"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga": A Prequel Struggles to Find Its Reason for Existence

As one of the most anticipated summer movies of 2024, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has performed poorly at the box office. The film only grossed $26.3 million in its opening weekend, marking it the worst Memorial Day holiday box office record in nearly 29 years, and it cost $168 million to make. We can declare it a commercial failure.

The film received mixed reviews from audiences. Right after watching the movie, George Miller fanboy Hideo Kojima declared on Twitter that Furiosa was not only better than Mad Max 1 & 2 but even better than Mad Max: Fury Road!

But most of the audience still voted with their dollar bills. And they decided that Furiosa was a movie that didn't have to be seen in theaters.

And their thoughts are not entirely without merit. As a standalone movie, Furiosa doesn't have a good reason to exist. The backstory that was only hinted at by George Miller in Fury Road has now been given an exhaustive 148-minute (longer than Fury Road!) runtime this time around, thus making this new entry of the Mad Max franchise overlong, uneven, disoriented, ambitious at times, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Furiosa opens in the same oasis that Charlize Theron's character in Fury Road struggled to find. In this green matriarchal society, spared from an ecological crisis, the childhood version of Furiosa is playing games with her pals while her mother works with her companions. It's a paradise that does not want the outside world to intrude.

Of course, paradise doesn't exist in the Mad Max world, and sooner or later the rogues and scoundrels of the wasteland will find their way in. During an invasion, Furiosa is kidnapped by a gang of hoodlums, then rescued by her brave mother, Mary (Charlee Fraser), but at the cost of her life. Furiosa once again falls into the hands of the gang led by the childishly deranged Dr. Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. Dementus has an infantile side to his character: he always carries a bear doll with him. His childhood was brutally stripped of him by this wasteland, and now it is his ambition to strip the rest of the world of their innocence.

On a rambling trip, Dementus and his gang find a desert stronghold, the Citadel, ruled by warlord Immortan Joe. Dementus has the ambition to become king of the desert, but he lacks the strength to overthrow Immortan Joe's rule. After a few collisions, Dementus offers to make peace, asking Immortan Joe to provide his gang with water and food, on the condition that he accepts Immortan Joe's rule and transfers Furiosa to Joe's side.

Furiosa narrowly escapes her fate of being Immortan Joe's child bride. She flees from Immortan Joe's palace, and (dramatically unconvincingly) lurks among those who repair Immortan Joe's "War Rig" for over a decade. By the time the star of the film Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the adult version of Furiosa, makes her first appearance, the movie is already an hour in. Not long after that, she's about to be treated to a vicious battle that takes place on the fury road.

Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the top driver under Immortan Joe's reign, is in charge of driving a War Rig to deliver supplies to the Citadel, whereupon he encounters a robbery by a roving gang along the way. Flames, paragliders, incendiary bombs, bullets, and engine noises will fill your senses in this action-packed scene that lasts 12 minutes. The scene is nothing less than the flashy sequences of Fury Road, yet pulling out all the stops in the middle of the story is never a good sign for a film.

The second half of the movie starts and stops in terms of pacing. The two villains Dementus and Immortan Joe cancel each other out, leaving the film's main revenge thread unclear; at the same time, the film is overly dutiful in its mission of being a prequel film: it goes to great lengths to explain where Furiosa's look of applying black grease to her forehead came from, why she cut her hair short, and how she lost one of her arms. Coupled with George Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris' chaptered narrative structure, the movie's pacing is cut to pieces, and its momentum fails to carry through.

The performances of the two leads each have their problems as well. Since Furiosa only has about fifty lines in total, Anya Taylor-Joy's main task in the film is to pose gestures, which makes her look more like a supermodel who wanders onto a wasteland set, although her action sequences are not bad.

Chris Hemsworth's performance suffers from the thinness of the script. Although he has a huge amount of dialogues and monologues, he fails to portray a three-dimensional villain, but he does bring something new to the table in terms of appearance (fake nose) and vocal performance that is different from Thor.

Ultimately, Furiosa fails because it departs from the main thread of the Mad Max series: why would people want to see a Mad Max movie without Mad Max? But there is another solution. It wouldn't have been unfeasible to have this prequel focus on themes of female emancipation and female awakening for the sake of keeping up with the times, but the two male screenwriters explore these themes in an ultimately shallow way that doesn't leave the viewers with any aftertaste.

George Miller has his creative ambitions. Furiosa deliberately cuts down on the action, instead trying to emphasize a certain fairy tale/folklore quality; as a revenge story, Furiosa's ending is more like the ending of Kill Bill Vol. 2 than Kill Bill Vol. 1, if you get what I mean. It is clear that Miller wanted to highlight not the thrill of violence, but the exhaustion that war brings, and the futility of revenge. But this ambition had to be balanced with Furiosa's function as a new chapter in the franchise, making the film highly uneven as a whole.

After all, Furiosa is subject to the idea of “cinematic universe” that is so prevalent in contemporary Hollywood. But not all franchises have to be universes. What makes the Mad Max franchise so fascinating is its simplicity, its brutal force, and its no-bullshit attitude. When it loses these qualities, it loses its raison d'être.