The Reel Review
Kidnapped and taken captive by marauders as a young child, Furiosa must use her survival skills and wits to find her way back to her idyllic homeland in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change and low birthrates. Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in this origin story to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a bombastic visual marvel with all of the wildly creative moments that fans of co-writer/director George Miller’s film franchise have come to know over its whopping four-and-a-half decade run. Taylor-Joy is a terrific Furiosa, revealing key aspects of Furiosa’s life, as is Alyla Browne (George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing), who spends the first hour of the saga as the clever young Furiosa. Hemsworth, sporting a ridiculous wig and prosthetic nose, injects sometimes ill-placed humor into his portrait of the charismatic but feckless warlord Dementus, itself a nod to our revolting modern-day politics.
The biggest shortcoming with the largely dialogue-free film is with the overlong story itself, which at times just doesn’t make sense and vacillates between over the top, frenetic energy and sluggish, pointless storytelling. There is even a sense that the film, in trying so hard to be unique, comes off even more like an imitation of the superior prior film, which it even showcases in the closing credits. But still, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a wildly entertaining, cinematic extravaganza worth seeing on as big a screen as possible.
REEL FACTS
• Mad Max creator George Miller, 79, initially planned to re-cast Charlize Theron as Furiosa using de-aging technology, before opting to go with Anya Taylor-Joy, whom he cast prior to her Emmy and SAG award-winning performance in 2020’s The Queen’s Gambit.
• Chris Hemsworth’s wife, actress Elsa Pataky, has two roles in the film – one as the general of The Green Place of Many Mothers, who briefly assists Furiosa’s mother in the quest to find her daughter, and later, as Dementus’ facially deformed, lone female warlord.
• With the exception of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which was filmed in Namibia, all of the other Mad Max films, including this latest one, have been shot in the Australian Outback.
Video & Photo
