Furiosa Review: Finally, a Prequel That's Actually Essential (original) (raw)

The Pitch: Once upon a time, there was a guy named Max who was pretty mad (maybe because he lives in an apocalyptic wasteland), who got caught up in a desperate quest to help five young women escape the cruel Immortan Joe. The mastermind behind that escape was a badass named Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) — but was she always a badass? Thanks to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the answer can be confirmed: Absolutely yes.

However, being a badass didn’t make her path through life any easier. As a child, Furiosa quickly learns to survive the most wild elements of the Wasteland, including the demented Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a gang leader who challenges the ruling overlords for a shot at real power. As an adult, Furiosa realizes that there’s something maybe better than surviving: Escape to the green place. All she needs is a plan — and some hope.

Hope Is a Mistake: The obsession Hollywood has these days for prequels has become a little exhausting in recent years. But the important thing to keep in mind, going into Furiosa, is that the story it tells was dreamed up at the same time writer/director George Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris were concocting 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

This isn’t an example of a bunch of writers pitching for an open writing assignment for how Furiosa lost her arm — Miller told journalists, prior to a press screening, that because Fury Road takes place over such a short amount of time, “in order to tell it cohesively, we had to know everything that happened in the time before. So we wrote the story of Furiosa from the time she was taken as a child, as she refers to in Fury Road, until she becomes the Imperator Furiosa. And this ended up as a full screenplay with concept art and so on — the actors, the designers and all the crew got the screenplay of [_Furiosa_] before we shot [_Fury Road_]. It was the only way we could have done Fury Road, otherwise it wouldn’t have been cohesive.”

In many ways, Furiosa is not immune to the tropes inherent to the prequel — you do find out how she lost her arm, for one thing, and the film does eventually collide with the events of Fury Road. Yet because its development was simultaneous with the first film, it feels much more connected to it, perhaps even essential. And in the rough-and-tumble desert that is film in the year 2024, a prequel that doesn’t feel like a blatant effort to exploit corporate IP is truly special.

I Live, I Die, I Live Again: In a recent interview, Miller confirmed that the character of Furiosa has just 30 lines of dialogue, and in the context of the film, that spare approach works so well for two reasons: Miller’s such a masterful visual storyteller, you don’t really need too much, and also the two actresses playing Furiosa at various ages are incredibly expressive performers, both saying an awful lot with just a look.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Warner Bros.)