In a time when blockbuster films have become increasingly dense and talky — awash in exposition and callbacks and in-jokes — George Miller’s films are refreshingly, blessedly simple.
It’s not that he dumbs down, it’s that he strips back his cinema to its barest essence — mythic figures against mythic landscapes, rendered in a kinetic style, with fire and brimstone intensity.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller’s latest, plays like a “testament” film — an apotheosis of the techniques Miller has developed over a 40-year career.
This is the fifth entry in the ongoing “Mad Max” franchise — a franchise which, unusually enough, has been Miller’s brainchild all along. He originated the series back in 1979, and has directed every installment since.
This latest film is a direct prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” telling the backstory of Imperator Furiosa, the fearsome warrior woman originally played by Charlize Theron. Here, she’s played first by Alyla Brown as the bright-eyed child who is spirited from her lush home, the ”Green Place,” and taken as a captive to the hostile desert “Wasteland”; and then by Anya Taylor-Joy as a watchful, guarded warrior in training, learning skills she hopes will help her exact revenge on Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the warlord who kidnapped her.
The direct connection back to “Fury Road” immediately sets “Furiosa” apart within the “Mad Max” franchise, which up to now has been cheerfully unconcerned with continuity. It didn’t really matter what order you watched the “Mad Max” movies in — all you needed to know was that the apocalypse had happened, and poor Max Rockatansky had been left to fend for himself in fallout ravaged Australia (a world where food and water are scarce, but gasoline is apparently readily available, considering all anybody does is drive around really fast).
The other “Mad Max” pictures used their central character as a vessel to introduce us to entirely new worlds with each installment. “Furiosa,” in contrast, returns to the world of “Fury Road” and deepens it, letting us soak more in the details.
“Furiosa,” therefore, doesn’t have the bullet-like concision of “Fury Road.” It’s more expansive — a saga, as the film’s rather unwieldy subtitle suggests. The structure is more akin to Sergio Leone’s Western epics, particularly “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” where the story is just a convenient clothesline on which to hang a succession of set pieces. Fortunately for us, those set pieces are so good.
It’s frankly astonishing how good Miller, at 80, still is at directing action. Basically nothing could “top” “Fury Road” (that movie was one two-hour long chase, a tough if not impossible act to follow), but “Furiosa” has one mid-movie chase scene that is probably the best sequence of its kind since Steven Spielberg stopped directing blockbuster entertainments, and maybe the single best set piece in Miller’s oeuvre. (There’s a later sequence set in a quarry that is nearly its equal.)
The action staging and editing in “Furiosa” is so good that it points up how lax and lazy this kind of stuff usually is. Modern action filmmakers should hang their heads in shame comparing their work to what Miller manages here, and to the fiery clarity of his images.
As in “Fury Road,” the down-and-dirty aesthetic of the ’80s “Mad Max” movies is more or less gone. Both these recent films have fever dream color palettes, and rely a lot on digital compositing to paint the landscapes. But Miller is able to make the digital stylization, which sinks so many other filmmakers, work for him. He plays with his digital tools like a painter; he and cinematographer Simon Duggan create images that have the grandeur of David Lean and the precise, iconographic quality of a comic book.
The performers blend perfectly with the mythic visual approach. Chris Hemsworth is better than I’ve ever seen him as the cartoonishly evil Dementus, who is fearsome but also buffoonish — he’s a good killer but not much of an administrator, a chaos agent in a world desperate for order.
Taylor-Joy, in classic Western hero mode, apparently only has something like 30 lines in the entire film, but her eyes (like Lee Van Cleef’s) burn holes in the screen. She’s vulnerable enough that you worry for her, but also ruthlessly convincing as a fighter. She’s a desert mouse, small but wily, willing to gnaw its own arm off to escape a trap.
By the end of the film, she’s transformed herself into, essentially, a Valkyrie, and “Furiosa” grows more and more expressionistic, earning comparison to Leone and Lean and also Fritz Lang, whose silent epics “Metropolis” and “Die Nibelungen” were overwhelming in their sheer cinematic power.
If there’s a flaw to “Furiosa,” it’s that the movie can’t quite execute that final apocalyptic vision — because, after all, it’s a prequel, and the real climax is the next movie, “Fury Road.”
“Furiosa” instead ends on a philosophical, even surreal note — not unsatisfying, but quiet rather than cacophonous. Miller and company seem to be betting that by the time we arrive at that point, we’ll have been fully satisfied by the two-plus hours of action mayhem we’ve already been served. They’re not wrong. “Furiosa” is a feast.
C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.
At a glance
What: “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” rated R
Director: George Miller
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth
Run time: 148 minutes
Rating: ★★★★½
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