Her Ride Into Vengeance: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Growing up in the green place among the Vuvalini, a young Furiosa Jabassa (Alyla Browne) was no stranger to threat and danger. The best defense the Vuvalini have is keeping their green home secret. So, when she spots a group of bikers slaughtering a horse while she and her sister (Dylan Adonis) are gathering fruit, she knows they must never leave the place of abundance alive. To help her people finish off these bandits, Furiosa decides to sneak in, sabotage their bikes, and leave them stranded. However, she is interrupted and taken prisoner. Horsemeat is fine, but an unirradiated girl with all her teeth intact is the best proof of the place’s existence for the ears they hope to tantalize.

They do not get away free, however. Furiosa’s own mother Mary (Charlee Fraser) gives chase, picking the bastards off one at a time before they can get her back to the warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Alas, Mary fails to get the last one. Furiosa is revealed to the warlord though she remains mute when questioned about where she’s come from. When Mary tries to free her child during a dust storm, a moment of compassion works against their ultimate escape, leaving a mother tortured and murdered and Furiosa ultimately in Dementus’ hands … at least for a while.

He calls her his daughter, but treats her like a prized possession—same as his bastion of knowledge The History Man (George Shevtsov)—and roams the wasteland trying to eke out a better than subsistence living. When Dementus learns of the Citadel through a near dead war boy (Sean Millis), he tries to take it. Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his mouthpiece The People Eater (John Howard) repel his efforts with ease.

However, the Citadel reveals the existence of two more fortress areas, Gastown and The Bullet Farm. The first is the source of fuel under the rule of Immortan Joe’s brother, while the second is the source of ammunition under the rule of The Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry). New plans begin to form. First, he uses a Trojan Horse gambit to take Gastown for his own, then he makes a peace treaty with Immortan Joe, exchanging gas for increased shares of food, water, and milk. Joe, however, wants Furiosa as part of the deal to be one of his future wives. Initially, Dementus does not agree, but eventually relents, using his “daughter” as a trade good.

Furiosa’s experience in Immortan Joe’s wife vault is an unpleasant one, and when one of Joe’s sons (Nathan Jones) takes a fancy to her, she uses his interest to escape. Unable to go far, she dons a boy’s clothes and exists among the Citadel’s war boys and mechanics for over a decade as a mute young man (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy), learning the skills necessary to survive in this wasteland. However, when the infamous driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) takes her under his wing, she learns how to drive and therefore thrive.

Working with Jack, she hopes to amass the resources necessary to go home. But increasing tensions between Immortan Joe, The Bullet Farmer, and Dr Dementus make the long term survival a risky proposition. Soon enough, Furiosa is caught in the midst of a 40-day war, yearning for revenge against the man who kept her from home and murdered her mother. However, the road to satisfaction is a twisted one and there may well be little satisfaction waiting out there in the sandy emptiness …

George Miller reunites with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) co-writer Nico Lathouris for the story of one of that earlier film’s most enigmatic new characters and filling in the blanks not only on her life and motivations but on the entire setting Fury Road only really alluded to. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is one part adrenaline rush, one part character study, and one part world building exercise. Across five separate chapters (and about fifteen years of chronological time), the picture balances its disparate materials in gloriously cool ways and reaps one memorably beautiful and/or terrifying image after another with increasingly enviable levels of skill and craftsmanship.

Because of delays getting Fury Road greenlit, Miller and Lathouris had time to flesh out a lot of the details about this version of the wasteland and producing back stories for several of the characters appearing in that flick. Some of these made their way into comic books, other elements served as the basis for screenplays. There is a consistency of vision between Furiosa and Fury Road that is surprising. The first three films in the Mad Max universe were unconnected, individual stories united only by Mel Gibson’s portrayal of an aging and increasingly mythic Max Rockatansky.

The first, 1979’s Mad Max, was presented as a straight ahead action flick about bad things happening in a near future on the verge of collapse. The others (1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome) are each portrayed as legends involving an unwilling hero Max who comes into a messy situation and then sets the balance back on the side of the innocent, the humane, and the compassionate by destroying evil barbarians (or at least distracting them long enough for the working class decent people to get away). Through each of those pictures, the increasingly vanished roads and rising sandy wastes are all part of the fallen world.

When Fury Road hit theaters, it was once more played relatively as a straightforward story—involving a car chase across the desert and then a second chase back again—with mythic elements more or less pared away. While the picture’s champions (like me) consider it a masterpiece of cinematic action and economical storytelling, some naysayers complain that the movie’s plot is far too simplistic, easily summarized as a “Let’s go that way! Whoops! Let’s come back again!” circular, ninety-minute journey from A back to itself.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga should satisfy those complaints. There is nothing streamlined or simplistic here. The story is rich with meat and incident, the setting is clearly presented as vital places that have more than mere names on some science fantasy map, and the piece is gloriously aware of how to twist a character’s journey both through plot elements as well as developing character ones. However, the film is also portrayed as a mythic one, recounted by an unseen narrator (The History Man, presumably) as a painfully detailed retelling of historical events (that character’s raison d’être, in fact) that basically bring Furiosa up to the beginning of Fury Road.

Here, we also get a sense of the vanishing roads and the rise of dust and ash. The road is visible in some scenes, mostly sanded over in others. The old world has been eaten and pillaged by its survivors, and now nature itself seems to be expressing a desire to wipe away traces of humanity. The essential machinery keeping mankind’s remnants from being swept away, weaponized transportation, has to be functional with pavement and without.

There’s one place where the film could have been better than it already is. Hugh Keays-Byrne is dearly missed in the role of Immortan Joe—his replacement gets the voice and eyes right, but there’s a quirky and unique way Keays-Byrne did line reads that cannot be imitated—and while I’m sure he would have been happy to reprise the role, he unfortunately passed in 2020. Hulme does an excellent job with the Immortan’s wonderfully weird wardrobe, mechanisms, and mannerisms, but it is difficult not to wonder what the original actor would have done with this material.

That said, Furiosa is another terrific feather in Miller’s cap. He’s offering masterclasses for the young dog filmmakers on how to make action movies that matter. The piece is superb, gritty, fanciful, outrageous, jaw-droppingly cool, and without blemish. A real triumph for the eye, the ear (damn if the grumbling engines didn’t shake me to the core), and the heart.

Sign me up for George Miller’s next Mad Max universe flick. I’m more than ready.

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is currently playing in theaters. It will undoubtedly become available in DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD, and VOD editions.

Next, we will take a look at a sequel almost thirty years in the making. Nightwatch II: Demons Are Forever is currently streaming on Shudder and VOD channels. It will eventually become available in other editions.

Writing for “Her Ride Into Vengeance: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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