Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
The film attests to Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.
George Miller gets biblical in the opening moments of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment in his postapocalyptic action franchise. The young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne, picks a ripe piece of fruit from a tree growing at the edge of a verdant forest. “We’ve come too far,” says her companion, emphasizing the forbidden nature of the act with the perfect amount of allegorical on-the-noseness. What happens next certainly has the aura of divine punishment, as Furiosa is whisked away from her home (“the Green Place” first mentioned in Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road) by a masked group of motor bikers.
She’s no helpless waif, mind you, and with her steadfast mother, Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser), in hot pursuit, Furiosa gives as good as any of the lecherous brutes tormenting her. But the fates, not to mention the narrative dictates of an origin story with an already fixed outcome, soon place her in the clutches of a lunatic prophet named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), one of several warlords vying for control of the desertscape known as the Wasteland.
Furiosa’s kidnapping and imprisonment is practically a movie unto itself. And Furiosa is best viewed as a series of interwoven tales charting her steely coming of age. There’s more here of Miller’s previous feature, the headily fanciful, eras-traversing romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, than there is of the compressed and propulsive Fury Road. The film is divided into five chapters spanning 15 years, and the ostensible star, Anya Taylor-Joy as the older Furiosa, doesn’t appear until about 40 or so minutes in. Her dialogue is honed to a bare minimum, and her eyes do most of the performing since the rest of her face is frequently obscured.
Miller tends to approach the people he films like objects, though they’re ones that he treats with great and loving care.