Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Synopsis:  A young woman fights to survive in a post-apocalyptic world; yearning to return to the oasis in which she was raised. (Streaming on Max)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga isn’t a dialog-free movie. But it could be, save for one important exchange an hour into the movie. Someone asks the heroine, Furiosa, if the man who claims to be her father is, in fact, her father. She answers.

Otherwise, without dialog, we can still piece together people’s aims and whether they can be trusted. You can probably guess that in a post-apocalyptic world, in a region called the Wasteland, most people are just trying to get enough food and water. And trustworthy individuals? Few and far in-between.

Furiosa is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s Furiosa’s origin story. In Fury Road, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron is a fierce, but decent human being in a world nearly devoid of even the smallest human kindnesses. She has an iconic look: hair shaved down to bristles, and soot applied in a rectangle covering her forehead and eyes. And she has only one arm.

Furiosa is a truck driver, ferrying supplies– food and fuel– along armed robber-filled roadways. In spite of the danger of her job, it’s one of the few occupations in which a person isn’t being nearly worked to the bone doing manual labor or soldiering. Most of the women we see are enslaved, either as sex workers who must produce offspring or be exploited for milk production. Yeah, the truck driver job seems the better option.

Furiosa is amazing, but don’t make the mistake of reducing her to a badass or girl boss. She’s tough, but we can see that this woman doesn’t relish the violence she needs to employ to survive.

Don’t bring your middle-school aged daughter or niece to the theater, expecting to present her with a portrait of an empowered woman. True, Furiosa is an inspiring role model for girls interested in becoming truck drivers, but the movie is way too brutal. The only thing that we, thankfully, don’t see among the frequent butchery, are depictions of sexual assault.

Furiosa starts well in bringing viewers up to speed with voiceovers, headlining the human-made calamities that have nearly destroyed the planet. Nuclear war is likely the straw having broken the camel’s back. In fact, things are so bad that it doesn’t seem even a camel could survive Australia in Furiosa’s time.

We are introduced to Furiosa as a child, foraging in an oasis. Uh oh… she hears marauders, a small band of men with motorcycles. So… I can’t say it’s too big of a spoiler that she’s kidnapped.  As she is spirited away, the child resolutely tries to pick off each kidnapper. Even more than she is afraid of losing her life, she is afraid that the terrible ‘roobillies’ will bring more invaders to her small homeland, “The Green Place of Many Mothers.”

The first half of Furiosa features Alyla Browne as Child Furiosa. The poor girl has  to survive all manner of mayhem. Not the least of which is living with Dementus, the leader of a murderous, thieving motorcycle gang. Dementus is played by Aussie Chris Hemsworth who employs a rather comic way of speaking, to good effect.  His character sports a head of hair and beard that are long and ragged.

Hemsworth has had his good looks altered for the role too– just temporarily, mind you. His Dementus possesses an extravagant roman nose to match his title, Imperator. Maybe the extreme heat Down Under messed with the prosthetics a bit because the nose has a Norwegian troll look to it.

All and all, it seems that Hemsworth is having a good time hamming it up in the role of Biker Horde master. His personal bonuses include filming in his home country and the company of his wife, Elsa Pataky, in a supporting role as a fellow biker who appears to relish doing Dementus’ violent bidding. She wears facial prosthetics to play down her good looks too.

Dementus rules over his gang like a warlord messiah. When we first meet him, he’s adorned in a white, hooded cape. The only hint of any humanity he might have left is exemplified by the little teddy bear he has chained to his garments. He tells Furiosa that it belonged to his long gone “little ones.” Meanwhile, he bellows at rivals that they make him become Dark Dementus.

You might think Dementus has softened a bit when he dubs Furiosa Little D. But no, he treats her like a pet who could easily suffer from the whims of a captor. He stows her in a big cage where History Man (George Shevtsov) keeps her company. History Man is a wizened guy who keeps the knowledge of the Before Times. It’s a lot to remember, so he has notes scribbled all over his voluminous white robe and tattooed in tiny script over his entire body. But even under post-apocalyptic circumstances he hasn’t gone as far as Post Malone and inked his face.

