Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga launched in May 2024 as a prequel to 2015’s instant classic Mad Max: Fury Road. Directed by series creator George Miller, the belated follow-up is a prequel to that and focusses on the iconic Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron in 2015).
This time out Anya-Taylor Joy stars as a younger Furiosa. The narrative follows her character arc from infancy to young adulthood and the many devastating experiences she has to shape her relentless, brilliant, psychotic sense of justice. Oh yes, it’s an awesome movie.
A Prequel to Die for in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
As with the whole Mad Max series, this is a post-apocalyptic action film set in Australia. Furiosa is an incredibly dark time of it, some of the story arcs are brutal and the main character faces a hellish onslaught of death and sand.
Furiosa made her screen debut in Fury Road back in 2015. Charlize Theron was awesome in the role and the best bit of the film (for us, anyway).
For the prequel, young Furiosa is played by Alyla Browne for a sizeable chunk of the film. Then once chapter 3 (The Stowaway) kicks off we have movie star Anya Taylor-Joy take things over.
Full credit to her, she’s just excellent in this role. There are only 30 lines of dialogue across the whole thing for her, but the intensity she brings is great with the iconic eyes she has.
For the whole narrative, she must deal with the deranged antagonist Dementus (Chis Hemsworth clearly having a lot of fun with the role). He’s a warlord leader of the Biker Horde who wants to live in something other than a hellish wasteland.
His crew capture a young Furiosa, kill her mother, and then try to invade the Citadel headed by the deranged warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). The one from the 2015 film who’s a complete lunatic.
Furiosa winds up working in the Citadel, then with her smarts and fighting skills works her way up to a high ranking level. She impresses the level-headed Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) along the way and the two become close allies.
But this is a brutal world depicted. Death, savagery, and desperation rule over the dessert landscape and the core of it all is Furiosa’s revenge mission to make Dementus suffer.
Halfway through the film is the big turning point, a spectacular car chase action scene thing. It goes on for about seven minutes and cripes alive it’s a hellish work of art.
Unlike Fury Road, which was breathless from start to finish, Furiosa does have much more advanced story building. At two and a half hours, there’s a lot of origin story stuff going on.
These flesh out the characters more and we felt added to the weight of the story. Dementus is a particularly nasty bastard, so Furiosa’s push to bump him off does reach a rousing conclusion. Even if, along the way, there’s a lot of anguish.
We went back and watched Fury Road after this one and, to our surprise, now consider Furiosa to be the better film. Yes, indeed, our immediate desire was to watch it all over again and get the Blu-ray steelbook.
Hell of a great film, then, by cripes. 5/5 from us and a modern classic. As we cover below, it didn’t perform at the box office, so this may well be the end of the Mad Max series with George Miller at the helm.
If he doesn’t get to make another then, well, this is one hell of a way for him to conclude everything.
The Production of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Unfortunately, the film was a box office flop. Off its $168 million budget it went on to make $174.4 million at the global box office, which is considered a failure. Although subsequent streaming and DVD/Blu-ray/merchandising sales will have bolstered its recoup.
The main reason the film flopped is because it isn’t a traditional Mad Max film. Mad Max isn’t in it and the series is associated with tough masculinity and the like. So the focus on a female lead led to the usual tedious “woke” accusations. Which, at this point with all “woke” delusion dragging into its Xth year, is just very stupid.
It’s also tedious when we see men online complaining about modern films being rubbish, but then there’s fantastic stuff like this and they don’t go to the cinema as it’s “woke”. Time to grow up, darlings.
Anyway, it was critically acclaimed, met with outstanding reviews, but when the budget was as high as it was it’s always risky if the film underperforms. Fury Road was a surprise hit in 2015, but the Mad Max series isn’t a big name out there amongst other franchises. It’s more of a cult following. So when you have a nine year gap between the surprise hit and its prequel, the result is this.
George Miller had wanted to do the two films back-to-back in 2015, but Warner Bros Pictures had all sorts of salary dispute court cases going and so the project was halted for almost a decade.
When the court cases ended, Miller and Nico Lathouris co-wrote the new script (they also wrote Fury Road). Reminder here, Miller created the whole series and directed the first films, starring Mel Gibson, back in 1979.
Miller didn’t want to use de-ageing technology due to its “uncanny valley” effect, so he decided against recasting Charlize Theron. Instead, brought in the British-Argentinian actor Anya Taylor-Joy. Randomly, he made her audition for the role by raging out the famous “I’m as mad as hell!” monologue from Sidney Lumet’s film Network (1976).
Chris Hemsworth was easier to cast as he’s a major movie star, a big fan of the Mad Max series, and is Australian.
The film was shot in Australia from May to October 2022. The main action sequence took 78 days to complete and needed 200 stunt performers. Meanwhile, Taylor-Joy found the experience pretty lonely as she spent months filming whilst not saying much (those 30 lines of dialogue again).
This was also the most expensive Australian film ever created and 3,000 people worked on it.
It lost a lot of money, unfortunately, but that shouldn’t take away from its merits as a film. This is fantastic stuff, arguably every bit as good as the 2015 outing, and well worth your worship.
