Flasz On Film

When Mad Max: Fury Road came out in 2015, it turned heads. It amassed a decent box office take on the back of its incredible word of mouth and briefly featured close to the top of the IMDb top 250, all presumably owing to the simple fact that it was an incredible movie. In fact, it was a miracle of a movie as it germinated in George Miller’s mind three decades prior and painfully came together after years of strife and setbacks. 

What that movie also did was introduce the character of Furiosa, then played by Charlize Theron, written as a mysterious and magnetic sidekick to the titular Max Rockatansky who inadvertently came to overshadow him with her charismatic presence, thus giving the entire film an undertone of subtle allegiance with the feminist cause. It didn’t take much for Miller, presumably goaded by studio moguls, to decide it would be a good idea to revisit this character and give her a movie where she would officially be the centerpiece. That is, if you forget she was already the centerpiece of Mad Max: Fury Road in many ways, and the movie itself was at some point existing under a working title of Mad Max: Furiosa.  

And here we are. In the era of sequels and shared universes, some more organic than others, Furiosa gets her own film, a film where Mad Max makes only a brief appearance, short enough that it isn’t explicitly acknowledged. Yet, the movie itself is still titled to reflect that tether to the longstanding franchise dating back all the way to 1979. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. 

I’m genuinely expecting a making-of documentary where George Miller or one of the ADs on the project will admit the movie was supposed to be titled Furiosa, but a studio executive left a note saying that people wouldn’t know what this means and that the movie would bomb. Because of its veritable lack of brand attachment.  

Surprise, surprise. It bombed anyway. I suppose that branding didn’t help much, now did it? And the only honest question I have at this point is what do you people want out of movies? Because it seems to me that you lot, those who turned up to see this wonderful film and hated it, as well as those who chose to stay home because you listened to those who went and hated it, or who chose to stay home because the trailer didn’t look right or something, you lot have no idea what you want, or you can only relate to what’s most recent in your little minds. It seems that the world has turned its back on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga because it is not Mad Max: Fury Road 2.  

Nothing is! That movie was a unicorn! An absolutely singular wall-to-wall chase movie that took decades to put together! You can’t just follow it up with more of the same, can you? And in fact, I believe that if the filmmakers had followed up with more of the same, you’d have chastised the movie for trying to cash in on that previous movie’s clout. Because it’s unfollowable. It’s a poisoned chalice. You just don’t touch it and go. Your own. Way. Instead.  

But George Miller has always known this, and it doesn’t take a genius to see it. Or does it? If you pull back far enough to keep the entire Mad Max series in your view, from the 1979 Mad Max all the way to present day, you will see the format of this franchise and you will hopefully realize it is completely orthogonal to what franchises are these days. None of these movies are connected to one another. They are stylistically distinct fables set in a fantasy universe of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. They are all westerns of different flavors in many ways and in fact, even the character of Max Rockatansky doesn’t necessarily have to be the same guy in each movie. He’s a lone ranger. A high plains drifter. And stories he’s a part of are parables written or recounted by inhabitants of this fantasy universe themselves. One is about a guy losing his family and going on a revenge spree. One is about a lone gunman coming to the assistance of a peaceful community bothered by bloodthirsty marauders. One is about a guy trying to save children’s idyllic paradise from an army of demented raiders. One is about a guy coming to the aid of women escaping their vicious patriarchal overlords.  

And this one is about a woman that guy met once and her brutal backstory filled with grief, longing and revenge. It’s not meant to be Mad Max: Fury Road 2, even though the end credits cheekily connect the two films. It’s an operatic revenge fable of epic Homer-esque scale and an elevated ambition to give the universe of Mad Max movies more gravitas and heft. Sure, it has chases. All Mad Max movies do. But Furiosa is so much deeper than that. It’s about so much more than propulsive action, gonzo visuals and unrelenting adrenaline delivery into your bloodstream, hopefully taking you straight into Valhalla, all shiny and chrome. No, no.  

