It should go without saying that those expecting George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to be “Fury Road but with less Tom Hardy” will be deeply disappointed – not because Hardy shows up and steals away the show from Anya Taylor-Joy and company, but because Furiosa is an entirely different animal than its predecessor. Replicating a singular film like that, the epochal culmination of four decades of filmmaking prowess distilled into a lean and fine-tuned action machine primed to engage the pleasure centers of the human brain like a designer drug, would be impossible for any number of reasons, least of which because it was just so goddamned hard to make in the first place. Think about it: It takes decades of accumulated reputation for a publisher to pick up a making-of book that isn’t a direct tie-in – Chinatown, Stalker, Blade Runner, Breakfast at fucking Tiffany’s – but there was enough of a story in the making of Miller’s magnum opus for one to come out just six years after its release. And sure, the laurels placed atop its shiny and chrome head did signify that this was something special — ranked choice voting enabled Spotlight to walk away with Best Picture at the Oscars that year, but it was Miller’s night overall, fading the technical categories like Pedro retiring batters at the ’99 All-Star Game. If there were an all-century team of 21st-century cinema, Fury Road may very well be its captain, and any follow-up is doomed to bitchy comparison. To continue the baseball metaphor even further, there’s always going to be someone bemoaning the heydays of Babe and Lou Gehrig even as Mantle, DiMaggio, and Maris are setting records and winning pennants. A prequel? With CGI and a larger budget? Pssh, they’ll never recapture that glory.
The good news is twofold: The first item is that Miller isn’t trying to, and the second is that he genuinely does not give a fuck about what you want. Well, that second bit isn’t exactly true – he’s still concerned that you leave this movie thoroughly entertained after two hours and 20 minutes of captivating and enthralling action filmmaking because, boy howdy, does he succeed yet again at this – but he’s heard the complaints about Fury Road not being a proper Mad Max film and observed all the horseshit flung at guys like George Lucas and decided to make the kind of prequel that people typically hope for when they plunk down their hard-earned dollars at the Regal box office and re-enter a cinematic world. Prequels are often exercises in wrongheaded cleverness, which is why they fail. Aside from creators, nerds, and suits, nobody in their right mind gives a fuck about Midichlorian counts or space jockeys suiciding to put the “sperm” in “panspermia” – this is franchise protectionism at its finest, meant for other filmmakers to tease out the meaning and develop it into something useful far down the line. Phantom Menace spent the last month posted up at IMAX screens due to the passage of time (it’s a massive failure on IMAX’s part that they didn’t hand out rose-colored 3D glasses to the audience at those 25th-anniversary screenings), but it was mainly thanks to the work of guys like Dave Filoni, who made those elements into something other than handicaps. But Miller doesn’t have to worry about that: No one will come and demand a Mad Max TV show or a nine-film series, as much as David Zazlov and company might like. It is his baby, not anyone else’s, and he doesn’t owe anyone anything aside from – you guessed it – captivating entertainment.
So when audiences return to the Wasteland this weekend, they might be surprised to discover that Fury Road‘s mysteries are preserved intact in Furiosa. Indeed, most of the make-up of that landscape is already pre-established. We don’t see Immortan Joe get outfitted in his suit, watch the birth of his dumb sons or see the first War Boys roll into action, nor do we get major insight into how the Green Place fell and how the Many Mothers were scattered. Indeed, it’s practically fully formed, with the additional color provided by a more expansive scope (we get to see the Bullet Farm and Gastown) and straight-up additions just made for this film. Any enhancing information we do get is presented to us solely from Furiosa’s vantage – we do learn how she lost her forearm, as well as how she wound up in the Citadel in the first place – and, surprisingly, Furiosa can be fully enjoyed by someone who, somehow, someway, missed out on seeing Fury Road in the last nine years. We are given reasons to care about this character beyond the fact that she plays an important role in a subsequent and iconic film, and she has a full narrative arc that compliments and, importantly, enhances her journey with the Wives and Max upon a rewatch. The barriers to entry, normally stacked hard and heavy against a viewer like this, have been fully removed. To erect them would go against Miller’s ethos as a filmmaker – he is, for all intents and purposes, the last truly populist filmmaker working in the blockbuster genre space. This is a man who has spent his career making splendid spectacles out of simple pleasures — the roar of a V8, the cute smile of a precious pig, the classical song-and-dance – and I’d argue that’s why he spent so much time working in “children’s movies.” It’s easy to make a kid cry at the end of something like Babe, and it is another to have the whole family shedding tears into their popcorn. That takes rigor, and Miller is one of the few people operating in this sphere to have more than just a slight measure of it.
