You May Have Missed: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Dir George Miller, 2h 28m, 2024)

Last year, the Mad Max franchise turned forty-five. Later in 2025, Fury Road, the series' unapologetic return to form, and arguable high point, a film that I regard as among my favourites, (ninth, at least in 2019) will turn ten years old. The franchise's influence can be found all over this post-apocalyptic genre, and Fury Road's shadow over action cinema remains long. Ten years, though, is a long time in film-making; into this interregnum, George Miller provides the perfect petrol-billowing, engine-revving, all-action remedy to this Max-less years, filling in the backstory of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron in Fury Road, Anya Taylor-Joy ably picking up the reins of the role here), as she seeks to return back to the Edenic green place of her youth.

Beginning fifty years after the collapse of civilisation, as seen in Mad Max (1979-although the film's narrative timeline by this point has long contradicted itself to the point of making its hero seemingly a creature of myth and legend rather than flesh and blood), so we are introduced to Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne, one of several actors returning from George Miller's previous film, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)). She is soon kidnapped from her idyllic childhood home in the "Green Place", one of the few untained locations in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland, by bikers allied to the fearsome Dementus (an enjoyably unhinged Chris Hemsworth).

Ride Or Die: Anya Taylor Joy's vengeful Furiosa is a smartly played origin for the character

With her mother's unsuccessful rescue attempts leading to tragedy, and the young Furiosa being forcefully adopted by Dementus, so the warlord wages war across the Wasteland, eventually coming face-to-face with the Warboys, led by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and his lieutenants, in a power-play for the remaining resources of the post-apocalyptic world. All the while, as she grows into adulthood, and climbs the ranks, so Furiosa concocts a revenge against Dementus, that will become deeply personal, as she befriends a fellow survivor in the Wasteland, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), and utterly ruthless, the film's final act building to a crescendo of vehicular chaos, and bloody retribution that feels more like the finale of a Western as Furiosa stalks her tormentor and former protector through the desert.

It is these two central figures that the film revolves around; Taylor-Joy's slow evolution from innocent to vengeful "dark angel" to an embryonic version of Theron's character, driven as much by her attempts to save others from the wasteland as finding her way home is a well-acted character arc without resorting to prequel-by-numbers development where a character is assembled, piece by piece, into a familiar form. That Taylor-Joy's Furiosa is silent-deliberately so whilst part of Immortan Joe's Warboys, to hide her identity-for the better half of the film, and otherwise largely laconic, till she is finally brought back into conflict with Dementus, speaks to her quality as an actress, often restricted to body-language and facial movements, but it is undeniably a performance that builds upon and refines that by Theron; at its best, the two performances are in perfect concert.

In places, this familiarity is a well-placed shorthand; we understand their ideologies, and the clash between this triumvirate and Dementus is pacier for it. Viewed, as Miller originally intended, as a Part 1 to Fury Road's Part 2, Furiosa builds to bookends that immediately lead into the other film, lending both a mythic sensibility. Shorn of its prelude, however, Fury Road stands on its own, entirely, as Miller's Mad Max films always have; Furiosa nearly repeats the trick. Nearly. For, the more the Citadel's machinations enter the frame, with the exception of one sequence which underpins Joe's ruthless control of his underlings, the less comprehensible the film becomes; there's a little too much of the Joe/People/Farmer trio standing around scheming and a little too little character building, with little of their war against Dementus making it into the film. There's, also, a few too many little nudges and sideward winks as enleathered maniacs played by Australian rep actors hove into frame, reprising their roles from Fury Road; most egregiously, Miller can't quite resist a glimpse of a certain custom V-8 Interceptor and its driver in the foreground of a colossal desert shot.

Face to Face: Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) stares down Dementus (Chris Hemsworth)

Against this familiarity is what makes Furiosa a worthy inclusion to the Mad Max franchise; the fact that at eighty, George Miller is still making some of the best action fare in cinema; that there is beauty in this wasteland, and hope. Miller focuses in on Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs in the tower above Gastown, on peaches, a recurring theme of fruit ruined and grown, of shorn femininity and vengeful Valkyries, Miller's feminist leanings becoming practically horizontal as Furiosa ruthlessly whittles down her tormentor's men, and leaves those of her captor in her wake. Simon Duggan's cinematography is a far cry from John Seale's Bosch-via-Warhammer maximalism, the heavy use of CGI backgrounds, of vignettes corrupted and smashed through by metal and flesh and fire; this is a world of fleeting beauty. Against it is madness, and the machine.

Atop it all, astride his bike chariot, comes Chris Hemsworth's mad, bad, and dangerous to know Dementus, completing the triumvirate of films that consists of Knives Out, Oppenheimer and now this, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's main stars give performances that leave their caped escapades in the dust. Hemsworth is transformed, a mad, malignant performance, the film's best shot of him leering upward as blood red flare smoke pools around him. Dementus is something new in the Mad Max villain's gallery, an ultra-violence as high-camp escapade that feels as much influenced by Tina Turner's Aunty as it does Kjell Nilsson's Humungus, that is frankly the spectacle and the adversary Furiosa and Furiosa need, a gloriously mad bastard carnival barker warlord of a performance. Together, he and Anya Taylor Joy turn Furiosa from a mere tale to an epic, a mythic Wagnerian prelude-if occasionally too beholden to being one-to one of the greatest action movies so far this century.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is available in the UK and US via Netflix, and on DVD from Warner Bros.

Next week, we stay in the desert, and do our best to not attract the worm, as this way comes the colossal war and messianic arrival of Dune Part Two.