Book Review: “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

In the Mad Max franchise he established in 1979 and continues to the present day, Australian filmmaker George Miller has demonstrated a rare command of movement across vast spaces. Arguably, no director — not even masters of the form like William Friedkin or John Frankenheimer — has wrung more sheer kinesis out of his chase scenes than Miller has. That facility is on striking display in the opening section of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which depicts, in the sort of exhaustive detail that is implied by the inclusion of the word “saga” in the subtitle, the prehistory of the character of Furiosa. Played by Charlize Theron in the earlier, hugely successful Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Furiosa is one of a series of ruthlessly efficient crusaders against tyrannical gangs in a postapocalyptic realm in which, improbably, all living inhabitants retain the ability to operate motorcycles, trucks, and other motor vehicles at high speeds.

Fittingly, the new film opens with a chase, and it’s a good one: After being kidnapped by a band of skull-wearing, self-serving, exceedingly ill-mannered brutes, young Furiosa (played, as a child, by Alyla Browne) is secreted off to the encampment ruled by their employer, the self-aggrandizing Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Following Furiosa, seemingly in a straight line across the endless desert, is her devoted mother, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser). Here, Miller’s gift for geography remains intact: because of the relative simplicity of the scene — mother in pursuit of kidnapped kin across an open plane — it is both exciting and involving. Mary turns out not only to be an expert motorcyclist but also a brilliant, indeed lethal, markswoman. If you will excuse the comparison, this initial setup fleetingly suggests the searing kidnapping that opens John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers. At minimum, the fate of Furiosa and her mother command our attention.

Yet all good things must come to an end — or not come to an end, in the case of the overlong and repetitive Furiosa. The film is divided into numbered “chapters,” which break up the 148-minute running time, but which also serve as unfriendly reminders, like mile markers on a freeway, of the distance we must travel before the credits roll. Long before then, though, Miller’s clean, relatively elegant staging in the opening scene has given way to a duty, nasty, thoroughly congested nightmare of open hostilities among assorted warlords. All of the chases are loud and fast, but how many times can one listen to the sound of engines being revved up or watch clouds of dust form in the air? The cumulative effect is numbingly dull. It seemed as though I saw one particular shot, the camera moving in on Dementus while behind the wheel of what is essentially a monster truck, at least five times.

Once Furiosa reaches young adulthood, Anya Taylor-Joy assumes the part. But in her obsession with administering justice against Dementus, the actress is so stern, unsmiling, and monosyllabic that she might as well be called Anya Taylor-Glum. As Dementus, Hemsworth has something of the preening showmanship of a carnival barker, and he delivers some of his lines with relish. I do have a question: If this film is truly meant to unfold after some apocalypse-inducing event, and water and other resources are worth fighting to the death over, why do all the warlords and their armies all have so much energy to fight, ride, yell, weld, and toss explosives at one another? Has someone found a stash of protein shakes in the Australian outback?

There is some residual charm in the way the series’ characters use and reuse existing technology — the way, for instance, old-fashioned radio-style microphones are the way various bad guys communicate to great crowds. But, by and large, the incalculable number of CGI shots removes any sense of tactile authenticity from the proceedings. In close-ups, the film occasionally has some verve and believability, but overhead CGI renderings of such locales as the gonzo fortress city Gastown feel like they came out of the video game SimCity.

Worse than this, though, is the film’s undisguised nihilism. Perhaps the audiences who have turned out to see various installments of the Mad Max franchise for the last 45 years seek nothing more than undisguised nihilism. But I wonder if there is not something just a little dissolute in luxuriating in a lawless, hopeless world whose only currency is vengeance. And here we come to another troubling aspect of this particular Mad Max offspring: In the manner popularized by Quentin Tarantino in the various volumes of the Kill Bill films, the character of Furiosa is presented as entirely righteous in her pursuit of Dementus. But when she finally captures him, how can any decent-minded viewer perceive the torture session that follows as anything but an expression of pure sadism? Are we supposed to admire Furiosa for being so tough? Are we meant to applaud her suppressing of her own humanity in furtherance of retaliation? What is wrong with this movie?

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Once, Clint Eastwood was severely taken to task for making the pro-police, arguably retribution-minded Dirty Harry films. But today, critics and audiences seem to regard vengeance as entirely acceptable as long as it is exercised by a female protagonist. At least Eastwood’s series was rooted in genuine outrage over an actual problem that millions of Americans were contending with, namely rampant crime in big cities that was not being properly addressed by city officials or police departments. But Miller’s films, utterly detached from anything resembling the real world, exist only to revel in their own vile, violent vision.

There was a time when George Miller was capable of making eminently humane films, including the gripping medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil and, though they hold no particular appeal for me, the Babe and Happy Feet children’s movies. I’m afraid I must report that he has spent too long among clanging steel and toxic fumes in the middle of nowhere. At the end of this movie, the only chase you will remember is the race to see who can reach the nearest exit the quickest.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.