Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.

George Miller’s post-apocalyptic opus started as a tight little action film about a policeman who loses his family to marauders. Now, in its fifth chapter, it tells the story of a little girl (an absolutely astonishing Alyla Browne) who loses her family to marauders at the rebirth of the world. For me, the best films in Miller’s Mad Max quintet are this and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (co-directed with George Ogilvie). They’re the two most invested in world-building, the two that follow extended (and miraculous) chase movies (The Road Warrior and Fury Road), and the two, as it happens, that saw the future as undeniably female. The leaders of the three fortresses of this wasteland (The Citadel, The Bullet Farm, Gastown) remind me of Roald Dahl’s corporate grotesques. Furiosa sees their trade balance as delicate and ridiculous, a temporary equilibrium built on bluster and totalitarian bullying with no eye to the future beyond escalating their primitive arms race. Their functions are reduced to the production of oil, munitions, and the exploitation through violent repression of the reproductive potential of women. These are the levers that drive the venal, avaricious, genocidal men who run our world, too. Furiosa is less science-fiction than prophecy–and less prophecy than clinical diagnosis of our current state. I would call it satire, but we’re so far gone that I don’t think it’s possible to satirize us anymore.

The women of these movies are keepers of seeds for plants that are otherwise extinct. The men create weapons for war and vehicles with which to wage it. Women are hope and life; men are custodians of death. Furiosa is simple because it’s primatology as physical poetry. Consider it an extension of the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Miller’s language is cribbed from silent film; everything about these movies is legible because he learned how to tell stories from the first age of cinematic invention. I wonder if that’s why they feel so immediate, so primal. When cave paintings and a ViewMaster and fire to illuminate them both appeared in Beyond Thunderdome, Miller’s vision became clear. We have always told myths to explain the universe, and we have always learned them in the dark, accompanied by flickering firelight. Imagine what Buster Keaton might have choreographed with the resources and technology of the twenty-first century. Those afraid the chases in Furiosa will just repeat the already incomparable gags of Fury Road should trust in Miller. I tend to laugh when I see things I’ve never seen before executed in ingenious ways, and I left the screening with my cheeks aching from delight. There is a battle at the cliff-mounted Citadel that includes a tactic I never could have imagined, one that is at once so ingeniously twisted and so dazzling as an image it makes my heart ache. There’s a desperate escape through a sandstorm that ends in a tableau that would be at home in a Frank Frazetta painting, all gnarled trees and tortured meat, and how Miller chooses to visually mark the passing of time brought me out of my seat for its breathtaking perversity. The way they measure units of mother’s milk in “tits,” or one of the heroes stops mid-flight to change out a gas tank and wheel on an armoured motorcycle as the wall of a sandstorm approaches… The film is bliss.

Furiosa is a defining movie of our time. If we have history in a few generations, we’ll probably study it to see how close we were to bringing everything to an end–how narrow was our escape, I hope, though in any event how clearly we saw our fate looming, even as the men breaking the world refused to avert it. It’s a film obsessed with wars we start in deserts over oil and the short-sighted bellicosity of warlords supplying the artillery to perpetuate them. It’s about the oppression and brutalization of women. Most of all, it’s about the fragility of powerful men, the fights they start to mask their fear and inadequacy and the loud machines they make to disguise their humiliation. Furiosa paints a dire picture of our descent into fanaticism and genocide, of hoarded resources and the economic and environmental collapse our leaders have engineered. The greatest irony of this and other recent zeitgeist touchstones (Dune Part Two, Civil War, Oppenheimer, Godzilla Minus One) is how our most ambitious popular art, our desire to create precious things (still the best defense for our continued existence), is primarily dedicated to documenting what feels like our final years on a dying planet. The last flare of a guttering flame, perhaps. But there’s so much life in Furiosa that I felt hope for the first time in a while, because the world is still a beautiful place. There are still artists filled to the brim with magnificent brio. If they’re still fighting, maybe it’s all still worth fighting for.