“Furiosa” is a different type of myth
Directed by George Miller
Written by George Miller and Nico Lathouris
Based on Characters by George Miller and Byron Kennedy
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, and Alyla Brown
From the outset, it’s clear that Furiosa is playing a different game than the last entry in the Mad Max franchise, 2015’s immediately iconic Fury Road. Gone is that film’s most distinctive facet, Junkie XL’s massive, epic score; though the composer returns, his synths lurk in the background instead of taking the forefront. Director George Miller’s visuals remain potent, but where Fury Road was crafted to function as a visual narrative first and foremost, Furiosa is a much more plot-heavy affair. Its leads are still monosyllabic and more prone to expressive grunting than anything else, but this is a story of grander scale and deeper lore.
For these changes, though, the core of the Mad Max films remains intact, just altered. Until now, the series has been best understood as post-apocalyptic campfire stories. Their simplicity is by design; they’re the sort of things you’d hear huddled with other survivors in a nuclear desert, fairy tales for after the collapse about a man who may or may not have existed and may or may not even be the same man from story to story. He’s mythic even within his own world. Furiosa may dig deeper than all that as it tells the story of Charlize Theron’s standout co-lead from Fury Road (played here by Anya Taylor-Joy, Amsterdam), but her story too is the stuff of myth. It’s just a myth of a different sort.
Hers is the tale of a single woman and her quest for vengeance set against the backdrop of a war that will eventually see her entire world subsumed under a single flag. The way Miller builds out his world and all its power players and all their strongholds is less a campfire story and more an epic poem like The Iliad or The Epic of Gilgamesh. It isn’t meant to be told in whispers. It should be engraved on stone tablets.
Where Max himself was more archetype than human, Furiosa revels in specificity without losing its universal appeal. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the returning characters. In a lead role that requires her to capture the essence of Theron’s performance without getting lost in her shadow, Taylor-Joy does a commendable job, commanding both action set piece and revenge plot alike while delivering a surprisingly good impersonation of her predecessor in the role. Meanwhile, Lachy Hulme (Three Thousand Years of Longing) takes over as Immortan Joe from the late Hugh Keays-Byrne and is given rein to fill in the outer edges of his personality left, as with Max, purposefully vague in Fury Road. There he was a singular antagonistic force and served the role well, but it’s nevertheless fascinating to watch him operate in this fresh context without losing any of his evil presence in the new particulars.
However, the undeniable star of the show is Chris Hemsworth (Extraction) as Furiosa’s verbose nemesis, Dementus. This is a rare type of performance, not necessarily in craft but certainly in sheer swagger. It’s a movie star being unleashed upon blockbuster material and going as big as the film they’re in will allow while still maintaining a cohesive center. It’s the stuff iconic pop bad guys are made of and pairs nicely with an earlier Hemsworth heel turn in 2018’s Bad Time at the El Royale to prove that should the Australian Adonis ever prove tired of playing big brave bricks of meat, he has a viable fallback playing even more memorable villains.
Conversely, the action can’t help but fall flat in comparison to Fury Road. Part of that is inevitable. Our last visit to the world of Mad Max ranks as one of the finest action films ever made, every scene packed to bursting with breathtaking stunts and imagery. To be sure, the set pieces here are strong conceptually, especially a chase scene involving motorcycle-towed gliders and a battle within the Bullet Farm that threads a tough needle between tense and frenetic. Hell, it’s worth saying that the action here would be more than passable in any other scenario thanks to the thought that was put into it. The imagery is striking and outside the norm and dreamlike in a way most modern action blockbusters don’t allow for.
Where the rest of the film diverts from what’s gone before in such a way that the soul of the series is left intact, though, Furiosa’s action spurns the tactility that has been the draw of the franchise from its first installment for something much less substantial. There’s always been a sense that you could reach out and touch the vehicles, the settings, the mayhem of this world, largely because you could have. It was the result of craftsmen and stunt teams pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into actually building those sets and action sequences. It’s a common misconception that Fury Road especially had “no CGI,” but it was used to augment there. Here, ropey effects render what has always been a cartoony world a different kind of cartoon, one with much less impact. Miller may never lose sight of his characters and their place within the scene, and for that, he continues to stand above his peers in the genre. But this is the first time in a while it seems his reach may have exceeded his grasp.
Still, for all that, he refused to take the easy way out. A prequel to Fury Road that was the exact same as the original may have been fun, but that too would have paled in comparison. We’d be left with another blockbuster that asks nothing of us but to remember a movie we saw a decade ago. For its audience and for its makers, it would have been unfulfilling. Mediocre. Instead, we’re given intentional subversion. The personal is contrasted with the civilizational in a way that the smaller scale stories of Max Rockatansky have never allowed for. We see that the greatest of wars and the smallest of skirmishes are driven by the same types of bloodied noses. Someone takes, then follows reciprocity, and before anyone knows it, they’ve recreated the circumstances that lead to the hell they inhabit: a world dead of any number of causes. “Who killed the world?” one character asked in Fury Road, and Furiosa gives us an answer. It was men like these.
Rating: B+
Furiosa is now playing in theaters.
