Furiosa: A Ferocious, Worthy Prequel
A prequel is a tricky thing to pull off; how well can the storyteller flesh out the world and keep it interesting while ensuring that it doesn’t detract from the original? Can they successfully recreate what made the original work, could they do so without it feeling like a retread, or will they try to make something new, and if so, how well would the new tone mesh with that of the story that the audience knows follows it? Particularly when dealing with Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the most celebrated action movies of all time, nearly ten years after it released?
The Mad Max films, each written and directed by George Miller (who is also responsible for the Happy Feet and Babe films, yes, the ones with the dancing penguins and talking pig) are an enigmatic franchise. The first one depicts Max as a highway patrolman while civilization teeters toward dissolution in the background, and each movie after is almost intentionally detached from the previous movie. There is no narrative thread that flows through the saga as a whole, each movie is a self contained escapade of Max making his way through the post apocalyptic wasteland- until now. Furiosa is not only the first in the franchise to focus on a character other than Mad Max himself, it’s the first film to be intrinsically linked to another. It’s an origin story of sorts for Charlize Theron’s character Furiosa from Fury Road, a story that was already finished when filming Fury Road; Miller actually had Theron read through it to understand her character.
Let’s address the war rig in the room, this movie is not a retread of Mad Max: Fury Road, and will likely not be as widely accessible as that film was. Whereas Fury Road is almost one unbroken action scene, Furiosa is much more deliberately paced. It is uninterested in repeating what that film did, and focuses instead on the character of Furiosa as she grows older and navigates the tense relationships between different factions in the wasteland.
The opening sequence, a tense chase occurring patiently over several days, reveals a lot about how the movie will play out. It is not moving at a breakneck pace, but carefully, with sporadic bursts of intense violence, hope, and horror. This movie depicts the wasteland from a more grounded perspective than Fury Road did; it sells the gross desperation and horror of it more effectively. The music by Tom Holkenborg, boisterous, and epic in Fury Road, is more restrained here, drumming in the background like a heartbeat while action scenes play out with mostly diegetic sound front and center.
Furiosa is an epic fable, an odyssey in the tradition of our oldest stories, inspired by the storytelling of myths and legends. It’s a story someone would whisper to you in the wasteland to explain where Furiosa came from after she seized power in Fury Road. In some ways it feels more in line with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior than Fury Road did; Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus and his gang of bike riders feel equally as cartoonish as they do threatening, and wouldn’t be out of place riding behind Lord Humungus.
Hemsworth has never been better than he is here as a charismatic, desperate man trying to convince himself and others that he’s a proper leader. He is used to great effect as an occasional comedic relief, while still being spiteful and threatening. Watching his character develop over the movie is fascinating and occasionally devastating. I was also impressed with Alyla Browne as young Furiosa, who carries the same intensity that Anya Taylor-Joy then Charlize Theron would, as well as Charlee Fraser as Mary Jabassa, who plays Furiosa’s mother during the incredible opening sequence. Anya Taylor-Joy continues to be one of the most compelling actors of her generation, and is a worthy successor to the character as Charlize Theron played her.
Miller’s camera work and use of sound never cease to be impactful across the five chapters in the film. Each chapter comes to a natural close, none are too long, and the whole movie passes quite quickly for a two and half hour spectacle. He’s a master of getting the audience to look exactly where he wants, and when the action breaks out, it’s still as tense, gritty, and well choreographed as ever. The atmosphere feels desperate throughout, white knuckled, like a wire stretched to its limit that could snap at any moment.
More than anything else, I was impressed with how well this movie compliments Fury Road. In some ways, it reminded me of a great expansion to a video game. It fleshes out the world in a believable way, doesn’t rob it of its mystique, and still leaves a few things ambiguous for the viewer to determine. It’s an impressive accomplishment that I could easily see Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa become Charlize Theron’s over time. Watching this and Fury Road back to back, which I highly recommend, turns Fury Road into the two hour climax of this four and a half hour epic. It is such a rarity to get a prequel with so much thought and heart put into it, that stands alongside the initial film as a great companion piece.
