I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. But it’s almost the entire backdrop of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga amongst a few beautiful set pieces. It’s a landscape you see in a lot of films, just as you see a lot of revenge films which Furiosa also is. But George Miller’s flamboyant vision of a unique world is anything but conventional. Even with all of the sand, Furiosa is filled with colorful characters, bursts of imaginative design, and some of the most heated action sequences since Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the origin story of the titular character Furiosa and how she became the fierce woman we met in Mad Max: Fury Road. I won’t get into details about the story itself because the trailers were cut to prevent spoiling most of the film’s plot which I strive to do in my reviews as well. If you have not see the other Mad Max films, you can still see Furiosa without having to watch the others. It can function as a perfect standalone film while still including pieces from the other installments of the franchise.
Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t a very dialogue-heavy film, and Furiosa flows in that same vein. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the younger Furiosa who was played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road. With around only 30 lines of dialogue, Taylor-Joy brings an emotionally wrought performance of someone who fighting for their survival while trying to maintain who they are. Taylor-Joy’s emotive and striking facial features bring Furiosa’s emotions out in an almost animalistic way. She has a certain snarl to the way she interacts with other people after her childhood was ripped away from her. You can see it in the curl of her lip when she interacts with the world around her. While the tinier nuisances of her performance still tread over my mind, her physical performance is nothing to discount either. With such limited dialogue, as an actor, she sells so much more of who Furiosa is as she grows with how she moves, walks, and uses weapons with more confidence as she progresses through her journey.
While Anya Taylor-Joy plays Furiosa for around half of the film, Alyla Browne plays her for the earlier half of the story in her youth. She gives a fantastic performance alongside Chris Hemsworth as Dr. Dementus. Without getting too deep into spoilers, she is treated almost like an animal for a good portion, and we see the struggle she goes through after the horrors she has been put through. It’s a great performance from a young actor.
After seeing the film Spiderhead, I prayed to the film gods that every director would cast Chris Hemsworth in villain roles because he is incredible in them. As a physical specimen, he is already larger than life in stature and form. But he can give such an animated and bombastic performance that makes him an incredible villain. And when I tell you that he brings you to the thunderdome with his role as Dr. Dementus, I truly mean that. His costuming by Jenny Beavan has such a unique flair that he runs with. He prances around in a cape and a leather chest piece for a large portion of the film. There is a classic villain flair to him that makes you believe he very well could be the type to tie you to the train tracks.
But then he flips the switch. Hemsworth brings a performance of a much darker nature that I wasn’t ready for, knowing his previous work. Underneath the character’s machismo and cheese, there is a very sinister, horrible man that is portrayed wonderfully. There are scenes where you see that fun veneer wash away to revel the real monster behind the color soaked exterior. The scenes climatic final confrontation had me reminiscing about Rutger Hauer’s speech in Blade Runner. I was truly in awe of the performance, and I hope we see more like this from Hemsworth.
The primary colors of Furiosa are orange and yellow because of the apocalypse theming and the sand. With some films that would make it a bore to watch. But with George Miller’s vision of this world, it’s just a tapestry to paint an incredibly vibrant painting on. Where some post apocalyptic worlds go for a more cold, realistic design approach, Miller and his team go the opposite direction. Everything in the world of Mad Max is weird, and Furiosa is no exception.
For instance, we all know how important vehicles are to the series. They are cultural and religious staples in the world. So just giving your villain of the story a car or a motorcycle at this point would feel like toning it down. What this film does instead is give Dr. Dementus a chariot driven by motorcycles. That is only one of many incredible vehicles that shop up in this movie, some of which fly. They are all distinctly painted and designed to fit the world and groups around them. Everything is incredibly unique but not only that, everything feels customized. Every character’s vehicle feels like it is an extension of their self. That is an incredibly hard thing to do when there are so many things and people on screen at once.
While there are so many vehicles driving around on screen at once, they are also typically in combat with one another which leads to some incredible stunt work. The film isn’t as action heavy as it’s predecessor, which I think give’s those scenes more room to breathe instead of it being back-to-back from start to finish. There was never a time in the film or during any of the sequences where the thought “I’ve seen that before” passed through my mind. Every different thing just felt brand new or a remix of ideas to form something fresh. But with all of that combat, there is a ton of explosions and something that I think is very important in the film, fire.
With the world being so muted in colors, when fire is on screen it really stands out. One group called the War Boys, who are always painted white, use fire in almost everything they do from their explosive spears or flamethrowers. It’s a constant in the film that really just stands out to me because thematically, we are watching Furiosa being forged into the warrior that we met her as. There is a brilliant scene where Anya Taylor-Joy’s back is pressed to a gate as flames nearly fully engulf her as she tries to stage a rescue which she has failed to do in the past. Everything about the shot—from the costume design, to Anya’s face looking into the camera, and everything around it—felt like the perfect encapsulation of the film for me. It’s a world on fire, but we are seeing these small glimpses of the humanity that fights against the flames to exist. Despite everything thrown at her, Furiosa follows through on her promises until the very end.