Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review - buckle up, George Miller’s back

The sun-scorched world of Mad Max is back, earning rave reviews at Cannes. As mastermind George Miller invites audiences to return to The Wasteland and its infamous road wars, the New Zealand Herald’s Karl Puschmann and Emma Gleason discuss what’s driving the new instalment, target="_blank">Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and whether you should see it.

Emma Gleason: It always takes my brain 10 minutes to adjust to the Mad Max cinematography – the frame rate, speed, colours and clarity, it’s a lot.

Karl Puschmann: Yeah, there’s no easing into things here. Director George Miller stomps his foot down on the gas pedal right from the opening moments and lurches you straight into his world with all the speed of a souped-up hot rod. It can be dizzying but I love how idiosyncratic and immediately identifiable these films are with their hyper-real colours and details. And of course, their speeding-forward momentum.

Emma: Yes! He handles it better than Guy Ritchie I think. But back to Miller; technologically Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga feels like a jump forward, with Miller better able to realise his madcap dystopian world. Although, was there more CGI? It felt like there was more than the last instalment, Fury Road, which relied on physical effects (many by Weta Workshop) and a famously gruelling on-location shoot in the Namibian desert.

Karl: From what I’ve read this shoot was no less gruelling. It’s easy to see why. They’re in sweltering, unpleasant places and are surrounded by hordes of ridiculous albeit cool-looking vehicles. Imagine the sweaty desert heat mixed with the neverending noise of throttling engines and the accompanying stench of gas fumes! Ugh. But damn, the results of their suffering were worth it.

Emma: As a film expert, was there anything that particularly impressed you?

Karl: Miller’s masterfully economical storytelling. Effects, practical or otherwise, don’t mean a thing if the story doesn’t grab you. And Furiosa’s story immediately grabs you before dragging you all the way to its final credit scene. Every scene matters. Every word matters. Every gruesome, brutal death, matters. There’s no faff or filler in this story at all. This is the foundation for all of its thrilling, elongated action scenes and its population of unconventionally bizarre characters.

Emma: Chris Hemsworth’s violent buffoonery was great. Camp, crazed and vengeful with an ego as swollen as his physique.

Chris Hemsworth plays Doctor Dementus.

Karl: He was superb. Having the villain also be the comic relief was a bold move, but it totally paid off. It made Dementus more disturbing and gave the character a depth that stopped him from being one note. Something you couldn’t really say about, for example, Immortan Joe. Dementus is violent, manipulative, cowardly, charismatic and deceitful. How much of his tear-jerking backstory did he just make up? You could tell Hemsworth was having a ball hamming it up.

Emma: That nose was unnecessary. Why did they do that you think?

Karl: Probably because Hemsworth, who became globally famous for playing a literal God, is just far too good-looking without it. Like all prosthetic noses it was distracting at first, but I soon acclimated to it.

Emma: I’ve seen complaints that Anya Taylor-Joy “only” had 30 lines. But I don’t think you can quantify a character’s impact or a performer’s success by how many minutes of dialogue they’ve racked up?

Karl: No, you absolutely can’t. It’s an utterly ridiculous metric to judge anything by. These “not enough lines” complaints – which Furiosa is not the first to receive – are moronic and display a fundamental lack of understanding of how basic storytelling works.

What makes Furiosa such a compelling viewing experience is that it has zero fat on its bones. Like its titular hero, the movie is lean and mean. It may run for two and a half hours but there isn’t a wasted second. Every moment of every scene moves the story forward in a meaningful way. The story is so brilliantly realised that you simply don’t need the characters yapping away at each other or quipping like Marvel superheroes every few minutes. In fact, more lines would be devastating to the movie’s constant forward momentum. Because it shows you, it doesn’t need to tell you.

If you go back to its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road, Tom Hardy’s lead character Max only had 63 lines. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa only 80. These are not wordy films and anyone who wants them to be – or thinks they should be – has no business commenting on art. In any form. They’re imbecilic complaints and should be treated as such.

Apologies for the #rant, but whenever I see this sort of stupid, it really grinds my gears.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, as Mad Max and Furiosa, had minimal lines in the Fury Road script: 63 and 80 respectively.

Emma: Gear grinding is what movie discourse is all about! And I agree. What makes Miller’s films impactful is that the dialogue is scant, and the lines we do get are impactful; The Wasteland has its own distinctive speech and language, with “word burgers” and “boom sticks”, and the actors don’t need epic monologues or witty banter.

What performances stood out to you and why? Anyone miscast or who should have had more screen time? It’s such a rich world that it’s hard to give audiences everything in a finite time limit.

Karl: I would have liked to have seen or learnt a little more about those mysterious, weirdo stilt-walkers of the night that were briefly seen wading on all fours through the swampland in Mad Max: Fury Road. Then again, maybe that would have destroyed their mystique, in the same way that Star Wars’ Boba Fett has become steadily made more uncool with every new info dump.

