You have to hand it to George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, now five films in: it has kept the end of the world going for the better part of half a century. A big, busy, ornately designed prequel to 2015’s delirious series peak Mad Max: Fury Road, the new-to-streaming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) isn’t exactly meant to be cosy or comforting. It takes place in the same scorched, uninhabitable desert wasteland as its predecessors, a landscape that essentially defined the idea of a post-apocalyptic Earth in the popular imagination.
And yet it’s so familiar now as to feel almost nostalgic. Most of Furiosa’s pleasures relate to the past rather than the future. Miller has assembled another driving, visually lavish, slam-bang adventure of rising to power in a hopeless place, but its iconography abounds in callbacks to previous entries, while you can’t watch Anya Taylor-Joy’s impressively steely turn in the title role without thinking of Charlize Theron’s more hardened interpretation. The shock of the new, and the terror of the future unknown, is missing.
