Furiosa – A Violent Premonition
It feels cliché to call visionary director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga “a revelation” but there was something revelatory about the experience – a thematically dark, aesthetically bright world that would be hell to live in but is paradise to visit for a couple of hours. Days later, sitting and typing, I am replaying sequences in my head, behind my closed eyelids, feeling like I am back in the cinema, watching Furiosa fail to escape her captors as a child only to later outlive and outwit them as an adult. There is triumph in the film, carried as it is by violence and madness. It is an engaging action film, an exhilarating epic, about the human drives for survival and exploitation, the dialectical relationship between collaboration and competition, and the danger a woman faces in a world run by sadistic, self-serving men.
Furiosa is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, one of two films I have seen three times in theaters, both in 2015, the one of the two whose quality I still stand by. My friend took me and I had a great time, so I took another friend, and we had a great time, so we invited some other people. This was in New Orleans in the sweltering summer of 2015, one which featured tremendous rainstorms and remarkable flooding. I mention all that because the Mad Max movies, especially these last two, are about climate catastrophe and the experiences of humanity in the wake of it. Amid genocide, global conflict, and elections inspiring despondence, the climate is still changing. Mad Max: Fury Road features a lightning sandstorm that I have not been able to get out of my mind since that day at the AMC theater in Harahan which, amid conversations about who destroyed the world and what it used to be like, make plain that the story of the setting is a warning for the present. Furiosa is more specifically character-driven while showcasing that same world. It is one of those projects that accentuates that prequels have value. An easy critique of the form builds on the idea that artists ought to, as Oscar Wilde put it, start the story as close to the end as you can. The story you’re telling is already the good stuff, why go in and backfill past allusions? There are many ways to do this that feel tedious and unsatisfactory, and we are replete with soulless, brainless products in the modern IP-wringing era of the new studio system. But there are some films and shows and books that explain things in a way that makes the original text they reference richer, fuller, and more vibrant by giving the audience a deeper connection to a character. Furiosa is one such film.
Furiosa takes place in post-apocalyptic Australia, in the desert Wasteland. Everywhere we see barbarism, easily recognizable as mankind reverting to baser instincts, using remnants of modern technology to rebuild society along the lines of a pre-Axial age reliant on scavenging 20th century technology. There are self-important despots, makeshift armies of bandits and scavengers, strongholds built in caves, mountains, factories, and refineries, arbitrary despotic rule and nebulous necrotic social structure enforced by cruelty to subordinates. Since the mid-apocalypse or pre-apocalypse of the first movie, society has been fixated on automobiles and motorcycles, with a prominent place in the films for chase sequences and a prominent space in their stories for gasoline and car parts. The structure of this film feels more like the original Mad Max, where Fury Road had clear similarities with The Road Warrior. Here we have a tale of vengeance born from severing of the protagonist from their family and full of an evil motorcycle gang.
The film begins with Furiosa (Young Furiosa played by Alyla Brown) living in something like a hidden oasis, foraging with another young girl in a forest. They see bandits on motorcycles nearby, field dressing a deer. Furiosa disables one of their motorcycles but is captured – two women (Charlee Fraser as Furiosa’s mom, Mary Jabassa, and Elsa Pataky as Vuvalini general) chase after her, their small village alerted by Furiosa’s whistle. So begins her saga.
The film quickly establishes the nomadic scavenger nature of the people, both Furiosa’s villagers from “a place of abundance” and the bad. Everyone must be adaptable and rely on ingenuity; there are motorcycles affixed with car parts, outfitted so their fuel tanks and tires are easily replaceable. Furiosa’s mother is a crack sniper, dropping foes at great distance and with terrific mastery of short-term combat strategy and close-quarters combat. The stakes of survival, of keeping their home secret and eventually returning to it, are quickly established. Furiosa’s mother sacrifices herself so that Furiosa can return home, but she does not take the chance when she should have. She becomes the prized – and mercifully untouched – trophy of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a warlord with a chariot tied to three motorcycles, leading a tremendous horde of motorcyclists, comprised of gangs like the Mortifiers, led by the Octoboss (Goran Kleut). We see countless acts of psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, as cruelty and vengeance rule the wasteland. Eventually, Dementus meets Immortan Joe (played by Lachy Hulme replacing the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), strikes an uneasy barter, and the plot follows the shifting power dynamics among the major strongholds in the wasteland. Furiosa must avoid Immortan Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones reprising his role from the original) and falls in as a mechanic, hiding her gender and then proving her ability as a driver and shooter alongside Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the war rig for Immortan Joe and his Citadel.
