At the beginning of director George Miller\u2019s bitter, thrilling film \u201cFuriosa,\u201d the latest installment of his decades-long \u201cMad Max Saga,\u201d 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t escape. And her name, you\u2019ve probably guessed, is Furiosa. Which is a curious name for a girl from paradise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFuriosa\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014one for gasoline, one for bullets, one for cabbages\u2014all that assholes need to get by, apparently.<\/p>\n\n\n