Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, R)

I’ve been excited but apprehensive for this movie. Fury Road is such an incredible film, and Furiosa is an amazing character. The trailer for this prequel looked pretty cool, and I like both Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, but I wasn’t sure if it could live up to the brilliant film that preceded it.

As a child, Furiosa is stolen from her home in the Green Place and taken across the Wasteland, where she’s held captive by the unhinged warlord Dementus. He and his gang are amazed by her health and vitality in a world full of “half-lives,” but she refuses to reveal the location of her home of abundance. When Dementus barters her to Immortan Joe, Furiosa does whatever she needs to survive, all the while dreaming of escaping back to the Green Place.

I really liked this movie. I haven’t seen any of the pre-Fury Road films in the franchise, but I love this world. It’s a series where the ensemble is just so important. In what’s maybe a weird analogy, it’s like a Broadway show where the dancing is on another level (looking at you, Newsies!) The main characters are all strong, but the minor characters and nameless extras add so much. I love any and all War Boy content, and we get plenty of epic fights against the war rig. I like the History Man who serves Dementus, defining words for him and holding onto the last remnants of knowledge from before the apocalypse, and I really like Smeg, who acts out Dementus’ speeches for him.

Unsurprisingly, the design is fantastic. The action is cool and hard-hitting, and the world-building is both overt and understated at once—everything we see onscreen is very obviously intentional, but not much is explained, leaving us to simply let this world and its characters wash over us.

The only place the film really falls flat for me is as a prequel to Fury Road. And again, I haven’t seen any other Mad Max films, so maybe I have no room to gripe. But I love Fury Road so much. I remember sitting on the edge of my seat in the theater, crying in the third act, and feeling invincible when I stepped outside afterwards. Fury Road is high-octane and brutal and brilliant. To me, Furiosa has a lot of the right pieces, but they don’t come together in the same gut punch for me. I think much of the disconnect is probably due to the Wives. I like the very specific focus and mission of Fury Road, and I like the rise and fall of hope as Furiosa, Max, and Nux fight to give these women the lives that have been taken from them. Furiosa’s story isn’t as tight, and I don’t feel it has as much to say. Which isn’t to say it’s just mindless entertainment—there are definitely hard-hitting scenes, and the final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus is a thing of beauty. But more than anything, this time around, I left the theater wanting to watch Fury Road again.

Before this film came out, I wouldn’t have thought to cast Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa, but she turns in a strong performance, channeling Charlize Theron’s excellent work without feeling like just an imitation. Chris Hemsworth is wild and kind of fascinating as Dementus—it’s a performance I haven’t seen from him before, and I really like what he does here. Tom Burke also does a really nice job as Praetorian Jack, who drives the war rig, and I feel like this film gives us a little more of Immortan Joe, played here by Lachy Hulme. Finally, big shoutout to Charlee Fraser, who plays Mary, Furiosa’s absolute badass of a mom.

Warnings

Copious violence (included references to sexual violence,) gore, disturbing images, language, strong thematic elements, and disabled characters played by nondisabled actors.

A Few Notes on the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road

Okay, so you can’t round the corner without running into commentary on feminism in the new Mad Max movie.  Nothing I’m saying hasn’t been said before – I know.  However, as a geeky feminist, I love talking about this movie.  Maybe it’s pointless to join a conversation if you don’t have anything new to add, but I’d just like to be part of it.

We’ll start with plot.  Having a real female presence in an action film can be rare, which is partly why pure action isn’t a genre I often connect with.  I tire of seeing women mainly there to be rescued, fridged, or used as eye candy.  That said, impressive heroines can come out of action movies, too (like Fox in Wanted,) but they often a) fit the narrow “hyper-sexualized badass” mold of Strong Women, and b) are the only major female in the film.  Certainly, Fury Road could have gone down this path.  We have the wives, the sexy damsels the bad guy wants to recapture, and Furiosa, the striking warrior driving a tricked-out death machine.  In this film, though, neither of these threads follows stereotypical conventions.  Most importantly, Furiosa is the wives’ primary champion.  While Max obviously joins the proceedings, at its heart, this movie is about women helping women.  Right from the start, it frames the film differently, as does the distinction that Furiosa is helping the wives, not saving them.  Though they don’t have her experience, the wives take an active part in their own rescue.  They often defer to Furiosa, and they spend some time hiding, but they also contribute in varied, tangible ways to the escape.

