Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

It has long been a Hollywood truism (applicable even to films not made in Hollywood, or even the United States): the villain is always more interesting than the putative hero. So it is with this prequel, wherein everyone’s favorite Imperator grows up to become Anya Taylor-Joy (and, someday, Charlize Theron), only to see the show stolen by Chris Hemsworth and his character, Dementus. (A side thought: I wonder how many kids these days are being named either Furiosa or Dementus. I’m guessing, some for the former, relatively few for the latter.) Hemsworth had the advantage through about two-thirds of the film, wherein the young version of the title character barely speaks while Dementus hardly ever shuts up. It’s hard to win an argument when you make nary a peep. Thankfully, this is a George Miller post-apocalyptic flick, so what generally does most of the talking is the very voluble presentation of shit being blown up. That’s a tradition in Mad Max movies—even with the legend himself only making the barest cameo here—and this outing still follows all of those longstanding rules, even if the mayhem has gotten a bit tamer over the decades (there are no outright rapes in this flick, and everyone who gets ground into the wastelands dust does so without any lingering shots of the gory details). The action sequences still measure as first-rate, even if the rest of the story is somewhat lagging and lacking. Ultimately, this and the other movies in the franchise do ask the viewer one provocative question: is this really what the future holds? Are humans truly so depraved that a societal breakdown will eventually lead to this kind of madness? You probably want to dismiss that idea as too far-fetched, perhaps out of some sense of the common decency of mankind...but given all I’ve seen of the world, I have a suspicion that someday, this flick may be less a fantasy and more a piece of history that just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe get your war rig ready, just in case, and hopefully find a resourceful type to drive it. And thanks to this film, now you know what kind of kid to look for.