Perhaps this tactic is indicative of older artists looking back over their careers, hoping to worm their way back into the headspaces that they found particular rewarding? To elevate exciting but subordinate voices within the original text from the margins to a bigger, more narratively central role? As well, thanks to the first Mad Max, the fragment of happiness officer Rockatansky's experienced before the bombs fell is already known to us. So, having already woven his title character in and out of irradiated myth, it's only natural that writer-director Miller (who shares a screenwriting credit here with Nico Lathouris) has lasered in on a different character to power this prequel. Played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa was an anomaly: a woman who had risen to a position of power and status within a monstrous, misogynistic society that had otherwise reduced women to subterranean beggars or beatific breeding stock. Furiosa's unsuitability for that latter role seemed to be visually coded, as if to immediately settle that query in the mind of the audience. She had the same shaven head as the terminally ill shock troopers that she fought alongside and one of her arms was mangled and mechanical; a claw that curled around a steering wheel adorned with the leering skull mark of her branding obsessed owner.
That Furiosa was a survivor, Virginia Hey's Warrior Woman from Mad Max 2 raised from a striking but supporting role to the lead character. In a film nominally built around Hardy's Max returning from the wilderness, it was Theron's Furiosa that shone brightest. She was the one who stole Immortan Joe's wives from under him; the convoy commander who brought generations of displaced women out of their crater and into governance. Although Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga covers decades in the life of its subject, the film forgoes spending any significant amount of time describing the green utopia that Alyla Browne's Furiosa was born into. Rather than delineate the particulars of a shaded paradise running on renewable energies, proceedings instead kick-off with a chase across a desert. Seized by raiders after she takes it upon herself to cut the fuel lines threaded through the trespasser's motorbikes, young Furiosa doesn't freeze when captured, taking any opportunity she can to frustrate this hasty escape. The men holding the child are pursued across a sizzling Outback by her mother, Mary, played with steely determination by Anyone but You's Charlee Fraser.
Dips in the landscape provide cover, while speeding up a particularly steep incline exposes these fleeing marauders to the crack shot that is hot on their heels. Although simplistic in terms of route - this getaway is largely ran in a straight line over undulating dunes - Miller's film builds and releases tension through clashing expressions of expertise. So, when a raider is blasted off his motorbike, his allies pick his vehicle apart, taking spare fuel tanks with them or depriving the dirt bike of its front wheel. This isn't enough to halt the advance of Furiosa's Mother though. She's already claimed a bullet-riddled ride that no-one had the chance to scuttle. Mary is then able to cannibalise her flagging chopper for parts, resurrecting the discarded, badlands tuned motorcycle. As a model of action, Miller chooses to prioritise the prolonged description of frayed expertise rather than, simply, explosive dominance. The director's subjects are seen to struggle within desperate situations. They might find themselves hog-tied armed only with their teeth or dangling under a speeding vehicle; their limbs lashed by chains or crushed then shredded by whirring monster truck tires.
Later sections of Furiosa return to the scrambling road wars introduced in the series' first sequel, adding remote-controlled hydraulic arms while, simultaneously, transforming the titanic, semi-truck climbing frames into rolling, religious iconography. But this first chapter is different, even singular. It combines the bold imagery of anime (by all accounts Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time co-director - not to mention Fury Road concept artist - Mahiro Maeda was in the frame to head up an animated Mad Max instalment that would've covered similar ground to this film) with the bubbling, histrionic emotions of Italian westerns. Specifically, this connection is made thanks to a lingering sense of personal culpability felt by a hero when they are at their most helpless; the despairing memories of Harmonica from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West sunken here into a digital lacquer. While the canvas of Furiosa expands to cover close to twenty years, this opening event is told with that same, embedded feeling of pure incident that Fury Road effortlessly generated. Ultimately though, Mary is unsuccessful in her attempts to rescue her child, and so Furiosa falls into the hands of Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, the khan of a great hoon horde that rolls across the sand plains, gobbling up everything and everyone in sight.
