George Miller might be the movies’ most fascinating world-builder, a wholly cinematic visionary who not only created the world of Mad Max but peopled it with characters sporting names like Lord Humungus, Lobotomy Eyes, and Toast the Knowing. His influence is as vast as the desolate wasteland where this ever-expanding franchise takes place, a post-apocalyptic Outback in which water, gasoline, and bullets are the only resources worth fighting for. Compared to those other monikers, Imperator Furiosa is as normal a name as, well, Max — the series’ erstwhile protagonist who took a literal and figurative backseat to a new heroine in 2015’s singularly captivating Fury Road.
Played by Charlize Theron in that film, Furiosa is here portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy. Well, eventually: the elder imperator doesn’t appear for nearly an hour in the prequel bearing her name, during which time her younger self (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped from her idyllic home before being traded from one warlord to another. If you were bothered by Max receding into Fury Road’s background, you may have a similar issue here — Furiosa is little more than a pawn for the first hour or so, denied all agency as she silently plots revenge on the man who ripped her from her mother’s arms. That would be Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a worthy addition to the rogues’ gallery who sets our heroine on a quest for vengeance before reminding her of its folly. Some scales can never be balanced, and the “already dead” have no way of regaining their former lives.
Furiosa spends more time revving its engine than any of its predecessors — at 148 minutes, it’s far and away the longest installment — but once it kicks into gear it’s just as worth witnessing as any of them. What it isn’t is another Fury Road. That movie was a breathless symphony of action that could never be replicated, and if Miller even attempted to it’s likely that several people would end up dead. Where that film was lightning in a bottle, this one is more akin to a firefly caught in a jar on a warm summer night. Not unlike David Lynch before him, Miller shows little interest in devoting his long-awaited prequel to merely offering fan service while filling in the gaps and answering our most burning questions. He instead uses it as a jumping-off point for expanding the mythos and making his fictional world a deeper, more interesting place to inhabit — an appropriately ballsy move for a movie with a character named Scrotus.
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