Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s relentless, raging, post-apocalyptic epic from 2015 was that rare thing: a blockbuster which made almost $400 million, won six Oscars from its 10 nominations, and provided as many truly jaw-dropping stunts and set pieces as it did moments of genuine heartbreak and anguish.
There was also something delightfully tongue-in-cheek about its title. While the film opens with Tom Hardy’s tormented road warrior, Max, he eventually takes something of a backseat to the women he finds himself traveling with: the wives of the monstrous Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), as played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoë Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton, but especially Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, their buzz cut-sporting, grease-smeared, laconic protector. In the final shots of Fury Road, it’s they who are proclaimed the victors, they who stand above the masses while Max, having aided them, simply nods and disappears into the crowd.
Over the course of the film’s two-hour runtime, Furiosa says very little, but she speaks volumes in the clenching of her jaw, the furrow of her brow, and with her eyes, which overflow with grief, fear, regret, and longing mingled with steely determination. This is a woman who’s endured the unimaginable, wrenched from her lush, idyllic homeland as a child and forced to grow up in a barren wasteland, serving a tyrannical warlord. For her, driving these women away from their oppressors isn’t simply about safeguarding their future—it’s about trying to turn back the clock, to reclaim a lost innocence, and undo a historic wrong which, ultimately, can’t be undone. And yet, we’re left to glean all of this from her faraway looks and pregnant pauses—Furiosa’s dreams, her passions, her darkest secrets remain tantalizingly out of reach.
So, naturally, the prospect of getting to delve deeper into this fascinating, thorny character almost a decade later through an equally nerve-jangling prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was thrilling. And it begins well enough: we meet the wide-eyed young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) plucking an apple from a tree in her Edenic forest home, before being kidnapped by a gang of hapless bandits. Her fierce mother (Charlee Fraser) gives chase, in a nail-biting sequence which has some of the magic of Fury Road, and when the pair are torn apart for good, the effect is genuinely gut-wrenching.
We know how this loss will shape Furiosa, how she’ll be haunted by it, but it is at this point that the film appears to lose interest in our scrappy heroine—instead, the focus shifts to her captor, Chris Hemsworth’s swaggering, volatile bike horde leader, Dementus. Dressed in leather trousers and a billowing Superman-esque cape, with a teddy bear chained to his crotch and his hair dyed red from a flare gun shot as he munches on “human blood sausage,” he’s a classic Mad Max-ian villain—darkly funny, larger than life, frequently inept—and the actor embodies him with relish as he faces off with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).