‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ review: The rocky road to revenge
Furiosa would have been… had Fury Road not existed. George Miller’s 2015 film remade the action genre from the inside out, taking it back to its basics, then supercharging it. Furiosa has its share of bone-rattling, cardiac-inducing wonders, but these wonders are largely familiar, burned into our brains through re-watchings of Fury Road.
It might give some wry satisfaction to all those directors who had their films compared to Fury Road to see that Miller himself isn’t exempt from the standards he set nine years ago.Not that Miller is attempting a retread of Fury Road. If anything, he seems eager to drive a stake through the heart of that film’s clear-cut chase framework, built around Furiosa freeing Immortan Joe’s slave wives. Furiosa takes place in the same post-apocalyptic wasteland, but its emotional landscape is very different.
It’s fractured and strained where Fury Road barrelled ferociously in one direction. It’s far more pessimistic, even nihilistic, its characters driven by power-lust and revenge. We first meet Furiosa as a young Vuvalini girl (played by Alyla Browne) in the Green Place.
She’s discovered and kidnapped by roaming bikers, who take her to the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth with a flowing beard, doing an unhinged version of his native Aussie accent). Her mother (Charlee Fraser) successfully breaks her out, but is eventually captured and killed in front of her daughter. For all his gleeful cruelty, Dementus can’t seem to dispose of the girl.
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