Review: 'Furiosa'

In 2016, a year after his masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, George Miller was invited back to the Croisette to be the main competition jury president. As you might expect, he did press for this event. It was at this point in my life’s experience that I learned: George Miller loves Breaking Bad.

In a profile in The Hollywood Reporter, Miller shares that when youths ask him if they should go to film school, he tells them, “Look, the best thing you can do is sit and watch the 63 hours of Breaking Bad 10 times and each time concentrate on one of the elements—the writing, the camera, the unfolding story, the acting, the music, the sound.”

To me, this is crazy. I like Breaking Bad quite a bit. The second half of the show, in particular, is really great.¹ But is it a replacement for film school? Is it a replacement for watching Citizen Kane and Jeanne Dielman? Not really.

Now, in 2024, we have the next installment in the venerable Mad Max franchise, Furiosa, so named for the Imperator iconically played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road.² Here she is played by Anya Taylor-Joy for roughly 60% of the picture. Who plays her for the other 40%, you may ask, considering ATJ is first-billed? A child named Alyla Browne. I find this more or less unforgivable. By the end of the film, I was really loving it, but let me tell you, I couldn’t begin to give a fuck what happens to “Child Furiosa.”

Now, far be it for me to tell George Miller and the alleged dramaturg he works with (someone tweeted about this but I can’t find them in the credits) how to structure a film, but it is one of my greatest cinematic pet peeves to be asked to identify and invest emotionally in more than one actor playing the same role in a movie.

Some might say, but Ben, you are only being asked to identify and invest emotionally in the character Furiosa. I say this is incorrect, because I can easily tell with my eyes that Alyla Browne does not have the same face as Anya Taylor-Joy, styled similarly though they are. You simply can’t get over that subconscious barrier that these are the same person. If the viewer was able to transfer that emotional investment between actors without a second thought, the experiment that is Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, in which the lead female character is played by two different actors in the alternating scenes, would not be such a thought-provoking picture about the very nature of cinema.

Further, Christopher Nolan’s best film Interstellar almost whiffs the ending by having Ellen Burstyn come in to replace Jessica Chastain as “Old Murph.” I did not come to love the relationship between Matthew McConaughey and Ellen Burstyn over the preceding two and a half hours, so why should I care about him reuniting with her? If I were directing the film I would have simply put Chastain in some light old-age makeup and put her in that hospital bed! Even someone I know and love as an actor as well as Ellen Burstyn cannot overcome this issue. #NotMyMurph

Anyway, now that I’ve spent 600 words talking about other movies and why I don’t like the first hour of Furiosa, let’s talk about what I do like. When the movie finally begins (i.e. when ATJ takes over the role), we start cooking with gas (from Gastown) extremely quickly.

ATJ is an actor who I think would be “a fun hang;” she possesses a silent movie star intensity with her eyes the size of dollar coins and severe cheekbones. She also possesses the silent movie star affliction of being unable to read dialogue in a convincing manner. She only knows how to interpret dialogue as a sort of deepset declaration devoid of any emotion. Which kind of works here, and, for some reason, really worked as the title role in the 2020 film Emma.³

Furiosa, as a child, is kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery, first with Dementus (Chris Hemsworth in a career-best performance—a low bar but true nonetheless) who treats her as a caged daughter, and then to Fury Road’s main villain Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) who locks her in with his other wives. She eventually escapes and becomes an Imperator. I’m maybe leaving out vital information but you should just see the film. It’s really good, despite what the first 600 words of this newsletter might lead you to believe!

Eventually, Furiosa, pretending to be a boy, inexplicably wearing a wig instead of just keeping her hair cut short, ends up on a war rig with Praetorian Jack (the sensual and erotic Tom Burke) and we get the best action sequence in a major motion picture since Fury Road premiered nine years ago. The war rig is attacked by a wasteland gang; Furiosa and Praetorian Jack are able to vanquish the enemy but the rest of their crew is obliterated. At the end of this sequence, in which Furiosa is stabbed in the shoulder, Praetorian Jack slips a piece of fabric under her clothing to help staunch the bleeding, a simple move so powerfully sexual that the women next to me at the 12pm AMC CityWalk IMAX screening began to audibly goon.

Friend of the newsletter Matt posited that it feels like Miller ran out of money while filming the final 45-minutes of the film, which I think is likely, and here is where Miller turned to his favorite auteur Vince Gilligan for inspiration. There is a voiceover by the tattooed History Man about the history of humans at war (I love all the theory given to us in dialogue in the final stretch of the film), and that we are now about to witness the 40-Day War of the Wasteland. We see this war through a montage that is distinctly Breaking Bad-esque, with ultra-wide fish angles and sped up movement as the peons battle against Dementus. And we get to see the guy with the flaming guitar from Fury Road! Nothing says “ran out of money” more than footage from the previous installment.

Furiosa begins the film as an angelic babe in the Green Place of Many Mothers, picking fruit in the forest, and ends the film a limbless war hero. Has she lost who she is? Like Breaking Bad, after the war montage there is an “Ozymandias”-style showdown where we learn if circumstance has changed our hero beyond recognition (you’ll have to see it for yourself to find out where our Furiosa comes out!), if someone who was once purely good is able to retain their humanity in the face of unlivable conditions—here, in the wasteland, and there, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

1. Skyler White finds out her husband is a drug kingpin at roughly the exact midpoint of the series episode-wise.

2. I use “iconically” here not in the gay popstar stan sense but in the literal definition, as in a rendering of a holy figure.

3. The period is part of the title!