Take any of this film’s chapters, and you’ll see what I mean. Miller took a tactic from Tarantino and other modern-day Western revenge filmmakers and divided the film into several equally astonishing parts, each with its specific set pieces and narrative arcs, which all dovetail into a cohesive whole. At large, the film is pretty much temporally split down the middle – the first half follows young Furiosa (Alyla Browne, who deserves as much credit as Taylor-Joy does) as she’s kidnapped from her home in the Green Place by a gang of bikers, who take her back to their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who is one of the most hilariously Australian villains to ever appear on screen since Vernon Wells left the Wasteland to go toe-to-toe with Arnie in Commando. Hemsworth’s been outfitted with a Nigel Thornberry nose and goofy teeth, and all of that ham energy wasted in dozens of mediocre comedies can come out in full and furious force. He’s a dangerous moron who thinks exceptionally highly of himself – even enslaving a man tattooed with notes and encyclopedic knowledge to be his “history man” and provide him with information for his ill-informed bon mots – yet who is given enough shading through the storytelling to become a strangely tragic figure. Miller’s always been fantastic at this, undercutting the evil power of his villains with poignant details of their pathetic and pitiable nature. Dementus is really the culmination of that, with the ferocity of Hemsworth’s performance often echoing the kind of crazy work the original Max once did – a sweaty panic and insecurity that guys like Mel Gibson excelled at in the past. He is a perfect foil to the stability of Immortan Joe’s trade network and Furiosa, who, as she ages, only accrues more and more reasons to hate her “adoptive” father.
Taylor-Joy’s steely-eyed ferocity made her a perfect choice for this role, which echoes the proud tradition of Miller stoicism in the post-apocalypse, where wit and sense matter just as much as any amount of physical prowess, and to see her grimace behind the wheel is a joy, a stable stone-faced element in an environment full of moving parts. I’ve made reference to Miller’s love and appreciation for the Silent Age before, and he is truly its last son, with the herky-jerky movement of fast shutter speeds and the broad-scale absurdity of its imagery paying tribute to the eras in filmmaking before sound and, more importantly, before television. Miller is somewhat unique among current directors in that he, while conversational in its usage, takes very little from the language of television – his works are cinematic to a fault, justifying the largeness of the screen through a steadfast refusal to be boring in blocking. Dialogue complements his filmmaking instead of being its centerpiece, and his works remain experiences that justify IMAX’s price on the stock ticker. When you watch the absurdly clever raid that happens at the film’s midpoint, you will understand what I mean – it, like the action in Fury Road, steadily accumulates intensity, placing its characters in circumstances that only grow more deadly until it resolves in a denouncement both vicious, beautiful and strangely tragic. The CGI is once again amazing, never consuming the frame in obvious ways – if there’s any “slickness” to the action here, it’s mainly because Miller has once again upped his power level. The action was always slick, and the effects work was as well – the only difference is that people have something to compare it to, even if the films themselves could not be more dissimilar in motivation.
What Furiosa ultimately is – aside from being yet another towering action masterpiece from an inimitable filmmaker willing to take on all young buck-comers and fleece them for all they’re worth – is a litmus test to try and get the audience to figure out what they actually liked about Fury Road. Suppose you liked the simplicity of the chase narrative: Wages of Fear, but in ruined Australia with something more explosive than TNT in the tanker. In that case, you might genuinely be disappointed by the long epic serving as its follow-up, and I understand that impulse. Remember, I don’t care for The Raid 2, so I should be primed to dislike this movie based on its capacity to overcomplicate a simple and beautiful thing – an exact inverse of the ethos that made the original so special. But Miller (and his entire production team) has crafted such a richly detailed world that one can’t help but want to see more of it in some way. He’s granted us another two and a half hours in the dregs of the desert among the cannibals, mutants, freaks, and screaming engines, watching the most splendorous action possible with the tools of modern cinema. For viewers game to pick up what he’s putting down, as well as casual audience members, I can hardly imagine a better time at the movies this summer or any other. To put it as plainly as possible, May 24 will be a lovely day. Oh, what a lovely day.