The gang, with Furiosa in tow, barrels across the landscape in a chariot (!) pulled by motorcycles. I was glad that they didn’t make horses do this. Of course, we can’t credit any humanity, just practicality, for the motorcycle variety of horsepower.

Dementus alternately makes deals with and attacks rivals, including the leader of the Citadel, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). If you’ve seen Mad Max: Fury Road, you’ll remember him and his fortress, guarded by war boys who are fanatically allegiant to Joe and his old cronies. Joe seems to control the business in Gastown –not nearly as picturesque and welcoming as the neighborhood in Vancouver, btw. Dementus wants to stage a coup. The motorcycle army heads out.

Stuff happens and Young Furiosa gets herself lost in the bowels of the Citadel. She’s learned a lot about survival watching the brutality of Dementus and his ilk…

This is probably a good time to mention that if you plan on watching the movie with your middle-school aged sister, daughter or niece: Don’t.  I know, the posters and trailers glorify Furiosa as a total badass. You might think girls will see her as an inspiring girl boss. Nope. She doesn’t come off as a cool girl, besting the bad guys, but–more realistically– as a vulnerable person desperate to survive horrors.

Also, you know the carrot-stick metaphor, right? Dementus doesn’t have any carrots, only sticks. He employs roasting people alive or having them drawn and quartered by motorcycles to interrogate or punish. Again, this makes me glad that horses are not involved in the depictions. Back to the movie…

We know, even with the lack of dialog or voiceover, that young Furiosa has a plan when she finds herself marooned at the Citadel. How do we know that she has a plan she’s resolved to carry out, no matter the price? Because she shaves her head and rubs soot across her face.

I was eager to see what Anna Taylor-Joy would do with the role of grown-up Furiosa. The production employs a technique that visually blends Brown and Taylor-Joy’s faces until voila! she is fully Anya T-J with her big Praying Mantis eyes. Even more captivating than her eyes, though, will be how she handles a role with very few lines.

Long haul truckers do not have an easy time of it, pressured to make many miles a day. But at least they have rest stops. And they aren’t pursued by robbers trying to jack them. Furiosa learns the ropes of her job riding with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). For once, the actor gets to play a good guy. His character holds the civilized values of his parents. He may lead a lonely and dangerous life on the road, but at least he has some degree of autonomy in a world where legions are nearly worked to death by their rulers. No human resources departments or workplace rules to help them out.

Furiosa keeps her dream of making her way back home a secret. She has done a fine job of tattooing a constellation of stars on her forearm, a map to lead her home. However, she’ll need to memorize the details, because, if you’ve seen Charlize Theron as Furiosa in Fury Road, you’ll know that, in the Mad Max world, one can’t be certain of keeping their extremities intact. Still, I knew she’d triumph for two reasons: 1) She’s in the Fury Road movie and 2) She shaved her head and put on the black forehead makeup in a determined fashion.

Director George Miller loves action like Richard Linklater loves dialog. For us to care about characters, seeing their decency and bravery in the face of peril goes a long way. But we need to know more about them through dialog (or, in the case of novels, exposition on their thoughts) to get to know them as unique individuals.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga works as an action film, but it makes Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke work too hard to make the film a drama as well. Reportedly, one fifteen-minute action sequence took seventy-eight days to film. It seems sort of a poor use of time for someone with Anya Taylor-Joy’s acting skills.

However, Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus does get a lot of talking time. It gives him the opportunity to really own his character. And he does. I look forward to Chris Hemsworth sinking his teeth into a big character who is not a villain. As for Anya Taylor-Joy? Until her next flick, I think I will re-watch EMMA. ATJ gets to talk a lot as the title character.  She has to outmaneuver socialites in green England, not fight-off warriors in a wasteland.

Movie Loon’s Movie Review Shortcut:

Grade:  B

Cut to the Chase:  Doesn’t work as well as Fury Road, but Anya Taylor Joy does a lot with the Furiosa origin story.

Humor Highlight:  Chris Hemsworth as Dementus. Well, he’s funny when he’s not being violent.