54912: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Twenty-five years ago, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace premiered to sold-out audiences around the world. It had been well over a decade since he had wrapped up the original Star Wars trilogy, and rather than continue the saga he had created, this new film would be a prequel, taking audiences back in time to see how it all started. It was the highest grossing film of 1999, and, in my humble opinion, it is an embarrassment. The dialog is unnatural, at best. The performances are wooden. The digital special effects were great, for their time, but pale in comparison to today’s CGI. Then there’s the issues of midichlorians. If you know, you know. But perhaps the greatest problem with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, and the two additional prequel films that followed, was that they simply weren’t as amazing as we imagined them to be. The original trilogy of films featured larger than life heroes, insuperable villains, and a galaxy of possibilities. There really wasn’t a way to live up to expectations.

Walking into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, I couldn’t help but feel a little twinge of anxiety, the last remnants of PTSD from seeing The Phantom Menace back in 1999, that what I was about to see would be another ill-conceived exhibition of self-indulgence from a tired old filmmaker who should hang up the spurs on a played-out piece of intellectual property. That’s not what happened at all. Furiosa is a thrilling, thoughtful, stylish, and fun film that improved my affection for the original, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

In some key ways, Furiosa differs greatly from Fury Road. Unlike Fury Road, the new entry spends a considerable amount of time introducing the world and its people. My recollection of Fury Road is that it starts at about 8.5, quickly spikes to 10, and never really drops below 9 before the credits roll. Furiosa, on the other hand, follows a rather more traditional plotline, basically “The Hero’s Journey,” as laid out by Joseph Campbell (a noted inspiration for George Lucas in writing the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope). We meet Furiosa as a child, she’s called to adventure, yadda yadda yadda, mentor gets killed, she appears defeated and prevails, etc. It’s pretty standard stuff, if you really look at it, but George Miller makes it epic, to paraphrase The Great Dementus. Spoilers to follow. Turn back now if you’d rather not witness.

In Furiosa, Miller gives us some hints about what happened to the world. He never comes out and says exactly what happened, and thank goodness for that, but makes a few vague hints that give us enough to connect the dots on our own. This is a real departure from Fury Road, which felt to me so disconnected from our world, or the previous Mad Max films, that it might as well be another planet. This time around, we get to see exactly where we are, and we get a rough idea of how long it’s been since things fell apart.

We also get to see the Green Place, and we get a sense of why a person might spend her whole life trying to get back to it. Additionally, Furiosa takes us inside Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, two places we only saw from the outside in the previous film. Miller builds out his world in an organic way, taking us inside these places only when the story dictates. We get to see more of how brutal and chaotic life is in this version of the world. We see riots in Gas Town, people running for their lives from biker gangs in the wasteland, and the relative peace and stability of The Citadel. There’s a lot that Miller packs into Furiosa that makes Fury Road more comprehensible and enjoyable, which is a neat feat for a prequel.

Of course, the film lives and dies with Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth’s performances as the dueling cobras at the heart of the story. Taylor-Joy breathes life and fire into the character of Furiosa, even though she has only about 30 lines in the movie. Her performance is driven in large part by her incongruously large eyeballs. They are constantly searching, probing, usually giving nothing back but the perfect poker face. She gives off the energy of an apex predator, taking in every detail and analyzing to find a weak point to exploit. Hemsworth’s Dementus, however, is constantly talking, proactively goading others into responding, to revealing more than they wish. It’s one way that the two of them act as Yin and Yang in the story, their personal narratives becoming entwined over time, even as Dementus forgets Furiosa, his sins against her simply fading into the background noise of terrible things he’s done.

In the world of Furiosa, revenge is a let down, but it’s also a cop-out.

Early in the movie, Furiosa is kidnapped by marauding bikers. Her mother chases them, and nearly saves Furiosa. When she knows she is about to die at the hands of these marauders, she demands a promise from Furiosa that she will someday return home. She doesn’t ask to be avenged, because she doesn’t want that cold, hateful, hunger to be what drives her daughter through life. Later, adult Furiosa has a mentor who talks about his parents, who were soldiers, and how they longed to be part of a righteous cause. It’s a sentiment that clearly resonates with Furiosa much more than the idea of bloody revenge, and the moment these two share is one of the sweetest in the film. Granted, that's a low bar. But still.

However, given that you probably know that Furiosa has no mentor in Fury Road, you already have realized that things don’t end well for him in this movie. In fact, he’s brutally tortured to death by Dementus, and that seems to be the final straw that breaks the back of Furiosa’s “Happy Healthy Choices” camel, as she then goes into full vengeance mode, slaughtering Dementus’ gang of ne’er do wells before finally making her way to the big boss himself in the climax of the film.

In a sequence that Miller introduced as “Beyond Vengeance” in a title card, we see a victorious Furiosa and a prostrate Dementus, together in the wasteland. In a simpler movie, this would be where Furiosa says something clever and puts a bullet into Dementus’ head, or maybe he gets free and attacks her, forcing her to kill him, but not in cold blood. Furiosa is not that movie. Instead, what we get is Dementus begging for his life, saying, “I have nothing, I am nothing.” It is not exactly standard villain monologue, but it serves a purpose by subtly telling Furiosa, and the audience, that taking his life will get you nothing. Vengeance upon him is a hollow, meaningless act. It’s not even a victory.

Killing Dementus would ultimately be a nihilistic act, once which would vindicate his violent, Hobbesian worldview. Moreover, once he realizes who she is, he gloats to her that by taking his life, she will take his place. She will become his spiritual successor, a blood-soaked daughter to replace the family he lost. (At this point in the screening, I wondered if we will be getting a Dementus prequel in 2033 to explore his convoluted backstory) And this is where the movie takes a left turn. Just as the movie tells us, Furiosa goes “beyond vengeance” on Dementus. She does something truly horrific to him, without taking his life, and manages to turn him into the source of new life.

If it seems like I’m being cagey about this, I am. What she, and Miller, come up with for Dementus’ fate is too good to spoil. But I will say that it brings her hero’s journey to a conclusion, as she returns home to a new equilibrium, free to live her life how she wants. And in the last scene, we see that she is adopting her own righteous cause (which, if you’ve seen Fury Road, you already know what it is) and eschewing vengeance in order to re-embrace the promise she made to her mother, and finding a way home. The idea that we can always find our way back is a beautiful sentiment. Perhaps that beauty is marred by our knowledge of how things go in the next movie, but it seems clear to me that Furiosa thinks it is important that we at least try to find our better angels, our righteous cause. Big explosions and insane stunts don’t hurt, either.