What’s Really Epic About Furiosa
Even as a little girl, Furiosa understood the value of staying hidden in the wasteland of postapocalyptic Earth, where resources are scarce, war is everlasting, and strangers are immediately treated as threats. But keeping out of sight is not the easiest task in the Mad Max films. The director George Miller’s dystopian setting conceals little; his bleak hellscapes provide the perfect stage for thunderous exhibitionism, the kind that yields characters such as the Doof Warrior, who shreds a flame-throwing electric guitar to lead militias into battle. For most humans in this world, surviving means roaring through life with ruthless ferocity on armor-plated vehicles. The madder you are, the better off you’ll be.
Yet Furiosa draws strength from quiet control; she’s a largely silent, sensible observer who refuses to succumb to the insanity of her surroundings. Her origin story, told in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, shows similar restraint: The film, in theaters this week, does not move at the breakneck pace of 2015’s stupendous Mad Max: Fury Road, an extended chase sequence of a movie that first introduced the character played by Charlize Theron. Instead, Furiosa is a complex, contemplative, and sprawling picture that explores the price of holding on to your humanity—hiding it, tending to it—in a world that argues against its very value. The result is a film that’s perhaps less propulsive than its predecessor but no less visceral to watch.
Told across five chapters spanning 15 years, Furiosa combines coming-of-age nightmare, romantic tragedy, and revenge tale. We first meet Furiosa as a child (played by a fantastic Alyla Browne) held captive under Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, boasting a prosthetic nose and a jocular squawk), the leader of a biker gang that killed her mother. She then becomes one of the child brides of the warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and quickly learns how to use the chaos of his headquarters, the Citadel, to her advantage. An hour in, Furiosa grows up, and is played by Anya Taylor-Joy; the subsequent chapters chart her mission to punish Dementus; rise within the Citadel’s ranks to become a driver of Immortan Joe’s prized vehicle, the War Rig; and find a way back to her childhood home, an oasis she calls the Green Place.
In other words, Furiosa is an emotional odyssey. The film is packed with settings, characters, and Mad Max lore, but its ambitious plotting and storytelling scope seem intended to underscore the pressure Furiosa faces. The more cacophonous and violent her experiences become, the more her raw compassion stands out—but rejecting the rot around her only gets harder. She can’t find her way back to the Green Place, after all, without following some of the rules of this broken society.
Furiosa still delivers the action expected of a Mad Max film, of course. It opens with Furiosa’s mother hunting her daughter’s captors, in a set piece that rivals those in Fury Road. The astonishing third chapter, titled “The Stowaway,” depicts a brutal assault on the War Rig involving, of all things, airborne motorcycles. And Miller once again fills practically every frame with baroque, gnarly details: shots of a projectile ripping through a man’s skull millimeters in front of the camera, a cascade of bullets washing over a character’s face like water. Dementus is a particularly memorable creation, a showman whose idea of warfare involves staging elaborate, deceptive scenarios, and who yammers into a microphone any chance he gets.
But what makes Furiosa truly gripping is how much goes unspoken. This is a story told not in dialogue but in the contrast between its grandiose moments of cruelty and its tender touches. Quiet images become more visible and striking as the film goes on: a patch of vegetation growing from the edge of a cliff at the Citadel, a shared glance between characters that conveys mutual respect, a caress of an injured shoulder. Miller overwhelms Furiosa with enough of the franchise’s signature orange dunes and blue skies to make you miss the color green—to feel the ache Furiosa feels.
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That the inevitable showdown between Dementus and Immortan Joe is told as if it’s a footnote to Furiosa’s story may disappoint viewers looking for something splashier, but the choice is appropriate. Her story isn’t about clashing warlords. It’s about how she, little by little, picks up lessons on survival from the worst of this world. From Dementus’s bloviating, she learns the value of a disguise. From Immortan Joe’s dispensable army of War Boys, she observes the cost of blindly devoting oneself to an impersonal cause. And in losing an arm, she becomes part-human, part-machine, akin to Immortan Joe.
In an interview, Taylor-Joy explained that she wanted Furiosa, after so many scenes of silence, to have just one moment of cathartic release that would capture her profound determination. “I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said. When her scream arrives, it’s satisfying, but I’m not sure the moment is really necessary. In studying the character so carefully, Furiosa makes clear the difference between her self-preservation and others’ selfishness, between her steadfast pursuit of home and others’ stubborn need for power, and, most of all, between the depth of feeling in her silence and the cheap talk others exchange. There’s no mistaking Furiosa for timid. Taylor-Joy herself, in a fine-tuned performance, makes sure of that.
Furiosa is bookended by two questions posed by two very different characters. “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” a figure known as “the History Man” asks in the opening narration. In the final chapter, Dementus taunts Furiosa, asking, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Many wanderers in this wasteland have blended those questions together: You brave the world’s cruelties by being as epic as possible—no holds barred, no punches pulled. But Furiosa has a different interpretation: You brave the world’s cruelties by rejecting the notion of epicness as a goal. Things do not always have to be callously done, fueled by hatred, greed, and gallons of guzzoline. In all this noise, the film demonstrates, there is beauty in the quiet. In all this loss, there can be something gained too.