Although almost entirely absent in this film, the Max character instead enjoys an unusual, spectral presence in Furiosa. Mel Gibson's wanderer has been trisected. The Road Warrior prised apart, with each of the fragments then elevated into individual, supporting players for Furiosa to bounce off. First there's the V8 Interceptor, seen here attended by a figure played by Tom Hardy's stunt double, Jacob Tomuri. We get a tiny glimpse of the most literal manifestation of this character as he idles on a cliffside, seemingly moved by the sight of a bloodied Furiosa struggling back towards one of her prisons. Chris Hemsworth's Dementus is the second part of this triumvirate, representing Max's bone-deep grief taken terrible shape. As Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome demonstrated, there's always the potential for this kind of powerful, charismatic larrikin to sink into the same maniacal rhythms as their enemies. We see Dementus experiencing waves of horror, presumably memories of his slaughtered wife and children, but his salve for these nightmares is chatter and momentum. Both of which, in this boiling hell, tend to segue swiftly into pointless, bloody violence.
Dementus talks a good game: professing to be an uncommonly generous warlord whose only wish is to lift his people out of impoverishment or, when it comes to the subject of Furiosa, a doting adoptive father. He is neither of these things. Dementus has a gift for summoning up honeyed, declarative statements and, when faced with intractable problems, he is (by the standards of his environment) unusually daring. That's it though. This leader's failing is that he cannot actually nurture anything. His desires are purely sensory and consumptive. Literally, in terms of transforming his beloved adoptee, who he fashions into a jangling, pale-faced trinket. The caged Furiosa displays an obvious lack of colour, all thanks to a blood-letting routine that ensures Dementus is never short of sausages. Later, when faced with a towering reproduction of John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs - painstakingly copied onto a look-out tower wall by a former warden of Gas Town - the head of the biker horde cannot help but scrawl in an extra arm. A white, sinewy limb that extends out from Heracles' passive companion to touch the naked bodies of the wading Naiads.
Completing the Rockatansky Trinity is Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack. This is Max in his physical prime, the undisputed champion of The Fury Road who takes Anya Taylor-Joy's older Furiosa under his wing then trains her in his own greaser image. Jack is Max's bravery and dauntless expertise codified, through repetition, into a being that offers a kind of masculine tranquillity otherwise completely absent in this setting. While the citadel's rulers obsess over their own degrading biology and the War Boys clamour to end their lives as burning shrapnel, Jack offers stillness and an encouraging word. As Jack's apprentice, Furiosa is finally able to reveal a femininity that she wears proudly. She sheds her androgynous, sickly disguise and her long, curling hair returns - previously shorn when it drew the attention of Joe's hulking, paedophilic son. Her status as an Imperator in training protects Furiosa in a way that she has never really experienced. She can be assertive now rather than shrinking. At this point Furiosa has long held the respect of her unusually (given their environment) easy-going peers but now she has an appreciable, fame-level value. One that is not based on her ability to deliver healthy progeny either. She's become part of the machinery.
Naturally, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga works hard to undo these connections. To detail the ways in which Taylor-Joy's enormous Clara Bow-meets-Sailor Moon eyes will lose their shimmering, expectant quality; physically shrinking into the sadder, heavier orbs set into the face of Charlize Theron. Miller's latest does so by telling a much more conventionally structured story. There are chapter stops and our heroine's progress is measured in decades rather than a few, fraught hours. These breaks allow tension to wane, to draw attention to a fractured approach to storytelling that underlines the suspicion that these are fragments culled from Fury Road's fruitful pre-production period. That fourth Max may be the livelier piece then, one that never stops to explain (really) anything, but Furiosa is still light years ahead of its nearest action contemporaries. Even with the odd stuttering computer generated stunt double that doesn't quite match the physical capture, the conceptual focus on determined figures surmounting hair-raising hazards, all without ever losing either a sense of geography or genuine, physical danger, is the work of a master. Above all Furiosa underlines the very real phenomena that nothing is as purely exciting as watching a bloodthirsty maniac hurl their screaming hot rod down an impossibly steep sand seif, hoping to collide with their trembling prey below.
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