At the beginning of director George Miller’s bitter, thrilling film “Furiosa,” the latest installment of his decades-long “Mad Max Saga,” a couple girls are picking peaches in a lush green wood, along a river, surrounded by the forbidding vastness of a seemingly endless desert. They spot a gang of bikers who’ve stolen into their Eden. One of the girls, maybe 10-years-old, attempts to sneak close and disable their motorcycles, but gets caught and carried off by the marauders.
So begins a dazzling race across desert dunes, as women of the oasis pursue the bikers on horseback, then motorcycle, to rescue the girl, and to make sure none of the interlopers survive to reveal the location of their secret paradise. And the pursuers are excellent shooters. But, alas, the girl (played by Alyla Browne) doesn’t escape. And her name, you’ve probably guessed, is Furiosa. Which is a curious name for a girl from paradise.
“Furiosa” is about how this girl protects her knowledge of her homeland, about the terrible compromises she makes to survive, about how she chases bitter revenge in a heartless landscape after nuclear war and pandemics and global warming. It’s one of those futures in which the world is a parched desert populated by wantonly murderous gangs of white assholes. (Where did all the women and people of color go?) Warlords backed by fiercely loyal, fiercely violent idiots fight each other for control of strongholds—one for gasoline, one for bullets, one for cabbages—all that assholes need to get by, apparently.
Furiosa gets caught in between them. The gang that absorbs the young Furiosa is led by a sort of charming, but evil Thor named Dementus (played by Chris Hemsworth who embodied Thor in the Disney/Marvel flicks), who carries a teddy bear and roars across the burnt wastelands on a chariot pulled by three motorcycles. While Dementus might be surrounded by self-serving dolts, he’s actually brilliant at diversions and switcheroos and Trojan horses and double-crosses. He’s also fond of torture, believes it edifying for his enemies. And the hunky windbag is always making pronouncements like “Come to me with your pain and burden and I will double your gruel,” when he’s trying to get residents of one of the fortified outposts to turn against their awful local warlords. Or he’s hollering things like: “There is no hope! … We cannot be soft. There must be retribution—justice and retribution.” Sometimes you just wish he’d shut up for a while—especially when he monologues forever at the seethingly silent Furiosa late in the film.
Dementus deploys every bit of his ruthless guile to try to seize control of the various strongholds—but meets his match in the scheming of a warlord by the name of Immortan Joe, whom you may remember from the last Mad Max film, 2015’s “Fury Road”—you know, the freak who looked a bit like Darth Vader if he’d let his hair grow out and go gray and never wore a shirt anymore and had a kink for milk.
The “Mad Max” series has gotten so much better as they’ve moved the center of the stories from real-life asshole Mel Gibson to Furiosa. It makes the resonance of gender in the films more complicated, more compelling. Nonetheless, this prequel drifts a bit as it labors to get us from young Furiosa to a 20-something Furiosa, played here by Anya Taylor-Joy, to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in “Fury Road.”
Thankfully, Furiosa is soon caught in the middle of an attack on a souped-up battle truck known as a War Rig, driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who takes her under his wing. The stunts are incredible and visceral—so many bodies crunch under tires. Part of the thrill of the chases is how the characters are constantly working to outwit each other, to adapt on the fly. The attack is followed by a series of battles full of awesome trucks and motorcycles, custom steampunked hotrods, paragliders, cranes and construction diggers, guns and spears and fire, all underlined by the bassy growl of gas-guzzling engines. The ideal form of a “Mad Max” action spectacular is a fighting chase across the desert that never ends—and Miller and crew do it better than anybody.
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