Long live Furiosa

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It is clear to me that I made a grievous mistake by not seeing Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga when it screened in theaters in May. I don’t have a reasonable excuse for this lapse in judgment. I grew up on Mad Max movies — I must have seen the first one when I was 10 or so years old, 11 years after it premiered, and even still own a VHS copy. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Mad Max 2, but I agree with many others that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome represented something close to a shark jump. Still, it’s a classic.

Courtesy photo.

So it was with great excitement that I viewed the 2015 reboot Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy as the titular road warrior Max Rockatansky and Charlize Theron as the scene-devouring Imperator Furiosa — the latter an erstwhile commander in the post-apocalyptic religio-political commodities cult of the sinister Immortan Joe. 

That Furiosa begged for her own spinoff was apparent by the end of Fury Road. Now comes the film bearing her name and representing the origin story of a character that has well and truly supplanted Rockatansky as the “Mad Max” we never knew we wanted, but are overjoyed that we have. Even luckier for us, Furiosa is now available to rent on Amazon for under $10, so there’s really no excuse not to see it — though, if you’re like me, you’ll wish you’d shelled out the theater prices for the full experience.

No less than ebert.com gave it four stars and referred to director George Miller’s latest installment of his 45-year-old franchise as, “simply one of the best prequels ever made.” Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 90% critics’ rating and 89% among audiences.

Like Fury Road, Furiosa is a sumptuous, gravity defying, ultimately bonkers monument to crazed action filmmaking that would be tedious if not for the meticulous attention to world building that serves as its ground wire.

When we left Furiosa — the character — at the end of Fury Road, she’d broken with Immortan Joe to liberate his “breeder” wives and, in the process, upended his tyranny. In Furiosa — the film — we meet our anti-hero as a child, stolen from her paradisiacal home removed by culture and geography from the gas-and-bullets-obsessed shitshow playing out on the wretched, desertified Earth outside.

Furiosa’s captor is biker gang warlord Dementus, whose name needs no explanation. Played with infectious, strutting, psychopathic gusto by Chris Hemsworth, Dementus totes around young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) as a trophy quasi-daughter, though she’s traumatized into silence and tending the seeds for a harvest of vengeance that knows no limit.

Over the course of 15 years, as Dementus makes his play for control of the Wasteland fortresses of Gastown, the Bullet Farm and Immortan Joe’s power center in the The Citadel, Furiosa grows into an adult, played with seething intensity by the always impeccable Anya Taylor-Joy. She ends up as a vassal of Immortan Joe, then a student to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, channeling Mel Gibson’s original Max), who teaches her the ways of road war and offers the first human relationship since her kidnapping.

These parts and pieces add up to a series of showdowns that get as frenetic and jaw-dropping as they are weirdly emotionally affecting.

Furiosa is — like its predecessors — a story of all-consuming revenge, a bit of rumination on what turns humans into monsters and, ultimately, how to survive among those humans-turned-monsters. In that way it’s uncomplicated but that doesn’t make it stupid, like so many other blockbuster franchises. It pulls almost no punches and, in its bombastic grit, somehow delivers us a human story among the carnage.

I wish I’d seen it in the theater, but I’m glad I saw it at all. And will see it many more times, I’m sure.