All great film series have their highs and lows. A masterpiece is followed by a dud, a long sequence of flops suddenly comes up trumps. One can never be confident that a great film will be followed by an equally compelling sequel, or that a franchise that resembles a dead horse might not spring to life under the whip of the right director.
George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the fourth in a sequence dating back to 1979, was one of the most brilliant action films of all time – a rare occasion when that cliché about having viewers on the edge of their seats was completely justified. The stunts, the cinematography, the editing, were like nothing ever seen. I left the cinema feeling as if I’d been run over by a monster truck.
In Fury Road, Miller did just enough to establish a vision of a dystopian future in which wars over scarce resources have driven humanity back into a savage, tribal existence fuelled by modern technology, where cars, trucks, and weapons have mutated into murderous fetish objects. The characters and plot were laid in efficiently, allowing the action to dominate. One felt a constant atmosphere of dread without having time to dwell on the details.
When Fury Road appeared, it had been 30 years since the previous Mad Max film. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, arrives after an interval of nine years, in which production was slowed by COVID-19. The box office and critical success of its predecessor had ensured that Furiosa would be the most anticipated movie of the year in Australia, if not the entire world. As anyone can testify who attended the premiere at the State Cinema, which saw Market Street lined with fans hoping for a glimpse of the stars, the movie has delivered on the hype but not necessarily the content.
Furiosa is a prequel which provides an origin story for Furiosa, the character played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road. This time around, she is portrayed by Hollywood’s current ‘it’ girl, Anya Taylor-Joy, with Alyla Browne as the younger version. The lack of resemblance between Theron and Taylor-Joy was obviously never an issue.
The story begins in the Green Place of Many Mothers, the hidden oasis in the desert known from the previous film. Furiosa is a precocious tomboy who spies a band of grisly hoodlums who have discovered this paradise. In trying to sabotage their motorbikes she is captured and taken on a long journey over the dunes, with her Amazonian mother (Charlee Fraser) in hot pursuit. I’ll spare you the details, but Furiosa ends up in the clutches of Dementus, a fearsome warlord, played by Chris Hemsworth.
Dementus and his boys have ambitions to take over the entire region, storming the makeshift city-fortresses of the desert – the Citadel, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm. They have mixed results, which make for some spectacular battle scenes, but end by having to negotiate for fuel supplies with another self-styled ruler, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). As part of the deal, the young Furiosa is handed over to the other side, where she will grow to adulthood. Through a mixture of chance, and her own fierce will to survive and conquer, she will find herself co-piloting a heavily fortified petrol tanker through the desert with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who becomes a fleeting love interest. This ends in another confrontation with Dementus, who has grown no less weird over time.
I won’t linger on the plot, which spans some 15 years of Furiosa’s life, except to note that there’s too much of it. In Fury Road not a minute was wasted, but in this film, Miller gets caught up with all the gruesome particulars of the post-apocalyptic world he is creating. It makes the movie feel episodic, and too long. Even allowing for the time spent watching Furiosa grow up, or fleshing out Dementus’s story so we know he once had a wife and child, none of the lead characters achieve three dimensions. They remain comic book creations, like the superheroes in the Marvel universe who are forever being portrayed as sensitive, vulnerable human beings when they are not caped-up and saving the planet from cosmic peril.
The long scene with Furiosa and Jack on the truck, fighting off an ever-renewing swarm of crazies, is the undoubted highlight of the film. It’s a lot harder to nominate the least satisfactory moments, because there are so many things that feel more disturbing than suspenseful. This begins with the young Furiosa’s kidnapping by the bikies, who truss her up and sling her over the pillion like a dead animal. There are nasty suggestions of sexual violence and pedophilia in this episode, as the goons in Dementus’s employ seem to view the child as fair game, no more than the spoils of war.
Miller and Nick Lathouris could hardly have been unaware of these overtones, but they would probably argue the situation is defused by Dementus taking a fatherly interest in the girl, who he sees her as a substitute for his own lost daughter.
This role of surrogate parent sits awkwardly with the brutality and cruelty Dementus displays on other occasions. It seems we’re expected to see him as a schizoid, conflicted personality, but it never feels right. This failure may be attributed to the writing, but also to Chris Hemsworth’s woodenness as an actor. Yes, I know this was supposed to be his breakthrough role, a career-defining performance, and so on, but I find myself incapable of taking him seriously. He may look like he was carved from stone, but his acting has all the animation of a statue. Even when he is condemning his foes to some awful fate, he is as inert as the tiny teddy bear he carries on his belt.
Anya Taylor-Joy is a more accomplished proposition, but she has relatively few lines to deliver, spending most of her time practicing intense attitudes and glares. It’s as if she is willing herself into the masculine role she assumes in the middle of the story, and trying hard to look like a warrior who will take on any opponent. Her major asset is those huge eyes, highlighted by occasional lashings of war paint.
There’ll be plenty of reviewers who will slaver over this movie like Pavlov’s dogs, flattened by the sense of expectation that comes with a new Mad Max feature. I began with the same tingle of anticipation, but as one brutal scene followed another, but the mood of the story took an ugly turn.
It’s far less gruelling to see dozens of attackers blown away in the heat of battle, than to watch premeditated scenes of torture and execution, even allowing for a dramatic need to establish the villainous credentials of Dementus and his peers. While Furiosa manages to avoid being raped, it’s a threat that hovers over this story, along with the moment when she loses an arm. The expectation of such dark and brutal deeds casts a pall over the narrative and offsets the exhilaration of the action scenes. This latest “Mad Max Saga” may be the most expensive film ever made in this country, but it’s yet another Australian story that goes searching for drama and discovers the joys of sadism.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Directed by George Miller
Written by George Miller & Nick Lathouris
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Charlee Fraser, Nicholas Hoult, George Shevtsov, Elsa Pataky, Lachy Hulme, Angus Sampson, John Howard, Nathan Jones, David Field, David Collins, Goran D. Kleut
Australia, MA 15+, 148 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 25 May, 2024