The film is full of the roar of engines, of dust storms real and artificial, and carries with it a decidedly epic storybook quality. It is broken into chapters with enigmatic title cards, and Dementus’s self-tattooed “History Man” (George Shevtsov) serves as occasional narrator in addition to sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the world, providing an informative and poetic description of the history of warfare near the film’s apex, connecting disparate sequences rather than creating a rupture in the story. It alludes to conflicts that have come to pass in the real world and some that only might. Anya-Taylor Joy’s Furiosa is not wordy, but her trademark expressive eyes, her tenacity in her many moments of action and few moments of speech, make her fun to follow. The combined powers of director George Miller, cinematographer Simon Duggan, and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel do much to hone intensity and urgency in the ways action plays out, especially combat. Further, I would say what dialogue there is in the film is tuned a bit tighter than in its predecessor, not that that one was so bad but that it was occasionally clunky in its bluntness. Not that we need a movie to be subtle, especially one such as this, but things felt like they flowed better, with the silly names and jargon taken as seriously as there, amid all their bleak implications.
Nonetheless, there is something scratching at the back of me about this film that cannot go unremarked upon. A small controversy bloomed before its release because of the use of “A.I.” to transpose Anya Taylor-Joy’s face onto Alyla Brown in much of the early-middle parts of the film, combining their faces and then gradually giving way to Anya Taylor-Joy. Setting aside my instinctive blanket condemnation of “A.I.” as a nebulous marketing term for a wide variety of technologies, I did find it odd to see “Metaphysic AI” in the credits. I don’t like that as a direction where art is heading, especially after long strikes preceding contract negotiations for WGA and SAG-AFTRA which noted concern about deployment of so-called artificial intelligence at the expense of entertainment workers, and I don’t think directors get a blanket past on critique or inquiry just based on liking their previous work. I will nonetheless say that special effect was quite effective; I spent much of the film wondering how they used makeup or camera tricks to make ATJ appear to be a younger person. Now we know, in part.
In any case, there is a lot of phenomenal effects work in the film. The chase scenes are great, especially one that involves people flying with propeller fans and parachutes. That was some of the coolest thing I had ever seen. The battle atop the war rig, its very creation… even some computer imagery that looked cheesy in the ads, like Furiosa’s robotic arm, looked great on the big screen. There’s nothing quite like the car-consuming lightning sandstorm from Fury Road, but this one feels even more practical just as its narrative is more personal. This film ends in a way that reminds the audience of that one, snapshots that lead right into it, though some uncertain amount of time has passed between this falling action and epilogue. That’s a difficult needle to thread or line to ride, reminding the audience of why they were drawn to this in the first place without overwhelming them. We get backstory on characters from that film besides the titular one but it never feels hackneyed or shoehorned. The same is true of the lone cameo of the original title character. Somehow it all comes together as its own thing, difficult as that is for prequels to do.
I am glad we still get movies like this, by which I mean big, expressive, experimental action epics. “Blockbuster” is too often applied before a film is even released and has earned the monicker, but for the artistic connotations the term conveys, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga delivers. There are few imitators, even as there may be vaguely adjacent works – Fallout, Twisted Metal, and so forth. Only environmentalist auteur George Miller can provide us with Mad Max. We will probably get no more stories of Furiosa, but this one will be worth revisiting for a long time.
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