- UK release: May 2024
- Director: George Miller · Writers: George Miller, Nico Lathouris
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Kennedy Miller Mitchell
- Genre: Post-apocalyptic action epic · Runtime: 148 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, The Menu) as Furiosa; Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Rush) as Dementus; Tom Burke (The Souvenir) as Praetorian Jack; Alyla Browne as young Furiosa
- IMDb: 7.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 90% critics / 88% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Nine years ago George Miller did the most improbable thing in modern action cinema: he came back, at seventy, with Mad Max: Fury Road, and made the rest of the genre look like it had been idling in the slow lane. Furiosa is the film he wanted to make alongside it, a backstory worked out so the lead of Fury Road would have a past to play, and now built out into a feature in its own right. The trick this time is that everyone walks in knowing where it ends. We have already met the one-armed war rig driver Charlize Theron played. What Miller is offering is the forty years that turned a stolen child into her.
The setup
Furiosa is taken as a girl from the Green Place, a hidden pocket of the wasteland that still has fruit and water, by outriders working for Dementus, a biker warlord assembling a horde out of the ruined world. Her mother comes after her and pays for it, and the child is dragged into the orbit of two rival fiefdoms: Dementus, who wants a kingdom, and Immortan Joe of the Citadel, who already has one. Passed between them, hidden, disguised and waiting, Furiosa grows up learning the geography of the wasteland and the men who run it, and nursing a single intention that the film is in no hurry to spell out. It is a revenge story stretched across a saga, told in chapters with their own title cards, and it covers more ground, literally and otherwise, than Fury Road ever tried to.
The cast
Anya Taylor-Joy has very little dialogue and carries the back half of the film almost entirely on watchfulness, those enormous eyes doing the work the script withholds. It is a performance built out of stillness and timing rather than speeches, and it holds. The surprise is Chris Hemsworth. Buried under a prosthetic nose and a Roman swagger, Dementus lets him do something he rarely gets the room for: he is funny, vain, wounded and genuinely frightening, a showman who has talked himself into believing his own myth. He is the most entertaining villain the series has produced. Tom Burke, as the road warrior Praetorian Jack who becomes Furiosa’s mentor and something more, brings a weathered decency that the film needs, and Alyla Browne, as the child Furiosa, anchors a long opening stretch with real composure.
The craft
Miller remains the most legible action director alive. However many vehicles are on screen, and there are a lot, you always know who is where and what they want. The centrepiece, a running assault on a war rig across open desert, is staged with a clarity that shames films with three times the cutting. There is more digital work here than in Fury Road, and a handful of shots show it, but the physical craft, the practical stunts, the engines, Tom Holkenborg’s pounding score and the editing rhythm Margaret Sixel brings to the chases, all carry the world. Simon Duggan’s photography gives the desert a scorched, painterly look. The wasteland itself is the deepest pleasure: the economies of guzzoline and water and breeding stock, the heraldry of each warband, a whole society worked out down to the spray paint on the teeth.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Fury Road, and it cuts both ways. That film was a single chase, a perfect mechanism with no fat on it. Furiosa is the opposite shape, a sprawling chronicle that pauses, jumps years, and asks you to sit with character and mythology. It is a less relentless film and a more expansive one, closer in spirit to The Road Warrior and to the world-building epics of the sword and sorcery tradition than to its immediate predecessor. Set against the wider field of franchise prequels, where the usual problem is a story nobody needed told, this one earns its existence by deepening what came before. You come out of it and want to watch Fury Road again, which is the best thing a prequel can do.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception is strong, around ninety per cent, but laced with a recurring reservation: that for all its scale it cannot match the propulsive simplicity of Fury Road, and that the heavier reliance on digital effects costs it some of the earlier film’s hand-built danger. Audiences are close behind at eighty-eight, and it is finding a slightly cooler commercial reception than its quality deserves, perhaps because the marketplace had decided it wanted Fury Road again rather than something stranger. I think the reservation is real and overstated. Asking Furiosa to be Fury Road misses what it is doing. It is a different and more ambitious shape, and judged on its own terms it mostly succeeds.
Verdict
This is exactly the sort of film I rate highly: dense world-building, a soundtrack that drives the whole thing, action you can actually follow, and a wasteland mythology I am happy to spend hours inside. It is not flawless. The pace sags once or twice in the middle chapters, and a couple of effects shots break the spell that Fury Road never broke. But Hemsworth is a joy, Taylor-Joy holds the centre with almost no help from the script, and the craft is the best in the genre. I will rewatch it, probably as a double bill with its sequel, and I suspect it will look better with distance from the comparison everyone is making now. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, and worth the largest screen and the loudest room you can find. See it in IMAX if you can.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: time has been kind to Furiosa. The early framing of it as the lesser companion to Fury Road has softened, and it now reads more clearly as the deliberately different film Miller intended, a chronicle rather than a chase. It disappointed at the box office on release, which says more about a crowded summer than about the film. It is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Max in the territories that carry it, where it pairs naturally with Fury Road for the full wasteland double bill.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, injury detail. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are bloody shootings and stabbings, as well as beatings and head bludgeonings. A man’s limbs are chained to motorbikes, which proceed to pull him apart; however, visual detail of this death is largely obscured. Vehicles and people are attacked with explosive spears and characters are killed by a giant industrial drill mounted on a lorry; visual detail of these deaths are limited. Characters are hit by vehicles and crushed beneath their wheels during intense action scenes, and others are attacked by dogs.
Threat and horror: Characters are restrained and threatened with torture and death. There are intense, sustained sequences involving high speed vehicular attacks and chases. A young girl is kidnapped by a violent gang and threatened; she is forced to watch the murder of a loved one. There are scenes of gun and knife threat.
Language: There is mild bad language (‘bollocks’, ‘tits’, ‘piss’, ‘bastard’) along with milder terms such as ‘hell’.
Sexual violence and sexual threat: A man plays with the hair of a young girl in a threatening way and later kidnaps her as she sleeps, taking her to a secluded room; it is implied he intends to sexually abuse her but she escapes from the situation unharmed. A man says he wants to use a young girl as a ‘wife’ when she is older, in order for her to bear his children; this man keeps a ‘harem’ of other women captive for this purpose.
Injury detail: There is occasional close-up focus on injury detail, including grisly shots of bloody wounds being treated with leeches and sight of severed limbs. Characters sustain bloody injuries in the aftermath of violence, including pulsing neck wounds, and there is brief sight of a man whose head has been impaled with a drill. There are occasional blood spurts and splashes. There is brief sight of the dead body of a stillborn, mutated baby.
Nudity: There are images of natural female nudity in reproductions of classical paintings and a man has the chest of a nude female mannikin attached to his vehicle.
Rude humour: A man describes another as ‘anal pus’. Character names include ‘Scrotus’ and ‘Rictus Erectus’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