As for standout performance, well, that’s tricky. Despite her slight frame, Anya Taylor-Joy capably stepped into Charlize Theron’s steel-capped boots to deliver an impressively intense and physical performance as Furiosa. She’s got the goods to become a proper action hero.

Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. CREDIT: Jasin Boland, Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. Source: The Telegraph

Emma: Her physicality surprised and impressed me, and it was a far cry from her embodiment of Jane Austen’s Emma.

Karl: Lachy Hulme’s performance as Immortan Joe, the ruler of The Wasteland, is menacingly creepy. And Chris Hemsworth gives a wonderfully scenery-chewing performance as the verbose, grandstanding wannabe usurper Dementus.

But really, the casting of the whole film is superb. There are no duds to be seen. George Miller and his collaborators have concocted a believable world of weird, unsettling freaks and populated it with a great cast. And you’re absolutely right about the richness of this world. More than most films it does feel like it takes place in an actual world that we’re only seeing a snippet of.

If anyone, I would have liked to have seen more of the female biker who memorably – and viciously – joins Dementus’ biker gang. With her safety-pinned face and eager ruthlessness, she was a total badass.

Emma: She was wild! It was great to see more of Miller’s world; we were finally taken to the frequently mentioned Gas Town and Bullet Farm. I love seeing how the dystopia functions. (Or, rather, doesn’t.)

Karl: Seeing the locations ticking over, how the interdependency between them works and their separate political structures was so much fun. While not at Game of Thrones levels of political intrigue and manoeuvring, it still presented a tricky balancing act for Immortan Joe to manage to keep his position and power secure. Just how precarious that balance truly is comes into full view the second Dementus shows up with his pointed threat to topple it over.

Emma: Loved the old sage.

Karl: Had this come out before Dune: Part Two I think his tattooed appearance would have been more startling. He got pipped at the post by that film’s Lady Jessica who rocked similar snippets of prophecies and wisdom on her face. That said, he was a great character. All the secondary characters, from Dementus’ nipple-ringed “doctor” to the Churchill-esque adviser to Immortan Joe were memorable.

Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, Lachy Hulme and John Howard star in George Miller's prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Supplied by: Universal Pictures International New Zealand Ltd

Emma: I also found Furiosa’s mother Mary Jo Bassa, played by Australian Charlee Fraser, affecting, and her relentless pursuit of Dementus’ horde was an incredible scene; she just would not stop. What was your favourite action set piece?

Karl: Tough question! I mean, the whole movie’s pretty much an action setpiece. There are so many cool moments. But I’m going to go with the opening chase scene over the wasteland. Cool bikes blazing through the desert being chased by horses, gun fights, fist fights and brutal killings … It thoroughly welcomes you into Furiosa’s hostile world and sets you up for what’s to come.

Emma: Thoughts on the violence? Too much? Gratuitous? Not enough?

Karl: It was great! Mad Max movies are violent action films and I feel you should know that going in. We’re not talking horror flick gore like you see in the Saw movies and its tortuous ilk, but there’s a lot of blood splatter splashing the screen and bodies being run down and squashed by monster trucks. It’s “fun” violence, if you will, as opposed to overly graphic violence.

Emma: The cinematography style reinforces this; it’s all so enhanced and bombastic, to the point of feeling stylised and surreal.

George Miller's prequel is packed with high-octane action scenes.

Karl: Miller’s fairly consistent in this film at setting up some potentially horrific violence and then cutting away to leave the worst of it to your imagination. Maybe, that’s worse?

Emma: It certainly leaves you wondering. Speaking of wondering, do you buy that no one at The Citadel realised the rig-driving Furiosa was the same girl kept in Immortan Joe’s harem tower? I feel like healthy, conventionally attractive women weren’t a dime a dozen so surely one of the stakeholders would have put two-and-two together and gotten “escaped bride-to-be”.

Karl: Maybe. Then again, it had been several years from her escape to getting behind the wheel of the War Truck. I don’t know if I’d recognise a kid that had been missing for years turning up one day all grown up as a head-shaved, face-painted mercenary.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the young Imperator Furiosa, the titular character of George Miller's latest instalment of his Mad Max franchise.

It was the time immediately after her escape when she was working in The Citadel that I found more immersion-breaking. She may have been wearing a face mask and pretending to be mute but Furiosa’s tattooed arm should have given her away immediately and if that didn’t, Taylor-Joy’s big blue eyes and feminine features – even while half-covered up – most definitely should have given her game away.

Emma: And what a game. Seeing her plan for vengeance unfold, and how she adapted to all the chaos and roadblocks (excuse the pun) made for a great story. And it was quite clever for Miller to finish the film’s plot at the point just before Fury Road’s starts.

Karl: I loved how it flowed straight into Fury Road. A brilliant idea, perfectly executed. That little moment when you realise that’s what happening was a fantastic piece of movie magic.

Emma: It made me want to rewatch that film immediately. Where do you hope Miller’s saga goes next?

Karl: Wherever Miller wants to drive this cohesively freakish, constantly exhilarating, artistically turbo-charged saga I am on board and buckling up to enjoy the ride.