It’s hard to understand why one of the year's best films is simultaneously one of the year’s biggest flops, especially when the film in question is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Director George Miller has been tinkering with his world of blood, chrome, and desolation for 45 years, and after the excellent Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, the world was hungry for more. Rather than capitalize on the momentum the soft reboot created, though, Miller turned the clock back to trace the origins of Imperator Furiosa.
That choice polarized fans. For some, focusing on Fury Road’s most interesting character — and one of the most compelling heroines in modern media, full stop — felt like a no-brainer. Others wanted more from the Road Warrior himself, Max Rockatansky, and seemed to resent his sidelining in Furiosa. This lack of consensus culminated in a dismal box-office debut.
Furiosa barely broke even worldwide, and any plans for future films seem dead in the water after its performance. To call its reception disappointing would be the understatement of understatements; Furiosa could have set the tone for the next phase of Mad Max films, but the franchise's potential is now in jeopardy. Still, there is a chance for Furiosa to find its audience: with the film now streaming on Max, it could potentially get a second life, or at least the appraisal it deserved when it debuted.
Furiosa and Fury Road are two parts of a whole, as the former leads right into the events of the 2015 film, retroactively folding it into one big, blistering odyssey. In Fury Road, Furiosa (Charlize Theron) was fighting to return to her childhood home, the Green Place of Many Mothers. Furiosa shows us just how she was taken from that oasis, and separated from the women warriors who guarded it.
Fifteen years before Fury Road, a much younger Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is abducted by a rough-and-ready biker gang, and dragged across the Wasteland to the lair of an aspiring warlord, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). In her attempts to escape and return to the Green Place, our heroine will find herself caught in Dementus’ battle against Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the ruler of several strongholds in the Wasteland.
Over the years, Furiosa (played as an adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) becomes a formidable road warrior, courts love and loss, and vows vengeance against those who’ve wronged her. Dementus, of course, is at the top of her hit list: not only does he want to find and plunder her home, but he’s willing to torture and murder anyone who could lead him there. That’s how Furiosa loses her mother, a tragedy that sets her on a blistering path of revenge.
Furiosa isn’t so much a coming-of-age film as an epic dystopian fable. It’s about hope in dark times, the lure of absolute power, and some gnarly vehicular warfare, but it also shows us just how monsters are created. The latter is embodied best in Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth’s dueling performances. Dementus is the zany, unstoppable force to Furiosa’s immovable object: their paths cross infrequently over the years, but when they do clash, the results are incendiary.
Miller also fills the space between those encounters with some of the best chase sequences ever put to screen. Furiosa doesn’t spend as much time on the road as its predecessor, but the action feels more visceral and bold, even if we more or less know how this story ends. If nothing else, it’s gratifying to see Miller get to tell his story on his own terms. Furiosa may not have worked in anyone else’s hands, and we may never see a film like it again. But hopefully its streaming debut will give Furiosa a second life, and some well-deserved revenge.
