'Furiosa' Sucks Exhaust Fumes

You were right to be skeptical of a 'Fury Road' prequel.

Following up a masterpiece like 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road was always gonna be an uphill battle. Still, I doubt anyone imagined that writer/director George Miller would fumble the ball as badly as he does with that film’s prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It’s been a while since I last saw Beyond Thunderdome, but I’m inclined to say that Furiosa is the worst entry in the Mad Max franchise to date. It has some redeeming qualities, but not nearly enough to warrant its existence.

I’m not inherently anti-prequel the way some people are… but Furiosa, undeniably, is guilty of all the things people who are inherently anti-prequel hate: it spends 2½ hours answering questions no one ever had, like how Furiosa got her haircut, leaving scant room for the elements that made its predecessor so great in the first place.

The challenge Miller set for himself when he made Fury Road was to create an entire film that was almost exclusively one long chase scene. To make that work, Miller had to boil the narrative down to its most bare essentials; like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk two years later, Fury Road is a predatorily efficient extended suspense sequence in which the dialogue is almost incidental. It’s a story told primarily with visuals, and there’s not an ounce of fat on it.

There’s a lot of other incredible stuff built on that simple and solid framework, like Miller’s singular world-building, a uniformly excellent cast, and, of course, the movie’s primarily practical and instantly legendary stunts (it turns out that the best way to make it look like Tom Hardy is swinging through the air on a pendulum attached to a moving truck is to swing Tom Hardy through the air from a pendulum attached to a moving truck). But none of that would be as effective without the film’s solid foundation.

Furiosa has no such economy of narrative. In fact, it’s quite bloated. Like, to watch the trailers for this movie, I bet you think it stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character, who was so iconically portrayed by Charlize Theron in Fury Road. But Taylor-Joy doesn’t even show up until the movie is almost half-over; up until then, Furiosa is played by the little girl from last month’s Sting, Alyla Browne (in fact, I think Browne has more lines than Taylor-Joy does).

That’s because what would be the basic set-up of most movies - the part of the plot you cover in 15-30 minutes, tops - takes up the whole first half of Furiosa. Which would be less bothersome if it was necessary, but it’s objectively unnecessary. Usually, if a filmmaker realizes that two scenes are redundant, they’ll cut one of those scenes from the script, or at least amalgamate them into one scene; Miller seems to almost willfully do the opposite. And at least some of this repetition exists for no better reason than that Miller had to make everything in Furiosa line up with Fury Road.

For example…

(MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW)

In Fury Road, Furiosa is trying to get back to her home, which is said to be a lush, Edenic place that exists in stark contrast to the rest of the post-apocalyptic world. She was kidnapped from this place, we’re told, when she was just a girl. But then, when she finally gets back, she discovers that it, too, has been turned into a barren desert.

So. For Furiosa, Miller wants to show us this place, because we need to understand why the heroine is so desperate to get back there (especially since he can’t rely on our pre-existing emotional connection to Theron’s Furiosa to keep us engaged, since she’s not in this movie).

But he also needs to explain why it took Furiosa so long to escape, and he knows he can’t let any of the bad guys see Furiosa’s home and live, because if they did, Furiosa would already know it had been stripped bare in Fury Road.

So how does Miller handle this?

He opens the movie with Furiosa picking fruit in the middle of this beautiful wilderness. She’s soon kidnapped by some nogoodniks who work for the villainous Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, hamming it up from beneath a prosthetic schnoz). Her mother, Mary (Charlee Fraser from Anyone But You), tracks her down to Dementus’ camp, killing the henchmen who took her before they can tell Dementus the location of Furiosa’s home. Then Mary frees Furiosa. But Furiosa has to stay caught, because that’s where she is when Fury Road begins, right? So Dementus chases Mary and Furiosa and re-captures them before they get home, and then kills Mary.

Furiosa is kidnapped and separated from the people she loves twice in 15-20 minutes.

Far be from me to give notes to George Miller, but if he happened to ask me, I’d say that the movie should open with Furiosa and Mary venturing out into the wasteland together for whatever unimportant reason (maybe they need sand for something? I dunno, it barely matters!) before being kidnapped simultaneously, resulting in Mary’s death. There. I just turned a 20-minute sequence into a 10-minute sequence.

