By Seth Lukas Hynes
Mad Max: Fury Road
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth
Rated MA15+
4/5
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is another enthralling action epic from iconic Australian director George Miller, but isn’t quite as good as the previous Mad Max film.
In this prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young woman in post-apocalyptic Australia, seeks vengeance against Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the gang leader who killed her mother.
Like Fury Road, Furiosa is a heady mix of kinetic, creative action sequences, starkly beautiful cinematography, nihilism, fragile hope and pitch-black humour.
Taylor-Joy is a fierce lead of few words as Furiosa, proving a worthy successor (or predecessor) to Charlize Theron from Fury Road.
Furiosa forms a close bond with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a fellow road warrior, and it’s gratifying to see an intense relationship between male and female characters in which romance is implied, not emphasised.
Hemsworth is clearly having a blast playing the bombastic psychopath Dementus, and his brief moments of warmth and anxiety render his sadism all the more shocking (also, Dementus’s bright pink cape may be a tribute to the 1994 Australian classic Priscilla, Queen of the Desert).
The fiery road battles aren’t as special the second time round, but are still gripping, brutal rides that turn the trucks and convoys into surprisingly large spaces for attack and evasion.
Unfortunately, while Fury Road is extremely tightly-paced, Furiosa is somewhat erratic and meandering.
The plot compresses too much of Furiosa’s growth as a road warrior, which feels oddly detached from the rushed war between Dementus and Immortan Joe (the antagonist of Fury Road), and the green oasis Furiosa came from fades into the background.
A riveting Aussie post-apocalyptic epic that falls short of Fury Road but is still savagely satisfying, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
