There are things I will never accept. A living actor playing a dead actor beneath a deepfake digital face: Nope. Hated it in Rogue One, hated it in Furiosa.
The Bullet Farmer was the villain in the artillery headdress in Mad Max: Fury Road. As played by Richard Carter, he looked like an ammo pharaoh, and was one among many memorable grotesques. Carter died five years ago. In Furiosa, actor Lee Perry incarnates a younger Bullet Farmer under floatface CGI designed to resemble Carter. It’s an inessential, un-special effect. The character has no major plot function here, just one of many lieutenants to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Surely some other weirdo could’ve been farming bullets years before Furiosa staged her great escape.
Unnecessary referentiality is a bad new thing for this series. Previous Mad Maxes barely noticed previous Mad Maxes. They didn’t care if an antagonist looked different, because no supporting characters ever crossed over. Every sequel transformed the world. The stories zoomed forward. This spinoff U-turns.
Was this inevitable? In the long development and tormented production of Fury Road, director George Miller clearly fell in movie love with war-rig wrangler Furiosa. Charlize Theron’s towering performance re-orbited the saga’s gravity, leaving nominal star Tom Hardy doing his rat-creature thing in awed support. Those two were only ever on the run. Fury Road’s 2-hour runtime covers a few days. Furiosa’s longer by half an hour and encompasses fifteen years. Young actress Alyla Browne plays the title character for quite a while before Anya Taylor-Joy properly takes over.
At any age, Furiosa is silent, enraged, effective. Her desert oasis gets invaded by despicable bikers, who steal her across the desert. Raised in peaceful Eden, she’s already a pre-teen badass, biting open a fuel line with her teeth. This first act comprises two chases. Furiosa’s mad mom (Anyone but You’s Charlee Fraser) follows the kidnappers with a sniper rifle. A rescue leaves mother and daughter pursued by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), gleeful king of a Darwinian biker gang.
Furiosa winds up in Dementus’ clutches. He’s a wildman anarchist with grand self-delusions, in direct warlord competition to Immortan Joe. (Dementus is, like, a Chopper Kublai Khan versus Joe’s Truck Caesar.) He imprisons Furiosa while freakishly adopting her, renaming her “Little D” in a parody of fatherhood. Hemsworth was a boring handsome until he started poking fun at his boring handsomeness. He’s going for more here. With a long nose prosthetic and a poly-chromatic wizard-rock beard, this guy’s throwing the biggest party in the end of days.
And Furiosa is… quiet. Browne and Taylor-Joy both have minimal dialogue. The default scene becomes a man (or men) giving a speech while Furiosa stares daggers. Fury Road’s equivalent gender divide was vital and outrageous. Joe’s wives were barely-clothed models on an 18-wheeler maternity ward, showdowning heavily-accessorized faceless dude-monsters.
The prequel can’t help navel-gazing its own toxic society. Did we need to know how Immortan Joe built an effective system of trade? Time passes, and Furiosa rises from worker bee to enforcer. The episodic structure zigzags: Astounding setpiece, way-too-long conversation, unbelievable visual, confounding plot turn. Furiosa’s plan to get home fades into a vengeance quest, but her solo journey disappears beneath Wasteland politicking.
When it’s good, it’s extraordinary. One freeway heist levels up Fury Road with parachute attacks and a giganto-drill. Miller’s part of the generation who evolved from youthful run-and-gun indies to old-lion gaudy digitality. Like George Lucas, James Cameron, and relative youth Peter Jackson, Miller pushed the technology forward, blending animatronics with CGI and embracing motion-capture for his cartoon hits. Alone among those visionaries, Miller never lost his palpable pulp instinct, that eye for analog detail. Furiosa has more computer moments than Fury Road, but pivotal scenes still carry crucial weight. I love how good everybody is at spinning a tire off one vehicle onto another. Most action movies treat cars like lightsabers, invulnerable weapons wielded by street fighters. Miller shows you the gas hoses, the door hinges. Every automobile vision-boards its driver’s psychosis.
Furiosa allies with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a sad-eyed Immortan lackey. Jack looks a little like Theron in Fury Road and a little like Mel Gibson’s Max, and even self-winkingly promises to school Furiosa in “road war.” Their dynamic is crucial, I think, because it gives Taylor-Joy anything to play. Otherwise, she’s a good performer wearing somebody else’s makeup.
Only a couple prequels have ever entirely worked: Better Call Saul (great show) and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (absurd game). That’s two out of a long post-Phantom Menace quarter-century of stories-before-the-stories. I think a prequel needs to surprise you with an unexpected transformation. Imagine a very different young Furiosa hardening into Theron’s hushed toughness. Taylor-Joy just simmers. I miss her charisma fireworks in something like The New Mutants, a whatever X-spinoff that trusted her for grim-grand comic relief.
Look. Mad Max: Fury Road was the best movie of 2015. Then it was the best movie of 2016, 2017, and 2018. George Miller’s ‘80s revival wound up the perfect high-velocity myth for last decade’s hysteria. The world burned, reckonings overturned icons, a tyrant goon kept tweeting fire and fury. Staying sane required an emotional war rig, and nobody stayed sane.
In nine years, nothing else followed Fury’s road. Dark futures, feminist themes: Sure. But Miller risked punk mania with engineering precision, envisioning an artisan-gearhead society full of screaming bad guys and silent anti-heroes. Furiosa returns to all that with appreciable abandon. Low box office will make this Miller’s final franchise statement. You have to see it to believe it. But when the Bullet Farmer walks onscreen, you don’t.