How do you assail the unassailable? Conquer the unconquerable? Deny the undeniable? Nine summers ago, George Miller unleashed Mad Max: Fury Road and demolished the audience in a firestorm of steel and gasoline. Gloriously transgressive, we waited thirty years for a new Mad Max film only to discover that Tom Hardy’s Max was the sidekick. The real game in town, the emotional heft, was Imperator Furiosa, Charlize Theron in instant icon mode.
Fury Road was essentially a battle on wheels, perpetual motion to such an insane degree the film defied human logic as well as the laws of gravity – Thunderdome wrought to preposterous dimensions. Miller had complete mastery of his craft, the tumultuous shoot documented in Blood, Sweat & Chrome by Kyle Buchanan only added to the film’s grindhouse grandeur. Miller and his team mined the thin veil between genius and madness and nearly didn’t make it out of the wasteland intact.
What does creating such a momentous piece of art take out of the artist? Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga goes someway to answering that question.
Furiosa’s origin tale, unlike the blitzkrieg of Fury Road, slams on the brakes when required or drifts effortlessly out of gear downhill to conserve fuel. This is a marathon not a sprint and, seen as the first part of a proposed trilogy, becomes a mirage image of the original Mad Max trilogy. Whereas Mel Gibson’s Max was a father who lost a child, Furiosa is a child who has lost a mother. Ripped from her bountiful homeland, Furiosa is kidnapped by skull-faced bikers and transported into the radioactive wasteland beyond.
This opening sequence is a post-apocalyptic chess match with motorbikes. Miller’s action sequences simultaneously expose narrative structure, character traits, and the evolution (or is that devolution?) of his wasteland. Watch as every bike part is interchangeable or cannibalised to extract the upmost efficiency. The mechanical Darwinism is essential – to not adapt is to die. Miller, an ex-emergency ward doctor, has always been the most unsentimental of film makers when it comes to death. Watch one of the children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome get drowned in sand, or The Warrior Woman in Mad Max 2 meet her demise defending the oil tanker and you’ll realise that a director nearing his 80s has little trouble unceremoniously disposing of people Furiosa cares about.
Yet Furiosa is no helpless victim. Portrayed as a child by Alyla Browne, and then morphing seamlessly into a young woman by Anya Taylor-Joy, she is resourceful, remorseless, relentless, biter of fuel cables, and scourge of despots. She is traded like a workhouse guttersnipe between two rival warlords, Chris Hemsworth’s diabolical-yet-earnest Demetnus and Fury Road’s arch villain Immortan Joe, this time played by Lachy Hulme. Dementus considers her a surrogate daughter, Immortan Joe prizes her as a future wife groomed for motherhood.
Each wretched experience only hardens her resolve. Her azure eyes are Charybdis whirlpools of retribution, sucking in every hardship, every indignity, stored for a future revenge we will see exacted in Fury Road. But there is a third way. When she joins Pretorian Jack to help crew the War Rig, the monstrous truck that is the umbilical cord that connects the triumvirate of The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm she learns how to become a road warrior. To be indispensable in a world that churns through bodies like human chum is to survive, become interchangeable, never to be wasted, never become obsolete. Furiosa is much like Miller himself, the master of adaptation within a world that will chew you up and spit you out.
Furiosa is no Fury Road, whatever film could be? But like the cab and the trailer of the War Rig, over time they will become inseparable and more than the sum of their parts. Furiosa’s pacing has its detractors but so did Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome for the second act sojourn with the children. Without that section, Max’s bittersweet redemption after the loss of his family in the original Mad Max would not have the same pathos. When the children escape to Sydney and light the hollow skyscrapers as a beacon for him, Max and the iconic cinematic version of Max ascend to movie godhood.
Who knows how, or if, Miller will complete his latest trilogy, especially with the acrimonious relationship Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron developed on Fury Road. But if anyone can survive the bleak hinterland of development hell and rage against the dark, George Miller can. When Dementus is rapt with Furiosa he declares, “You fabulous thing. You crawled out of a pitiless grave, deeper than hell. Only one thing that is going to do that for you. Not hope. Hate. No shame in hate. It’s one of the greatest forces of nature.”
Dementus could be waxing lyrical about the films, or he could be talking about Miller. Either way Furiosa isn’t leaving our rearview mirror anytime soon.