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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ Review: A Lonely Avenger
The fifth installment of George Miller’s series delivers an origin story of Furiosa, the hard-bitten driver played here by Anya Taylor-Joy.
transcript
‘Furiosa’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director George Miller narrates a sequence from his film featuring Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke.
Hello, I’m George Miller, director of “Furiosa.” At this point in the movie, we’ve got Furiosa played by Anya Taylor-Joy and we’ve got Praetorian Jack played by Tom Burke arriving at Bullet Farm, where they’re meant to pick up all these munitions and weapons for this battle. However, when they get to the Bullet Farm, there’s something weird going on. When they see the dog with a foot in its mouth, they realize that that’s Dementus’s dog. And they know at that moment that Dementus has somehow taken over the Bullet Farm. She just gets out in time, and the other car that came in with them gets basically cut in half by this massive steel portcullis. And that shot was a very difficult shot to do. Anya had to do that 180 degree turn. The portcullis came down. But to pull the timing of her turn and the portcullis coming down and crushing the other car was very, very difficult to do. [GUNSHOT] So there’s a certain part of this sequence which has no music because the music would be redundant, so it’s not scored. The score only arises when it informs what’s happening between our two main characters. They have to respond in the moment like all Warriors do, and get out of this situation. And in the process we find them relinquishing their own self interest. One for the other. What follows is that through their actions, not their words and their promises to each other, but through their actions that they actually are prepared to give of themselves entirely to the other. [ENGINE RUMBLE] So in a way, it’s kind of a love story in the middle of an action scene. That’s always at the heart of every action sequence. It’s not all the kinetics and the sound of it. It’s all about an interaction of characters. It’s character driven and it’s the interplay between the characters that we’re most interested in.
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
- NYT Critic’s Pick
- Directed by George Miller
- Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller
- R
- 2h 28m
Dystopia has rarely looked as grim and felt as exhilarating as it has in George Miller’s “Mad Max” cycle. For decades, Miller has been wowing viewers with hallucinatory images of a ravaged, violent world that looks enough like ours to generate shivers of recognition. Yet however familiar his alternative universe can seem — feel — his filmmaking creates such a strong contact high that it’s always been easy to simply bliss out on the sheer spectacle of it all. Apocalypse? Cool!
The thing is, it has started to feel less cool just because in the years since the original “Mad Max” opened in 1979, the distance between Miller’s scorched earth and ours has narrowed. Set “a few years from now,” the first film tracks Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), a highway patrol cop who has a semblance of a normal life with a wife and kid. That things are about to go to hell for Max is obvious in the opening shot of a sign for the Hall of Justice, an entry that evokes the gate at Auschwitz (“Work Sets You Free”). You may have flinched if you made that association, but whatever qualms you had were soon swept away by the ensuing chases and crashes, the gunning engines and mad laughter.
Miller’s latest and fifth movie in the cycle, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” is primarily an origin story that recounts the life and brutal, dehumanizing times of the young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), the hard-bitten rig driver played by Charlize Theron in the last film, “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015). Miller’s magnum opus, “Fury Road” is at once the apotheosis of his cinematic genius — it’s one of the great movies of the last decade — and a departure narratively and tonally from the previous films. In “Fury,” Max still serves as the nominal headliner (with Tom Hardy taking over for Gibson), but the movie’s dramatic and emotional weight rests on Furiosa, her quest and her hopes.
As befits a creation story, “Furiosa” tracks Furiosa from childhood to young adulthood, a downward spiral that takes her from freedom to captivity and, in time, circumscribed sovereignty. It opens with the 10-year-old Furiosa (Alyla Browne) foraging in a forest close to a paradisiacal outpost called the Green Place of Many Mothers. Just as she’s reaching for an amusingly, metaphorically ripe peach, her idyll is cut short by a gang of snaggletooth, hygiene-challenged bikers. They’re soon rocketing across the desert with Furiosa tied up on one of their bikes, with her mother (Charlee Fraser) and another woman in pursuit on horseback, a chase that presages the fight for power and bodies which follows.
The chase grows exponentially tenser as Miller begins shifting between close-ups and expansive long shots, the raucous noise and energy of the kidnappers on their hell machines working contrapuntally against the desert’s stillness. While the scene’s arid landscape conjures up past “Mad Max” adventures, the buttes and the galloping horse evoke the classic westerns from which this series has drawn some of its mythopoetic force. Max has often seemed like a Hollywood gunslinger (or samurai) transplanted into Miller’s feverish imagination with some notes from Joseph Campbell. The minute Furiosa starts gnawing on her captor’s fuel line, though, Miller makes it clear that this wee captive is no damsel in distress.
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