Nine years ago, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) hit cinemas with an explosive impact worthy of the big screen.  It is perhaps the best film of the last decade.  I remember seeing it at least twice in theaters, and being totally enthralled both times.  My niece, who is now nine, was still in my sister-in-law’s belly at this point; Barack Obama was still president; and the idea that the world would shut down due to a bad case of the flu seemed outrageous.  It was a different world.

Indeed, I remember my younger brother scolding me for seeing MM:FR with a colleague instead of him and his wife (and, I suppose, my natal niece by extension).  I think I saw it with them for my second viewing, but I cannot remember at the moment.  Regardless, that was probably the last time that the three of us could have gone to the movies together—truly the end of an era.

And MM:FR was the perfect film to end that era.  Indeed, it was something a vestige of the dying days of practical effects and crazy stunts.  Fury Road did use some CGI and digital effects, but it was largely shot practically, which is insane when one considers the dangerous stunts.  It must have been grueling to film.

What captivated me so much about Fury Road was the world in which this extended car chase occurred.  Miller dribbled in just enough information to give a sense for how this wasteland worked, but left a great deal unexplained.  That fueled hours of speculation about the locations and people in this world.  How did Immortan Joe come to power?  What happened to the Green Place?  What is going on with Max’s mental state?

After nearly a decade, Miller released Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), which serves as a prequel to Fury Road.  The film did not answer every question, but it does a great deal to flesh out the world of Mad Max, while still allowing it to maintain some of its mystique and mystery.  It’s also an excellent film.

The film follows the life and captivity of Furiosa, played here by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy (Charlize Theron portrayed the title character in Fury Road), tracing her rise to prominence in Immortan Joe’s army.  Furiosa is captured early in the film by a biker gang, and despite her and her mother’s best efforts, Furiosa remains captive, but the location of the Edenic Green Place is kept safely hidden from the marauders.

Furiosa receives first-hand lessons in the brutality of the wasteland as the captive, adopted “daughter” of the film’s major antagonist, Dementus.  Dementus is cruel and histrionic, but also a bit bumbling.  He manages to succeed in spite of himself, while also possessing some real cunning.  He is an excellent villain—he is clearly quite evil and possesses some intelligence, but also makes many hasty decisions and poorly mismanages his rough alliance of gangs once he secures established power.

In gaining that power, he trades Furiosa to Immortan Joe, where the young girl is meant to be a future “bride” of the cancerous warlord, but through her cunning, Furiosa escapes the life of a breeder, disguising herself as a boy.  From there, she quietly works her way up through the ranks, posing as a mute, and demonstrating real cunning, bravery, and ingenuity.

The “strong female character” is a sad, much-abused trope of modern films, but Furiosa here is totally believable.  Yes, real-life Anya Taylor-Joy looks like she could be blown away in a stiff breeze, but in the film, her character is compellingly portrayed as possessing physical strength with real limits.  Her size does mean that she cannot effortlessly taking down a dozen 200-pound men.  Never once during the movie did I think to myself, “oh, come on!”  Furiosa is what the “strong female character” should be.

Also, Chris Hemsworth gives Dementus a compelling portrayal.  Indeed, for most of the film I thought, “wait, who is this Australian actor who sounds a lot like Chris Hemsworth?”  The source of my confusion was a prosthetic, crooked nose, which changed Hemsworth appearance enough that it seemed like another actor.  He also spoke with a bit of nasal in his voice, which would be appropriate for a character with a bent schnoz.  That was enough to get me second-guessing myself throughout the film.  His portrayal had some of the hallmarks of a Chris Hemsworth performance—Marvel-esque quips and the like—but these qualities fit with the character well, and it never veered into goofy Thor territory.

I don’t want to give away much more, because this film is worth the journey.  Like its predecessor, it is one I would gladly pay to see a second time in the theaters, just for another opportunity to immerse myself in George Miller’s hellacious, post-apocalyptic wasteland.  It is a dreary place, to be sure, but it is so well-crafted and finely-detailed that I want to see more.  I imagine a second viewing would come with its own reward, too, in the form of catching more details and plot points.

That said, the film—like seemingly all major releases these days—is long.  It clocks in at 148 minutes—nearly 2.5 hours.  In spite of that, it felt right.  I never thought to myself, “okay, let’s wrap this up.”  However, there were several times the film felt like it was ending, only for another chapter to begin (the film is purposefully and ubiquitously divided into chapters, with a black-and-white title card popping up at each new chapter in Furiosa’s story).  If you’re not one for holding your bladder for that long, it may be worth seeing it at home, but I would strongly encourage readers to see it on the big screen.  It is one of those movies that, no matter how sophisticated one’s home entertainment system, will never be the same off of the big screen.

Furiosa is not doing great at the box office at the moment, and has—at the time of writing—not recouped its budget.  That is a shame, but I don’t think it is the fault of the film; I think it is an indication of how far movie-going has fallen post-The Age of The Virus.  This film deserves your hard-earned money, though; if we want more excellent flicks that aren’t just Leftist talking points for two hours, we should support good movies.  I don’t know George Miller’s politics—and I don’t care.  He didn’t preach at me for 2.5 hours, although there are certainly many messages here (protect the environment, don’t nuke each other, war is inevitable, etc.).  Instead, he took me on a wild ride for the second time in a decade, and I loved all 148 minutes of it.