Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga: Thrilling prequel in George Miller’s bonkers badlands

More than any of the three previous Mad Max instalments, Fury Road had a sweep and spectacle to it that delivered a sustained operatic kilter. Out went Mel Gibson, in came extraordinary action set-pieces, widescreen location filming (in the deserts of Namibia) and, in Charlize Theron’s ­Furiosa, an iconic heroine to prevail in Miller’s bonkers badlands.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga | Official Trailer

And bonkers they truly were, both in presentation and production. Vast sets, an army of cast and crew, flamethrowers and full-throttle machinery punctuating every note of the screenplay. How did the production negotiate the constant threat of on-set calamity, we asked ourselves, fists clamped to our seat arms. How was no one killed.

Prior to filming Fury Road, an origins story for Theron’s teak-tough amputee had been carefully devised in the conceptual world-building of Miller and co-scribe Nico Lathouris. The intention had been a lavish anime project someday, but Miller came to see that Furiosa merited her own big-screen prequel.​

Could any follow-up match what the fourth and greatest Mad Max outing achieved? Probably not, but Furiosa does manage to be everything we could hope for from a return to this parched dystopia: warped, hideous survivors riding beastly contraptions; the cold, vengeful bite of a samurai epic held up against a world cooked dead by our machinery.

This eco-thread is murmured audibly in the intro. Ten-year-old Furiosa (Alyla Browne) forages in the Green Place of Many Mothers, an arcadian outpost powered by renewables and seemingly the last bastion of civility in the scorched nothingness of the Australian continent. In an incredible opening prologue, she is kidnapped by a band of raiders and brought before Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the camply messianic warlord of a biker horde.

Despite the folly of our ways, fossil fuels are still bickered over, as is fresh water. It puts Dementus on a collision course with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the muzzled tyrant of Fury Road and leader of the Citadel.

A barter agreement exists between it and Gastown, a fuel-producing fortress, and following a botched attempt to seize the Citadel, ­Dementus proposes an alliance to suit all three parties. Furiosa, now approaching child-bearing age, becomes part of the deal and remains at the Citadel.

She is imprisoned with the rest of Immortan Joe’s harem of chattel wives, only to escape and disguise herself as part of his salvage crew. Her only goal is revenge.

Now in her mid-20s (and played by Anya Taylor-Joy), she sees an opportunity in Jack (Tom Burke), the driver of the “War Rig” moving shipments between the Citadel and Gastown. He doesn’t so much run the gauntlet as live on it, and when Furiosa helps him fend off a high-speed hijacking, a partnership forms.

Like any good western, ­Furiosa delivers its best lines where there is no dialogue. Taylor-Joy and Burke gurn and glower at oncoming threats. Hemsworth cackles away in a grating Aussie boganese and sports a prosthetic honker that only amplifies his brand of absurd menace. It’s the Australian star’s first homeg-turf role, and one meaty and complex enough, you feel, to reignite his somewhat difficult post-Thor career.

The analogue hellscape – rendered to life by Fury Road’s Oscar-winning production department – remains a thunderously tormented cinema experience.

But Furiosa is markedly (and vitally) different to Fury Road, with its own sensations and rhythms. Wild sequences unspool with the same visceral, kinetic tangibility, but increased CGI use is detectable. With both production and budget hit with natural disasters and Covid outbreaks, we can forgive the 79-year-old Miller for grabbing any technology to hand.

That whiff of struggle, of nothing coming easy to Miller and the realisation of his outsized vision, is part of why Furiosa will connect just as Fury Road did, albeit without the sheer blindsiding awe of its predecessor.

As we brace ourselves for the blandness that AI is set to usher into our lives, it speaks to things worth cherishing more than ever – ­ambition, adversity and resolve.

Four stars