Movie Review| Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – An epic prequel

With six Oscars to its name and widespread critical acclaim, Mad Max Fury Road is regarded as one of the best films of the 2010s and all time. Furiosa A Mad Max Saga sits firmly in the same world as Fury Road, featuring several of the same characters, set designs, and costumes, making comparison unavoidable. It tells the origin of Furiosa, but the question remains, how do you follow up a masterpiece?

The answer, it seems, is with an emotional and transfixing odyssey of biblical proportions. The story centres on Furiosa, from her abduction from a land of abundance all the way up to her defiant run on the fury road. It’s a life of struggle and survival in an unforgiving wasteland, a far cry from the verdant paradise she hails from. Anya Taylor Joy hardly says a word, yet her face conveys calculation, constantly seeking an opportunity to make her escape.

Her tormentor and the orchestrator of her demise is Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus. Easily Hemsworth’s most interesting role to date, Dementus fancies himself a God among men, leading a force of devoted followers on a rise to power by any means necessary. As gods are wont to do, his methods include sacrificing anyone he can to achieve his goals. His loyalty lies solely with himself, driven by an insatiable desire for chaos.

The story is one of revenge as Furiosa bides her time, waiting for the precise moment she can take care of her tormentor. The journey is long, split up into chapters, and features some wildly creative action sequences. There’s simply no one that does action quite like this, with different elements moving at a thousand miles per second, all with a clear focus that makes it easy to follow.

Visually, Furiosa is as over the top as it gets, leaning into its digital effects. Several frames of the film are so outside the realm of possibility, it’s unnerving. The film has literal uncanny valley moments where the landscape of a digital desert is blatantly obvious. Furiosa doesn’t hide its seams quite as well as Fury Road, but its distance from realism lends itself to the outlandish, delivering a host of scenes that, while not passed off as the real thing, are nonetheless gripping.

Furiosa brings audiences back to the wasteland for a truly one-of-a-kind experience, borrowing several elements from the last one-of-a-kind experience in 2015’s Fury Road. Near 10 years later, this film takes a beloved character and risks losing her mysterious appeal, but ends up creating a captivating and harrowing story, full of surreal visuals, taking far more risks than your typical blockbuster. Furiosa shows that, if you’re going to follow up a masterpiece, you’d better make it epic.

Rating: Big Screen Watch

Damian Levy is a film critic and podcaster for Damian Michael Movies.