FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024) - Movie Review

Director: George Miller
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme, Angus Sampson, George Shevtsov, Nathan Jones,
Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
Writer: George Miller, Nick Lathouris
Runtime: 148 min
Rated: Rated R for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images.
Buy This Movie: Blu-ray (Amazon), DVD (Amazon), 4K Ultra HD (Amazon), Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV

This blog is supported by its audience. When you buy through links on my blog, I may earn an affiliate commission.

Synopsis:

As the world falls, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and ends up in the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel, presided over by Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

Review:

Before we proceed, let me just confess my love for "Mad Max: Fury Road". It's a masterpiece of action cinema and an impressively immersive post-apocalyptic adventure that squeezes limitless imagination and filmmaking craft into every available frame. Considering all that, I was weary of a prequel, a prequel spin-off of a side character no less, and feared that George Miller was making a mistake. However, after watching "Furiosa", I can safely say that "Mad George" has done it again.

The script for "Furiosa" took over 15 years to write, and the movie was supposed to be shot back-to-back with "Mad Max: Fury Road". Charlize Theron even used a script for the Furiosa-centric movie as inspiration for her character. It didn't happen the way Miller planned, but the filmmaker still had a richly detailed world to explore, so it made sense to return to it for a new movie. Previous plans focused on an anime movie, but they eventually settled for live-action.

The story is set around 15 years before the events of "Fury Road", although an exact chronology is not really mentioned, which is a specific trait of the "Mad Max" franchise. There has never been a strict continuity in the entire franchise, which is very similar to the "Evil Dead" trilogy.

Although Anya Taylor-Joy is the lead actress, she's absent from the movie's first half. We first meet Furiosa as a young girl who is snatched from her homeland in the Green Place of Many Mothers by a vicious gang of wasteland bikers led by Chris Hemsworth's Dementus. Alyla Browne ("The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart", "Sting") plays her as a child and teenager, and she's one of the film's standouts, a surprisingly solid performance from the Australian child actress. This kid is definitely going places.

Hemsworth immediately commands the screen as soon as he appears with a fascinating villainous turn that at first glance seems entirely cheesy, but hides intricate layers that make Dementus an instantly iconic character. There's also a healthy dose of symbolism attached to his evolution, which fans will undoubtedly unpack with glee.

Although I had some doubts about the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa, I must admit she is fantastic. It's almost a silent role, with around 30 lines of dialogue in almost 90 minutes of screen time, but she conveys so much emotion with just her expressive eyes. She also brings a convincing physicality to her performance in action scenes, which is a must for post-apocalyptic wasteland survival.

The character of Furiosa, as written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, is not a "girlboss", as kids these days say. She doesn't start off as a badass, but owns a particular set of survival skills she learned as a child. Removed from her homeland, she soon discovers she has much to learn in order to avoid becoming a victim, hard lessons that will take years to learn and leave her with many scars both on the inside and the outside. The movie traces a convincing path that connects the dots between the child Furiosa, and the efficient killer we see in "Fury Road", while also expanding on the reasons for her actions in the 2015 movie.

I also loved how Miller handled the revenge side of the story. As you might expect, Furiosa's arc includes revenge for what Dementus did to her. The conclusion to that arc is simply fantastic, and perhaps the most ruthless and satisfying form of vengeance I have ever witnessed in a movie. A lengthy final scene between Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth is just riveting, a fantastic tour de force from both actors.

Obviously, it's hard to match the level of mayhem we saw in "Fury Road", but the prequel does come pretty close. That movie was basically one very long chase. It also leaned more into practical stunts and effects. "Furiosa" has much less action, as it focuses more on telling a story and expanding a world that was only hinted at in the previous film. It's also more CGI-heavy, because the action is much more ambitious and epic in scale. This of course means that the digital effects are more noticeable than in "Fury Road", but I wouldn't say it's a major problem. It still towers above any of the VFX work in recent superhero movies.

Even when the CGI is a bit iffy, the insanely frantic camerawork and editing won't let you focus on it for too long. One particularly clever use of CGI was the decision to blend Taylor-Joy's and Browne's faces together as Furiosa grows up, in order to make the transition between actors more natural. This was achieved with machine learning (a non-generative form of artificial intelligence), and it's a great effect.

Apart from brief scattered action sequences, there are two big set pieces filled with crazy stuntwork and clever choreography, that are some of the best in the entire franchise. It's a breath of fresh air to see such virtuoso filmmaking in today's cinematic landscape that has been overpopulated with lazily executed superhero movies. While "Fury Road" cinematographer John Seale did not return for the prequel, Simon Duggan does a fantastic job. The art direction is also incredible, adding so much detail and depth to this insane post-apocalyptic world. Overall, the movie looks amazing. I also appreciated that while Miller's world is brutal and very R-rated, he doesn't weigh the movie down with excessively explicit or gory violence, leaving more to the imagination, which can be even more terrifying.

Of course, "Furiosa" was a box-office bomb. It's not like "Mad Max: Fury Road" was a massive hit (it netted a loss of $20-40 million), but it did appeal more to the action crowd. This prequel is a dark character-driven drama first, and an action movie second. It's a shame it wasn't seen by more people, because it's an awe-inspiring movie and a creative gamble that few filmmakers have the courage or talent to pull off. We need more movies like this and less Marvel trash. But if people don't show up to support talented filmmakers, studios will keep churning out the same tired crap in theaters, which will eventually kill theaters altogether.

SCORE: 10/10