Mad Max: Fury Road has an impeccable reputation: It’s a ruthless action machine, full of ochre landscapes and roaring, retro, souped-up roadsters. Charlize Theron as the one-armed convoy driver Furiosa sent George Miller’s 2015 movie into the star-power stratosphere, but it was the discipline of the thing that put it on best-of lists. With barely any dialogue or sentiment to speak of, Fury Road simply floored it across a desert apocalypse and back again—flamethrowers blasting, dust billowing—and left you breathless along the way.
Could its prequel, Furiosa, which opens Friday and lacks both Theron and her costar Tom Hardy, possibly measure up? The answer, for me at least, is a surprised and delighted yes. Longer, richer in character work, and twice as dark in its storytelling, this origin story with Anya Taylor-Joy is operatic and grand and gleefully demented in its set pieces. I watched it in an adrenalized trance in a movie theater, naturally, with booming sound and seats that actually shook, and emerged yearning for more summer blockbusters like this one to look forward to.
For this will surely be another jolt of electricity to an ailing movie-theater business. Furiosa and Dune: Part Two share a color palette, approximate running times, and a commitment to immersive escapism. What Furiosa has over Denis Villeneuve’s box-office juggernaut, however, is giddiness, a sense of fun—even if that fun is tempered by some startling moments of warlord cruelty. (Take your tweens to Dune, maybe not to Furiosa.)
Which is appropriate: This is a revenge story, as classical in its arc as True Grit or Kill Bill, and Taylor-Joy holds the film’s rage and bloodlust in her tiny frame and stoic face. Like Theron in Fury Road, this heroine barely speaks, but her performance is a marvel of grace and physicality. Furiosa is populated by muscle-bound thugs who could probably bench-press 12 Furiosas, but Taylor-Joy plausibly defeats all of them. She makes Furiosa’s superhuman skills—she’s an adept mechanic, sharpshooter, acrobat, driver—seem natural. My colleague Radhika at British Vogue, who saw Furiosa at Cannes, felt she was underdeveloped. I don’t argue with that—George Miller’s idea of character building is to pause a car chase for a heavy-lidded stare—but Taylor-Joy’s righteous anger, loss, and even her mute longing for another convoy driver, played wonderfully by Tom Burke, kindled something like emotion in me, even amid the clanging, crashing chaos.
I was also interested in the story Furiosa is telling. The plot begins with a horrific trauma in girlhood (Furiosa’s mother meets a brutal end) and the orphan girl’s rise as a nameless mechanic and then driver under the loathsome warlord Immortan Joe. It plots a triangular conflict: Immortan Joe controls water and produce from the soaring Citadel; the strongholds Bullet Farm and Gastown are led by their own thugs. One of these villains is the movie’s dark heart, the biker Warlord Dementus (played to the absolute hilt by Chris Hemsworth), who pilots himself around on a motorcycle chariot and contains a depth of brutality that gives the movie its keen edge.
Furiosa vs. Dementus—that’s the plot in a nutshell—but I loved the way it swirled and spoked in different directions getting there. There are themes of empire and its inevitable collapse. The story is broken into chapters, and the plot spans 15 years. The chase sequences and stunt work—have I even mentioned these things?—are beyond. One hijack chase sequence took 78 days to film. When Dementus’s monster truck scales a near-vertical cliff face as his sidekick bikers skid off boulders left and right, I let out an inadvertent cheer of entertained delight. What is Hollywood doing if not this? Nine years passed between Fury Road and the triumphant Furiosa. Miller, God bless him, is 79 and clearly in his prime. Pedal to the metal, mister.
