Director – George Miller, Screenplay – Nico Lathouris & George Miller, Producers – George Miller & Doug Mitchell, Photography – Simon Duggan, Music – Tom Holkenborg, Visual Effects Supervisor – Andrew Jackson, Visual Effects – DNeg (Supervisors – Xavier Bernaconi, Dan Bethell, Stephen James, Giacomo Mineo & Shailendra Swarnkar), Framestore (Supervisor – Josh Simmonds), Metaphysic AI (Supervisor – Joe Plaete) & Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisor – Guido Wolter), Special Effects Supervisors – Lloyd Finnemore & Andy Williams, Prosthetics Designer – Larry Van Duynhoven, Production Design – Colin Gibson, Action Designer – Guy Norris. Production Company – Kennedy Miller Mitchell Productions.
Cast
Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe/Rizzdale Pell), Alyla Brown (Young Furiosa), George Shevstov (The History Man), John Howard (The People Eater), Angus Sampson (Organic Mechanic), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scrotus), David Field (Toe Jam), Elsa Pataky (Vuvalini General/Mr Norton)
Plot
Amid the post-apocalyptic wasteland, Furiosa and her mother Mary Jabassa are captured by The Biker Horde led by Dementus, who demands to know the whereabouts of the fertile valley they come from. In the course of this, Mary is killed and the young Furiosa taken in by Dementus who calls her his child. Dementus tries to invade The Citadel headed by Immortan Joe but is driven off by Joe’s army of War Boys. Dementus goes on to capture Gastown, the fortress that provides gasoline to the wasteland. With this, he is able to return and strike a deal with Immortan Joe. As part of his price, Immortan Joe wants Furiosa. Furiosa escapes Joe’s harem and works her way up among the crew of Joe’s newly built War Rig commanded by Praetorian Jack. Jack takes Furiosa on as his lieutenant after she helps repel an assault by rogue bikers. Furiosa and Jack form a close relationship. They discover that Dementus has invaded The Bullet Farm, the other fortress of the wasteland, and is planning a stealth attack on The Citadel. During the course of warning Immortan Joe, Furiosa seeks her opportunity to kill Dementus in revenge for the death of her mother.
Furiosa was the fifth film in George Miller’s Mad Max saga. The series began 45 years earlier with Miller’s Mad Max (1979), a tough, hard-edged action film following Mel Gibson’s cop set in a near future that was decaying at the edges. The work that elevated that to another whole level was Mad Max 2 (1981), The Road Warrior in the US, which expanded that world into a Post-Apocalyptic venue and created a series of exhilarating action sequences. What Mad Max 2 was most famous for in retrospect was its creation of a junkyard chic, which was promptly copied by numerous B-budget imitators and even music videos. Miller returned as co-director to make a further sequel with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The series then fell silent for three decades, despite occasional rumours, before Miller returned to triumphal success with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a work that ended up being nominated for Best Film and Best Director at the Academy Awards.
Furiosa comes to us as part of what George Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris intended as a trilogy. It recounts an origin story of Furiosa who was introduced in Fury Road as played by Charlize Theron. The question will be whether we see a sixth Mad Max film, the purported The Wasteland, due to what is being perceived as the box-office flop of Furiosa. (As with anything, this is relative where flop merely means ‘earned beneath expectation’ where the film in fact earned around $170 million worldwide, half what was expected (and half of what Fury Road did) and about break-even on the budget. For any other film, such a figure would be considered hugely successful and still makes Furiosa the twelfth top grossing film of 2024 by all objective measurement).
I love immersing myself back in George Miller’s comic-bookish world. There are the wonderfully sardonic character names – Organic Mechanic, Toe Jam, Smeg, Chumbucket, Pissboy and so on, while Immortan Joe has a duo of idiot sons named Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. This is especially so when it comes to the design of the vehicles and the recycled junkyard chic, which is at an all-time peak. Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, for instance, rides three motorcycles harnessed together to pull a Roman chariot.
Anya Taylor-Joy as FuriosaChris Hemsworth as Dementus
Chris Hemsworth, a world away from Thor, is near unrecognisable as he steps into the role of Dementus with long-haired beard, military-styled vest, what looks like a blood-stained tutu as cape and what he claims is his child’s teddy bear hung either on his back or his crotch. Hemsworth plays to the gallery in an entertainingly larger-than-life performance. The climax of the film is just he and Anya Taylor-Joy in the desert with nothing else but a gun but is something that gains a wonderful theatricality and contains the best dialogue of any of the Mad Max films. At complete contrast, Anya Taylor-Joy, who has become very much an It Girl of the moment and well worthy of the attention she is being given, has a character where her performance is stripped away until it is almost something feral with she hidden behind a band of smoky black makeup across the forehead and an absolute minimum of dialogue.
George Miller creates exceptional action sequences. There is the big mid-film set-piece of the attack on the War Rig with bikers using backpack fans and ice skates towed behind bikes, even a motorcycle body atop a parasail and a black parasail with octopus-shaped tentacles billowing out behind it, and the tanker outfitted with a cat’s cradle on its rear that can turn into a high-speed spinning blade that at one point churns up the octopus parasail. That along with assorted fights in and around the tanker with Anya Taylor-Joy like a monkey scarpering around the underside, across the top and in and out of the cab.
There are all manner of other action sequences with the Citadel’s response to the Biker Horde attack with diving suicide bombers and bike rigs being abruptly snatched up by winches from above; or the furious chase around the Bullet Farm quarry with snipers, collapsing towers, the War Rig going down and Chris Hemsworth in pursuit in a tow truck that has been built up with big wheel tires. As in Fury Road, Miller has a fantastical cinematic eye when it comes to the landscape – images of Charlee Fraser running around the curve of a huge sand dune, or a super wide-angle of Dementus’s Biker Horde circling around the end of a mesa. The heck with box-office flop or not, let’s create a petition to get George Miller to make The Wasteland.
George Miller’s other films include the Nightmare at 30,000 Feet segment of Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983); the immensely enjoyable The Witches of Eastwick (1987); the non-fictional Lorenzo’s Oil (1992); Babe: Pig in the City (1998); the performance-capture animated Happy Feet (2006) about tap-dancing penguins and its sequel Happy Feet Two (2011); and the djinn film Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). Miller has also produced the nuclear accident thriller The Chain Reaction (1980), Philip Noyce’s yachtboard psycho-thriller Dead Calm (1989), which introduced Nicole Kidman to the world, and the talking animals fantasy Babe (1995).
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2024 list. Nominee for Best Director (George Miller), Best Supporting Actor (Chris Hemsworth), Best Cinematography and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
