Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Sometimes road trips are an opportunity for introspection.
About halfway through Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, we’re barreling down a dusty highway alongside a convoy of road warriors fighting for control of a big rig. The camera stops to rest on the face of a figure clinging to the underside of the truck, the massive driveshaft whirling inches from her head as her eyes blaze with determination. We’ve watched this character grow up from a child (played by Alyla Browne) into a young woman (played by Anya Taylor-Joy); it’s a clarifying moment for both her and the audience as she discovers what kind of a person she can be. The moment is a peek under the hood at the machinery that drives the story, so to speak. Every character is the same, once you get a look under the chassis. They all need to survive, and they have to do it in the wreckage of a world that lost its sanity a long time ago.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga fills in the gaps left in the character’s backstory by Mad Max: Fury Road. Just by existing, the prequel invites unfair comparison to its arguably perfect predecessor. Fury Road is brilliant because it’s all show, no tell, a high-octane car chase that allows us to piece together just enough details from glimpses of the grotesque world that we don’t need to understand the how or the why. Charlize Theron’s portrayal of Imperator Furiosa is compelling precisely because we know so little about her. Fury Road is economical with its fragmented details: the brand on the back of her neck, the shaved head, the prosthetic arm, and the haunted look in her eyes. Furiosa is a thin sketch of a character, and she doesn’t need to be anything more than that. The sketch is sweeping and powerful, a swift glimpse of a woman on the move toward redemption.
Furiosa is economical, too, even as it shades in the details. As with every other Mad Max movie, we never learn exactly how or why the world fell apart, nor do we learn how the marauders who haunt the Wasteland came to be. We’re dropped into the middle of the action, a high-speed chase across the desert, with minimal dialogue and even less explanation. Everything we know comes from visuals, and the beauty of Margaret Sixel’s editing is that the film manages to pack so much information into a series of efficient, propulsive edits. Within half a dozen shots, we see a biker sniped off the back of his motorcycle, the camera zooming in directly to his face moments before he’s killed, followed by his companions scavenging his vehicle for the supplies they need to keep going themselves. One ties a spare tire to the back of his own bike with a rope: a tool that can wipe out his own tire tracks and kick up a dust cloud to obscure him from the sniper’s vengeful scope. There’s very little dialogue in the sequence, but it clearly communicates the ethos of the rest of the movie: nothing gets wasted in the Wasteland, not even the footage used by the filmmakers to tell the story.
The action scenes that follow are energetic and inventive. Miller has an eye for striking images, and the mise-en-scene that set Fury Road apart from contemporary action movies returns to the series with the same verve and clarity. Here, we’re treated to the same aggressive camerawork and color grading, with individual shots laser-focused on the character standing in the center of the frame, and presented with crystal-clear editing. The technical filmmaking is immaculate. The vehicular mayhem is astonishing. But strangely, Furiosa doesn’t have the same momentum as its predecessors. Furiosa spends a significant amount of time on the road, but her film is more or less anchored in place, trapped as the character is between two feuding warlords and unable to wander free.
Those two warlords—Immortan Joe (played this time by Lachy Hulme) and Dementus (a gleefully ostentatious Chris Hemsworth)—are the primary source of the movie’s conflict. We’ve met Immortan Joe before, in Fury Road; here he’s a menacing, silent presence in command of a fanatically dedicated army. Dementus, for his part, likes to talk, using his voice and a microphone to fill both the silence of the Wasteland and the void of his own hungry heart. This is an interesting wrinkle in a movie series so focused on visual storytelling: long speeches are a luxury, an opportunity for the speechmaker to come right out and say what he’s feeling. Most Wasteland dwellers prefer to communicate with a look or a gesture. Language fosters dialogue, and perhaps even introspection, an attitude that requires a certain amount of stillness. Stillness doesn’t come easily for Furiosa. To be still is to be a target. Her world favors drifters and swift action.
The film turns on these two warring impulses: to stay still and think about what it means to remain in a place, and to run away from the madness. Taylor-Joy (and Browne before her) play Furiosa with flinty-eyed taciturn determination. She’s seen things no child should have to see. She wants to go home to the place from which she was stolen. In the meantime, the film catapults her toward a predetermined endpoint, shoring up the legend of an already iconic character. After a certain point, once she looks like the character we know from Fury Road, the camera sinks down, looking up at her at an angle close to the ground. Furiosa looms high, a colossus, elevated above the blood and sweat and grease, a “dark angel” on a mission of revenge. Taylor-Joy modulates her voice to sound like Theron’s portrayal of the character in an uncanny impression, even as Miller’s movie frames her like a statue of a goddess, more immaculate than Theron’s dusty version ever was. She’s come into her own, and she’s somehow greater and more untouchable than she ever will be again.
The Mad Max universe tends to play fast and loose with its continuity, each movie elaborating on a theme of hopeless survival and the bitter cycle of revenge without caring much about connecting the dots between. Furiosa paradoxically exists in order to connect those dots. We know, going in, how the story will end; by the time the credits roll we’ll understand the haunted look in Furiosa’s eyes a little better. What’s remarkable is just how satisfying it is to see it all play out, even though the new details don’t actually have all that much to say. The original Furiosa didn’t have much to say for herself, either. Sometimes you just have to express something obvious. Wherever you go, there you are.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in wide release now.