Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) - Post Apocalyptic Film Review

At the start of last year me and my father began working our way through the Mad Max series of Australian post-apocalyptic films, due to him having visited Broken Hill, the filming location for Mad Max 2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the first movie in the series to be a spin-off, not featuring the titular Max as the protagonist, but instead Furiosa, played here by Alyla Browne (Children of the Corn) and Anya Taylor-Joy (Morgan, The Witch: A New England Folktale), an important side character in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. The film works as an origin story for the character, showing how she came to be working for Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme - The Matrix Revolutions), and sets up her motivations for why she decided to betray him.

After a series of worldwide disasters, the world has fallen into ruin. Furiosa (Browne) is a young girl who lives in a hidden oasis in the middle of the Australian outback where one day bandits appear. Wanting to prove to their boss that the oasis they discovered actually exists, the gang abduct Furiosa and take her back to their camp. The eccentric warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth - the Marvel series of superhero films) murders Furiosa's mother who had followed her to the camp and makes the young girl his special prisoner. After Dementus discovers the location of a vast water source ruled over by a warlord named Immortan Joe, he plans to take it over, but outmatched he instead sets his sights on the nearby Gastown. Taking over this essential location he forms a truce with Joe, and as part of the deal Furiosa is handed over to him to become one of his brides. Escaping from her confinement, Furiosa ends up working for Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), Immortan Joe's most trusted driver. Recognising the drive in the young girl, Jack takes her under his wing, promising to teach her all the skills she would need to survive in the wasteland.
Fifteen years or so later and Furiosa (Taylor-Joy) has become an essential member of Joe's workforce, where she has bided her time waiting to get revenge on Dementus. Having made a poor job of running Gastown, Dementus has decided it is time for him to make a move against Immortan Joe and so a war between the two warlords begins.

I really liked Fury Road when I first saw it, but repeated views has not had it stood the test of time as well as hoped. That movie was essentially one long car chase from beginning to end. Describing Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga I would describe it as a series of smaller car chases. Being a prequel I was interested to see how this would match up with Fury Road, especially seeing as how this story was already written before that movie was made. It was nice to see a bunch of returning characters reprising their roles. The bad guys of Fury Road were a memorable bunch, so it was cool to see them returning. Not all the actors reprised their roles, obviously Charlize Theron was replaced with the two younger actresses, but many of the bad guys return. I was surprised that Immortan Joe looked identical to his prior appearance, despite him being played by a different actor. I thought it was cool that two characters who had only ever appeared in the Mad Max video game made live action appearances here, so it seems that is still deemed canonical. Hemsworth was great as new antagonist Dementus, with him really fitting into the post-apocalyptic world. He was quite eccentric and faintly ridiculous, wearing a cape made out of a plastic sheet, and carrying around a teddy bear with him at all times (with it heavily implied this belonged to a child he had in his past). I liked his implementation, and he commanded a huge biker force making for some epic looking scenes. His most iconic vehicle was three motorbikes strapped to a chariot that he rode around.

The movie was again directed by George Miller, with him co-writing this alongside Nick Lathouris as he did last time around. Split into several lengthy chapters, the plot covers a lot of ground, with Taylor-Joy's version of Furiosa not actually making an appearance until around an hour has passed of this nearly two and a half hour movie. It was fun to see all the references to that other film, with many fun easter eggs included. Here for instance you find where Immortan Joe got his monster truck from, how Furiosa came to lose her arm, and the origins of the iconic tanker that Max and Furiosa hijacked. As for that other character, he doesn't make an appearance here outside of one blink and you miss it moment, but I didn't feel he was needed. This has an interesting way of integrating with Fury Road by showing clips of that film play out over the end credits. The wasteland of Australia looks as great as ever, and there is no end of vehicular combat against Dementus and his bikers and Immortan Joe and his warboys. Rated fifteen, this often suggests more than it shows, but there are plenty of body parts, and plenty of violent shootouts and crashes, and plenty of shots of people and vehicles being grinded under large wheels!

I feared that Furiosa would be a bit of a pointless film, I didn't really like her character too much before, but here, I was surprised that I came to enjoy her role. Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot to work with, with her character mute for most of the runtime, I think I read that she has less than a hundred words of dialogue spoken. She certainly looked the part, and was a credible acting bad-ass. I think the lack of dialogue from her worked, as the finale clash between her character and Dementus felt a bit out of place and overly philosophical with the long conversations they had. It was a treat to return to the demented world of Mad Max, and has made me want to check out Fury Road yet again to see if I spot more ways the two films melded together.

SCORE: