whatcha doin'?" Great, so Furiosa got her name from... her mom? Did Rictus Erectus and The Splendid Angharad and Toast the Knowing and The People Eater also all get their names at birth? Furiosa isn't a name forged from a lifetime of experience; she was just always this person, even the Green Place? Are audiences so dumb that they'd go to a movie called Furiosa, see a little girl who is the spitting image of the character they know, but get confused if she was called something else? Why does she need to be called anything at this point? In an instant, the world of Mad Max got a whole lot smaller and a whole lot stupider. So, from the get-go, this movie was going to have to work hard to get me back on its side. Of course, any Mad Max movie is gonna work pretty damn hard, and while I can't say I liked this picture anywhere near as much as any of the other films in this series, it does have enough going for it to make it worthwhile.

Surprisingly, it's Anya Taylor-Joy who really makes the picture thrilling. The young actress has become as ubiquitous as Timothée Chalamet (when she showed up in a surprise cameo in Dune 2, I had to laugh, thinking, "Of course, she's playing that character.) I've always thought she was a terrific actress, but I didn't think her slight frame and porcelain features would be a good fit for the role originated by the kickass beauty Theron. But Taylor-Joy makes the part her own. Miller and co-screenwriter Nico Lathouris wisely spend plenty of time with the young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne, so that by the time we see Taylor-Joy take over the role, we're fully seeing the character as envisioned in this movie, rather than comparing her to the prior film.

Unfortunately, other comparisons can't be escaped so easily. Furiosa is not the visual feast of spectacular action Fury Road was. Despite Miller and cinematographer John Seale's penchant for artificial digital colorization (and silly desaturation), Fury Road was a thing to behold. Its seamlessly CGI-enhanced practical stunt work was peerless. More than any action film of the past thirty years, it really made you feel like actual people were able to do impossible, death-defining feats of skill at crazy speeds. And every road, vehicle, mountain, sandstorm, building, kingdom, and crowd of thousands felt like it was really there. Furiosa, on the other hand, relies so heavily on computer-generated effects, stunts, scenery, camera work, etc., that it practically feels like an animated movie. Photographed this time by Simon Duggan (Live Free or Die Hard, Hacksaw Ridge, Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby), this movie features too much painfully obvious green screen work, uneven digital matte paintings, and physics-defying spills, falls, jumps, and crashes that verge on tedious. The citadel of this picture does not feel like a place you could actually walk into. The vast desert landscapes seem abstract and don't convey the sense of heat and isolation. One of the most masterful shots Miller ever devised, tracking from a head-on wideshot of a fast-moving vehicle into a tight close-up of the driver's determined face, seems to have become so easy to achieve that he uses it over and over to the point where this once jaw-dropping piece of camera work has been reduced to a hacky cliche.

The supporting characters in this picture are also a bit lacking. Chris Hemsworth, as the evil warlord Dementus, who abducts Furiosa and kills her mother in the film's opening, planting the seeds of vengeance that drive this story, is not up to the level of hilariously crazed villainy we expect from this series. His goofy performance is more in line with the secretary he played in the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot than with the tradition of Lord Humungus, Aunty Entity, or Immortan Joe and his fellow warlords. Immortan Joe and his sons, wives, cronies, and army of fanatical "war boys" are all back for this movie, but they register with far less power than in Fury Road. This is in part because the world of Fury Road was presented as a mystery, yet one which made total sense. We didn't need to see the various "towns" or comprehend the specifics of how the warlord hierarchy works to understand the characters and the story. We didn't even need to have seen any previous Mad Max movie. So much was so cleverly inferred we could fill in the blanks with our own assumptions. One such assumption was that the Furiosa we meet in Fury Road was once one of Immortan Joe's wives who was cast out when she proved infertile, then returned later on as a kind of "road warrior" who rose to the position of power at the citadel. This Mad Max Saga removes that powerful assumed backstory. We see a member of Joe's haram, someone neither we nor Furiosa have any connection to, cast out due to her inability to provide him with a son, and this seems to indicate a fate that could have befallen our protagonist but didn't. It's another example of how a prequel that shows us the direct events that led up to a great film diminishes the backstory that the great film inspired in the imagination of viewers (at least this viewer).

Everything about Furiosa is meant to feel bigger and better than its predecessor (including its bloated running time), which is always a mistake for a prequel. Films like this should be smaller and more contained yet captivating in their own unique way, but they so seldom are. Filmmakers nearly always treat prequels as if they were sequels—trying to outdo the film that spawned them. The flaw in this approach is crystal clear in Furiosa's climax and conclusion, which are, in fact, just the way a good origin story should end, but they come off feeling like a let-down arriving at the close of such a long, episodic adventure. And cutting to clips from Fury Road during the closing credits just makes us wish we'd watched that film again instead. Still, for a contemporary action movie, it's well above average.