Fiery and thoughtful, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will shake your bones and steal your soul

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• Directed by George Miller
• Written by George Miller and Nico Lathouris
• Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke
• Classification 14A; 148 minutes
• Opens in theatres May 24

Critic’s Pick

Once asked to describe his love for director George Miller’s action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road, fellow filmmaker Steven Soderbergh summed up his admiration neatly: “I don’t understand how they’re still not shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

While Miller’s 2015 epic about a pair of postapocalyptic warriors facing off against a fascist madman didn’t actually kill anyone – even if it might have momentarily stopped a few million moviegoers’ hearts along the way – you get the same Soderberghian sense of shock-and-awe wonder while watching Fury Road’s follow-up, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Every single human instinct nudges you toward accepting the cruel reality that Miller and his collaborators surely must have murdered scores of innocent extras and stunt professionals while barrelling toward the production’s wrap, so brutally outlandish is the on-screen mayhem. There are deaths by bullets, fire, harpoons and, in one particularly gnarly sequence, a doohickey that combines medieval mace balls with an aircraft piston engine to create the stuff of steam-punk nightmares. It is all then sound-tracked to the guttural grunts of an eternally revving V8, loud enough to shake your bones and steal your soul.

Yet unlike Fury Road – which remains the very best action movie ever made – Furiosa is concerned as much with carnage as it is with grace. If Fury Road was a relentless, single-minded pursuit into Hell that left you gasping for air, then Furiosa is a richer detour into the darkness that gives its audience time to breathe. Even if the only thing left to inhale is a smog-choked wasteland of humanity’s own making.

Separated into five chapters, Furiosa traces the origins of its title character, played with incendiary sincerity by Charlize Theron in Fury Road. This time around, the hero is played by the young Alyla Browne in the early going, then by Anya Taylor-Joy, who isn’t so much a dead ringer for Theron but proves to be a fiercely committed student of superstar mimicry. The actress – whose capacity for balancing innocence-lost warmth with scorched-earth hostility helped her break out in Robert Eggers’s 2016 modern-horror touchstone The Witch – nails Theron’s thousand-yard-stare intensity here, stewing in both toxic guilt and incandescent rage.

The anger is understandable, given that at the beginning of this film, Furiosa is ripped from her mother’s arms by a group of marauding thugs who crave only fresh meat and gasoline, those twin engines of Mad Max-ian survival. Things devolve further after Furiosa is acquired as a trophy-slash-plaything by the warlord biker Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, dicing things up just right), one of many madmen trying to carve out their own corner of the postapocalyptic outback. But as Furiosa grows older and stronger – and Dementus’s hold on power suffers through as many peaks and valleys as the flat Australian deserts allow – the character begins to carve out her own bloody path of retribution, which leads straight to Fury Road’s chief villain, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).

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Keenly aware that Soderbergh and others have spent the past decade watching and waiting for Miller to either surpass or sabotage himself with a follow-up, the director now seeks to build his Mad Max world rather than simply blow it up. By tracing Dementus and Immortan Joe’s self-destructive rivalry – which involves not only an extended visit to the franchise’s fabled Gas Town but also a trip inside its sister city, Bullet Town (the end of the world is no time to get clever with names) – Miller gets to flesh out a demented dystopia that was only haltingly dissected beforehand.

Even 1985′s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome didn’t get into as much contextual, almost infrastructural detail as Furiosa does in terms of what happens after the world as we know it ends. And while some of Fury Road’s more adrenalin-fuelled action purists may argue that no such background information is needed when you have the chase scene to end all chase scenes, Miller’s imagination is so bursting with delirious imagery and mythology that any adventurous audience should drop to their knees in gratitude knowing that a major studio afforded the filmmaker with such an expansive, generous canvas.

More than four decades ago, Miller began his Mad Max saga, and his career, by imagining a world out of his control. Now, he has been afforded the grand opportunity to remind both his fans that he never stopped thinking about that great, unstoppable wheel of destruction. This is action cinema filtered through the thousand pile-on details of a serialized Dickens novel, grand and seismic.

And when the action sequences do arrive, they are glorious. There are almost too many set-pieces to highlight, though an extended mid-film scene involving the attempted hijacking of Immortan Joe’s War Rig is executed with a precise kind of glee. Each swerve of the truck and each dispatch of a body feels frighteningly real, with each frame a perfectly formed puzzle of a million moving parts. Perhaps even more so than Fury Road, Furiosa is a movie that punishes you for blinking.

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All this, plus Miller introduces a new road warrior to the mix whose nerves of steel rival that of either Fury Road’s Tom Hardy or the previous Max era of Mel Gibson. Playing a mentor of Furiosa’s named Praetorian Jack, Tom Burke matches Taylor-Joy beat for hard-eyed beat, offering a shocking amount of heat for such an icy-veined character.

More than once after watching Furiosa, I found myself doubling over with the realization that Burke has possibly the best range of any actor his generation: not everyone can play such a kick-ass hero as well as the world’s worst boyfriend (in Joanna Hogg’s 2019 drama The Souvenir) and Orson Welles himself (in David Fincher’s 2020 biopic Mank). Hemsworth might be getting the most headlines for Furiosa, but Burke deserves the afterglow.

Although Furiosa’s ending might not land for some – a natural problem when you make one film designed to flow directly into another – its sombre, haunting tone has stuck with me longer than Fury Road’s more hopeful finale. If this is the way George Miller wants his world to end – not with a bang, but a self-aware whimper – than let him flip the switch and nuke us all. The man has earned his right to send humanity packing.