“The question is: do you have it in you to make it epic?” Garrulous and utterly deranged despot Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is making small talk with Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is in no mood for idle chatter. The moment comes towards the end of the movie; by this point in the film, Furiosa is a single-minded, flint-eyed avenger with a customised power tool for an arm. It’s a great line, which Hemsworth delivers with a lip-smacking relish. But given the barnstorming action onslaught that has preceded the exchange, it’s a question that is probably redundant. This is a George Miller picture, after all. Epic is all part of a day’s work. But even by the standards of the previous films in the Mad Max series (Fury Road is the closest in tone, but there are marked differences between the two pictures), this is a huge, marauding monster of a movie. See it on the biggest screen if you can; let the thunderous rumble of customised war rigs shake your seats, and the sandblasted angry ochre colour palette grind itself into your pores.
As the title suggests, we follow the backstory of Furiosa, the character played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron. Here, she’s performed as a child by Alyla Browne and as a young woman by Taylor-Joy. On the physical resemblance alone, it’s superb casting – the two look almost uncannily similar. Beyond that, they are both independently impressive in the role. Browne lets us see the wily calculation beneath the shell of trauma in the little girl ripped from her mother and her community and forced to see things no child should witness. And Taylor-Joy is a pleasure to watch in the action sequences, which take up probably 90% of the film. Her lithe agility and cunning is a refreshing counterpoint to all the lumbering muscle and firepower. She’s tiny in comparison with most of the cast, but give her a grappling hook and a set of wheels and you genuinely believe she could best any of them.