Furiosa is a movie that effectively forgets – and for a good reason – that Mad Max: Fury Road exists, slows down and unfolds as though previous movies didn’t matter. After all, it is a movie about everything that needed to happen to a little girl to turn her into a machine powered by vengeance and grief, from being whisked away by marauding predators and thrown into a life of de facto slavery at the feet of a megalomaniacal sociopath with a penchant for gratuitous comedy, to allowing herself to become vulnerable for another man, seeing this man torn to shreds, emaciating her own body and nearly sacrificing her own life in pursuit of divine retribution. It’s all here. It’s in Anya Taylor-Joy’s character work. It’s in Chris Hemsworth’s villainous turn. In the incredibly dense world-building that’s as organic as it is far-reaching. It is finally in the tone of the movie itself, which is deliberate – kinetic and wild where the spectacle matters most, operatic and heightened where Furiosa’s journey of revenge is what the storyteller wants you to focus on instead, and quirky and bonkers at its peripheries. 

What don’t you get? How can this movie fail as profoundly as it seems to be failing? All I hear are moans and groans about this movie “not being like Fury Road”, as though it was a problem. Some point to alleged shortcomings in the special effects department. Apparently Furiosa’s green screen was showing this whole time. And I didn’t notice. Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because I was too busy loving the movie I was given instead of hating the movie you expected to see based on the expectations of having seen a previous movie in the series nine years ago!  

Jesus wept. 

Apologies, but I am seriously angry about this. Look, at this point I’m not asking for original ideas, especially not when I walk into a movie belonging to a franchise older than I am. I can roughly expect what Furiosa is going to do based on the holistic precedent of the entire series and this is exactly what the movie delivers. It’s not a chase movie. It’s a fantasy epic branded with George Miller’s particular comedic timing and perfumed with a strong note of BDSM quirkiness all previous movies had in spades. It’s a bold and colorful exercise in archetypal storytelling rooted in fundamental ideas of operatic vengeance. It’s a fable, a parable. A gonzo fairy tale, festooned with blood, guts, dirt, smoke and sweat.  

And you can’t tell me that it doesn’t work. Once you get over the fact you’re not getting a redo of Fury Road and that the filmmakers never intended to give you that opportunity in the first place, you will see the light and understand how – with glee and remarkable ease – Furiosa adds layers of depth to the Mad Max universe without leaving a single plot thread dangling in plain sight, nor hoping to establish a M(ad)M(ax)CU. It builds a world around its basic narrative template that is so fertile and plump that I instinctively yearn for more stories set within it. I don’t necessarily need another story of Furiosa or Max. I just want to be a part of whatever germinates in George Miller’s brain next, as he seems to be one of those few (nearly enough) octogenarian filmmakers who still have what it takes to make great movies. 

And while I am not sure I’d trust him with delivering a war drama or a family-oriented adaptation of Aladdin, I remain convinced he’s got a few more wasteland-set epics in his loins that are at least as good as this one. The only problem is that he might not get the go-ahead to do anything more in this space because viewers wanted Furiosa to be like Fury Road and it was not. So it looks to be regarded as a box office flop and has now added into the growing narrative describing the 2024 blockbuster season as The Summer of Woe. 

I take solace in the fact that many of my favorite movies started as box office disappointments and later – thanks to ceaseless support from voices like mine all singing in unison – became cherished cult classics. Granted, not all box office bombs smolder for long enough to grow a devout following. But Lord as my witness, I lost myself in the sands of George Miller’s wasteland just as I lost myself in Furiosa’s visage, Dementus’s madness and the living and breathing grotesque universe growing around them. So, I can only deduce that a following will emerge in due time. Even if it requires me to grease up my forehead and spray my mouth nice and shiny. And chrome.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not a failure or a disappointment. It is a stone-cold cult classic in the making that most people didn’t know how to interact with. But they’ll learn. Soon enough.