At the very least, why not just have Mary get caught and killed as she’s trying to infiltrate Dementus’ camp? Why let her and Furiosa get away, only to be captured again five minutes later? What is gained from effectively playing out the same story beat twice in quick succession?

Here’s another example of this film’s narrative wastefulness.

After Mary’s execution, Dementus goes to see Immortan Joe, the villain from Fury Road (played in that film by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, played here by Lachy Helm). He wants to take over Immortan Joe’s empire; Immortan Joe, of course, does not want that. They fight; they separate; they fight; they meet for negotiations.

Why do they not just meet for negotiations after the first fight? Why do they have to fight twice, given that we learn nothing new in the second fight? And “Because it’s an action movie” isn’t a good enough answer: the movie’s run time hardly prevents Miller from opportunities for big set pieces.

Furiosa has a very bad case of “Never say in five words what you can say in 500,” and it badly slows the film’s momentum. Which is the one single element no previous Mad Max movie has ever lacked.

It also means that there isn’t really time for the supporting characters to register much. One of Fury Road’s more under-appreciated aspects is how well-defined its smaller roles are: each of the escaped “wives” of Immortan Joe, and the primary War Boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), are sufficiently well-defined that their deaths register with us on an emotional level. Supporting characters in Furiosa die, too, and at least one of those deaths is played as this big emotional moment… but it has no impact, because there isn’t time to even kinda-sorta develop smaller roles when you’re busy repeating every plot point three times.

On top of all of that, there’s the movie’s final act, which has no stakes and renders Furiosa a secondary element in her own story.

(MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW)

As the final act of Furiosa begins, Furiosa has become one of Immortan Joe’s top people; simultaneously, Immortan Joe’s conflict with Dementus has escalated to such a degree that they’re gonna go to war. Utilizing intelligence provided by Furiosa, Immortan Joe sets up an ambush to defeat Dementus - but won’t allow Furiosa to participate in said ambush because reasons (I guess it’s because she just lost her arm, but… given that she gets her replacement robot arm about ten seconds later, I’m not sure why this is a big deal).

So the ambush happens, we’re told (we only get to see pieces of it in a quick montage). Furiosa, now with her new robot arm, rides out to the battlefield, I guess on the off-chance that Dementus is still alive. Which he is… but he’s defeated, injured, alone, and on the run.

So Furiosa follows Dementus out into the desert and captures him. He has this whole big speech about how vengeance will never be as satisfying as she wants it to be. And the fact that he’s already beaten, and that Furiosa had virtually nothing to do with his ultimate downfall, is clearly meant to subvert audience expectations. Miller doesn’t want to give the viewer the rah-rah revenge ending they’re expecting.

All well and good, except Furiosa doesn’t listen. We’re told that Dementus ultimately suffers one of several possible horrible fates, each outlined by a narrator: he is either shot by Furiosa, or dragged through the desert by a chain attached to her car until he finally dies, or he’s turned into a tree. Regardless of which scenario is “real,” Furiosa has had her revenge. And no, it’s not satisfying, but… so what? Are we meant to feel that this is a tragedy? I don’t think it so: its final scene literally takes place hours (maybe even less) before the start of Fury Road (kind of like how Rogue One ends one scene before the start of A New Hope).

So Furiosa’s entire hero’s journey to both achieve nothing and learn nothing, I guess?

Speed - the single defining characteristic of the Mad Max franchise - seems to be the element in which Miller is now least interested. There’s one really good action scene in Furiosa, which arrives shortly after Taylor-Joy’s introduction. But most of the set pieces are, uh… fine, I guess? There are some great stunts, but the use of CGI is far more apparent (I’m not daft - Fury Road has tons of CGI - but it’s far better camouflaged than the CGI here). There’s literally an entire war - AN ENTIRE WAR!!! - late in the story, which we only get to see in a montage that lasts maybe 30 seconds.

I don’t blame Miller, who is almost 80, for losing his taste for action. I do blame him for making Furiosa anyway. Given his advanced age, this is likely the last time Miller will get to make one of these movies; he could have ended the franchise on a high note with Fury Road, but instead, he took what I assume was a very nice paycheck to make this very mediocre follow-up instead. Furiosa is the most disappointing film of 2024 thus far.