I’ve talked before about the importance of seeing a wide range of women in media, the idea that “strong woman” has more than one meaning, and this film delivers nicely on that.  Some wives find their inner badass, fighting or executing daredevil moves in and around the rig.  Others offer their skills of observation, insight, or nurturing.  None is just one thing, despite the emblematic names given to them by their husband/abductor/rapist Immortan Joe.  He calls them names like Capable, Toast the Knowing, and Cheedo the Fragile, but each shows more dimension than their titles suggest.  And while the plot sexualizes them – escaping sex slavery at the hands of a warlord – the film really doesn’t.  Even the initial shot of them washing themselves off in the desert in their underwear defies the male-gaze perspective.  They’re framed, not as objects, but survivors, and their story is about abused women reclaiming agency over their lives and bodies.  Furiosa herself, the gun-toting gearhead, doesn’t align with her usual expectation, either.  Her androgynous looks are functional over fashionable, and the film gets past her fighting prowess to explore her troubled past.  I also love that her prosthetic arm is just a detail – it’s ever-present, but it’s not a plot point, and there’s no speechifying about the abilities of disabled women.  And even aside from our six major female characters, there’s a slew of other brave, adept women who aid Furiosa, Max, and the wives. 

This film is bursting at the seams with a variety of female characters, strong female relationships, and amazing female-led action sequences.  That being said, I find it kind of disheartening to read editorials about it being the game-changer that will prove to Hollywood that audiences will go to movies about women, because despite Fury Road’s spectacular merits, Hollywood has shown countless times that it can’t retain this lesson.  People say the same thing whenever a Kill Bill, The Hunger Games, or Bridesmaids comes along, and each is supposedly the one that will make all the difference… until the next one arrives, and everyone loses their minds about the box office all over again.  What’s it going to take before the message finally sticks?

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, R)

I’m so glad this movie is as great as it is.  Even before I heard such encouraging things about it, from both a general film perspective and a geeky feminist perspective, I knew that I desperately wanted to see it.  I was hooked by the time they got to the “What a lovely day!” line in the trailer (and even more so when they flashed the names of the cast and I went, “Holy crap – that’s Nicholas Hoult?!”)  I was prepared to see it as a mindless action guilty pleasure, but I’m very pleased to love it as a gloriously insane spectacle of a stellar movie.

Full admission, this is my first Mad Max film.  Really, my strongest cultural understanding of the franchise is the brief rip-off the kids on Home Movies make.  That said, I think I followed the basic setup all right:  the world is a barren, apocalyptic wasteland (nuclear war + depletion of resources?), what civilizations remain belong to those with access to water, food, and gasoline, and all sorts of crazy tribes have formed in humanity’s brutal, dog-eat-dog efforts to survive.

Max is a loner warrior tortured by the voices of the dead he couldn’t save, but a fairly likeable one.  At the start of the film, he’s captured by the War Boys, the violent, half-dying acolytes of the warlord/cult leader/false god Immortan Joe.  They’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the only glory comes from dying in battle (and thus being born again,) but they’re ravaged by radiation sickness and require frequent blood transfusions among other patchwork, which is where Max comes in.  He’s chained to the hood of a War Boy’s tricked-out motor, serving as a “blood bag,” when he gets embroiled in an epic life-or-death chase.  Furiosa, a warrior in Immortan Joe’s service, has stolen the warlord’s five young wives and aims to take them somewhere green.  Max’s path intertwines with theirs, and he, reluctantly at first, helps them in their escape attempt as the full brunt of Immortan Joe’s war parties stalk them across the desert.

I’ll save the gender stuff for another post – it needs a lot of space, and I still have to rave about the action.  The action sequences are off the hook, exciting and impressive and, best of all, crystal clear.  The desert setting means most scenes are well-lit with great contrast, and an emphasis on practical effects over CGI gives it a sharper, more immediate feel.  It is awesome to watch Furiosa clinging to the underside of the war rig, the War Boys leaping onto of moving cars, and the Pole Cats during their super-cool Pole Cat thing.  It’s the kind of action that makes you feel keyed up when you leave the theater, like you ought to do something crazy and BAMF.

I’ll mention Charlize Theron’s Furiosa first, since it really is her movie.  She’s full-on stunning – driven, bad-ass, protective, and soulful, and she can work wonders even without dialogue.  As Max, Tom Hardy’s job is more to hold everything together than to draw focus, and he does it well.  I like his gradual move from self-preservation mode to becoming an ally of Furiosa and the wives.  And Nicholas Hoult, playing War Boy Nux, is wonderfully eye-catching.  Admittedly, his is a more eye-catching part, manic and otherworldly, but he delivers on the character’s potential and then some.  There are moments when it just physically does not compute that this is the same kid who played Tony on Skins.

Warnings

Lots of violence (not much gore,) sexual references, thematic elements, and disturbing images.