Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga kicks off summer with a bang

A cultural event like Mad Max: Fury Road only happen when all the stars align. 

If you were to tell someone a decade ago that the fourth Mad Max movie would win 6 Oscars and arguably should have won Best Picture, you would have been laughed out of the room.

The film redefined what the Hollywood blockbuster could do after the superhero rot had well and truly set in. 

The heart-pounding action and insane stunts made the film an instant cultural touchstone, with the film’s simple yet deep plotline giving audiences plenty to sink their teeth into.

Following up Fury Road is as tall an order as following Queen at Live Aid.

Wisely, maestro George Miller decides not to repeat what he did on Fury Road and opts to tell a deeper, more personal character-driven story.

The bombastic action sequences we’ve come to expect are there, but now we have a deeper understanding of character motivations.

The film is all the better for it.

Furiosa in a lot of ways sets up the kitchen table for the Fury Road main course.

The two films can be watched back-to-back (which we are very much looking forward to doing in time to come) and lose none of the impact.

Owing to the prequel nature of the film it will inevitably draw comparisons to Fury Road (and indeed, the film uses clips from Fury Road as a punctuation mark) but our advice is to simply enjoy the film for what it is.

Someone could wander in off the street with no prior knowledge of the franchise and just assume the Mad Max movies are a documentary about daily life in Roscommon but still get the same enjoyment out of the film as a long-term fan.

The shared collective feeling of “I can’t believe what I’m seeing” makes Furiosa that bit more special than other films.

Furiosa is a spectacular achievement in its own right and barring something more exceptional coming along it can be assured of a slot in our year-end top 10.

Furiosa isn’t as good as Fury Road, but it neither tries to be and doesn’t need to be.

Anya-Taylor Joy plays a younger version of the character made famous by Charlize Theron and makes it look effortless.

Filling the shoes of an iconic character played by a beloved movie star is one of the most difficult things an actor can do but the Queens Gambit star pulls it off with aplomb. 

Furiosa has somewhere around 40 lines of dialogue in the film, only speaking when it matters, meaning the film heavily depends on physical and non-verbal acting from its leading lady to get the point across.

Miller drafted in compatriot Chris Hemsworth to play the villain role and the former Home and Away man has never been better.

Hemsworth isn’t usually thought of as an especially good actor and is a great movie star (for a frame of reference, someone like Denzel Washington in The Equalizer movies is an example of both) but he brings his A-game to Furiosa.

Hemsworth is clearly having the time of his life as the wicked Dementus and plays the character with relish. 

After the Thor films gave up on structure and decided to become sub-par Big Trouble In Little China knock-offs Hemsworth ran the risk of being dragged down with the ship.

Hemsworth teaming up with Miller is a stroke of genius; a director gets a big, splashy action star to throw around and an actor gets the chance to flex their muscles and prove their chops.

Film scholars have noted that Fury Road shares a lot of DNA with the films of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd and an intriguing experiment would be to watch this film with the sound off when it hits streaming and disc.

The black-and-white version of Fury Road is a fun exercise in making the film feel like an audacious film from the 1920s and Furiosa would most likely work in the same way. 

Miller is the true star of the show with Furiosa – the franchise is his baby after all – but every crazy camera zoom-in or wide shot of a character enveloped by the elements around them reminds us that Miller needs to be recognised as one of the greatest living directors.

Directors like Spielberg, Cameron and Scorsese have rightfully been given their flowers, but Miller is never mentioned in the same conversation. 

There is a ruthless efficiency with the directing work in Furiosa that you simply don’t get with other films.

When the term “spatial geography” is used in the context of filmmaking it’s a fancy way of saying the viewer knows where the characters are at any given time in relation to the scene.

Miller is a master of making every inch of the screen count or filling it up with something interesting.

What Miller does with this film is extraordinary; there are no other superlatives needed. 

The Aussie has a wonderfully eclectic CV (Oscar winner for Happy Feet, directed The Witches Of Eastwick in 1987, made Nick Nolte seem almost human in Lorenzo’s Oil) but isn’t usually cited as a big-name director like your Nolan’s or Tarantino’s.

In 2022, Miller released the best film of that particular year, Three Thousand Years Of Longing.

The film died an undignified death at the box office when it came out in September 2022 but the 17 people who saw it all agreed that Miller successfully played around with the conventions of the classical fairytale and how people embellish stories involving themselves.

Furiosa strangely shares a lot of the same storytelling DNA of that film which is no bad thing in our book.

The 2024 summer blockbuster season is going to be heavily impacted by last year’s dual Hollywood strikes which means that Furiosa is likely to stick around for that bit longer as studios scramble to plug the gap.

It would be no bad thing if this film became a Top Gun: Maverick-style hit so we can send Hollywood a clear message; less superheroes, more auteur-driven action films.

Films like Furiosa, Nope and Top Gun: Maverick are the only kinds of films Hollywood can do properly anymore; the more the merrier, we say.