‘Furiosa’ Review: George Miller’s Latest High Octane Opera Is Supercharged With Lunatic Intensity

“I don’t understand two things,” said the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh of Mad Max: Fury Road in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” Whether it’s more or less impressive to pull off an impossible feat for a second time — you’ve got the benefit of experience, but the probability of lightning striking the same place twice is even slimmer — George Miller has brought us another comprehension-defying work of high octane opera. Like some kind of madman Moses with nitroglycerine pumping through his veins, he led his people back into the desert and everyone emerged with all their fingers and toes intact, along with the footage containing the most virtuosic action committed to film since the last time he started his engines. 

Nine years ago, Fury Road roared into the monoculture with the force of a post-apocalyptic tanker truck for its element of surprise, nobody expecting a consistent yet long-dormant IP fossil to be exhumed and shocked back to life using the technologies of the 21st century. Starting with its clunky clause-swapping title, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga arrives with a clearer mandate, feeling less like the fifth Mad Max installment and more like the second Fury Road. (On streaming channels, the thumbnail art for the first three pictures has also been tweaked to fall in line with Fury Road’s bright-yellow branding.) The lean-and-mean minimalism of its 2015 predecessor has given way to more expansive ambitions for Furiosa, and the extra half-hour of lore results in some mild bloat. But the core of the series remains the set pieces supercharged with lunatic intensity, incomparable syntheses of intricate choreography, obsessive production design, and death-baiting stuntwork in brash violation of all we know about both modern studio filmmaking and basic physics. 

Though most scripting will seem involved in comparison to Fury Road’s plotline of “they drive over there, then drive back the way they came,” Furiosa mounts a conspicuously vast canvas with multiple chapter cards spanning decades of our grease-streaked heroine’s life. Orphaned and abducted in girlhood by the biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, his curled mustache suggesting the steampunk version of a villain who’d tie a lady to train tracks), Furiosa spends her formative years in captivity, caught in the crossfire between her captor and the equally megalomaniacal Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) as she grows into the steely, taciturn adult originated by Charlize Theron. With her glower set to maximum hardness, Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t play the character so differently, the accomplishments of her performance more physical rather than conceptual. It was never too difficult to surmise the path through the Malthusian dystopia of resource deprivation and male oppression that deposited the character at the beginning of Fury Road, the precise endpoint of Furiosa‘s preambling, and those wondering about the purpose of laying out her origin won’t find a better answer than getting the backstory on her severed arm. 

The impulse to give fans more of the world-building they so crave smacks of corporate cajoling, an air that dissipates during the high-speed raids Miller lives to stage. In the biggest departure from his past exploits, he orients more of the major showstoppers around sniping, a complicated gambit that requires him to maintain spatial coherence between several points of focus as far as a mile away from one another. He orchestrates organized pandemonium in such a way that makes comprehension easy while revealing how hard the crew labored to hold it all together; in pulse-raising crane shots (some of which surely necessitated transferring the camera from one crane to another), we soar over vehicles in motion with judicious precision, the exact opposite of the let’s-just-see-what-we-get attitude prevalent in today’s coverage-style cinematography. All the praise heaped upon Miller the last time around — that he realizes the pure kinetic potential of the medium with more expertise and unbridled glee than anyone alive — still applies.

“The willingness to go the extra mile (at lethal ramming speed) sets Furiosa apart from the rest of the popcorn pack, and turns every wide shot into a banquet of little delights.”

Miller and his team haven’t stopped playing for love of the game, a passion visible in every fine-tuned facet of production. To pick one, consider the wardrobe department; hundreds of extras in richly and imaginatively detailed costumes, and I don’t think I saw any two wearing the same thing. The willingness to go the extra mile (at lethal ramming speed) sets the property apart from the rest of the popcorn pack, and turns every wide shot into a banquet of little delights. Dementus, for no other reason than it looks cool, travels by several lashed-together motorcycles joined with a single steering rack to resemble a Roman chariot of horses. A disarmingly poignant grace note shows us one War Boy (played by kid amateur Quaden Bayles, previously tapped by Miller for Three Thousand Years of Longing in the wake of news stories about getting bullied for his dwarfism) protecting a supply of fresh produce. Urine plays a more significant role in these proceedings than most of what’ll screen at your neighborhood multiplex this summer. 

In this instance, however, the welcome sense of novel idiosyncrasy grinds against an attachment to what worked for Fury Road. Furiosa gains a sidekick to serve the same stoically assistive function as Tom Hardy’s Max in identical turncoat Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the clever inversion of demoting the title character to a supporting player in his own story now gone. Taylor-Joy gets the chance to replay a lot of Theron’s greatest hits as if doing hardship karaoke: same power walk that betrays modeling experience in the hips, same primal scream with the same symbolic significance of gendered pain, same slow-mo close-up as she picks herself up off the ground and shakes out the sand. At a glance, the surest way to tell this film apart from the last would be the occasionally wonky digital compositing in some fight sequences, given away by the telltale muddled lighting heretofore skillfully avoided.

“Do you have it in you to make it epic?” goes a taunt from Dementus, challenging Furiosa not just to take her revenge but to claim her place in legend. The mechanics of mythmaking sculpt the most overtly sequel-minded extension of the Max-iad, the hopelessness of a wasteland without a future leaving her with no choice but to find inspiration in the narrative she’s plotted for herself. Furiosa has nothing to believe in but her own will to survive, the lone rider’s self-sufficiency rooted in the Westerns that have always provided a template for Miller to push against and break. Miller and Taylor-Joy succeed in building her up to be larger than life while staying in touch with her mortal frailties, even if the fixation on her leads them to retread some familiar dunes. To whatever extent this gums up the interstitial works between fume-snorting displays of technical excellence, it can’t slow down a Hollywood anomaly of big-budget artisanship leaving the rest of the pack in its dust. High on exhaust and the limitless capabilities of cinema, this no-brakes franchise keeps careening onward as if it could run forever. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.