I don’t know about you, but when I hear that Hollywood is making another prequel, I run the other way. The combination of creative bankruptcy, greed, and ignorance that underlies such projects has resulted in many products with short expiration dates, quickly consumed and then forgotten by the public. No one needed to know why the Wizard of Oz became so reclusive, how Cruella came to hate Dalmatians, or under what circumstances Wonka launched his first start-up. When the idea stems from the success of a film almost universally considered a masterpiece, the endeavour seems utterly pointless (at best) or insulting (to the fans of the original).

Thus, director George Miller’s proposal to make a film exploring the origins of a now-classic character, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), might seem hard to accept for the general public. And then there’s the usual toxic discourse: a quick check on the local social media has revealed countless mixed comments about how the Mad Max franchise (which I have written about extensively here) has become woke, Furiosa is “a bad movie, no doubt”, and Max has no place in the film because of the ideology.

And yet, George Miller deemed it worth making Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and has a pretty good alibi: Fury Road was a fast-paced movie from beginning to end, with no time to stop and provide explanations and context. The director, along with his screenwriter Nick Lathouris, developed a script covering 15 years of Furiosa’s life (up to the point where she hides Immortan Joe’s pregnant wives in the War Rig and hits the road), which they gave to Charlize Theron as background. Thus, the actress had answers to her own dilemmas about the character, and the production team had the necessary context to implement the director’s vision – like one of those guides that teach you how to play Zelda, telling you more about the world your character wakes up in at the start of the journey with no memory. The result of this script’s screen adaptation is a film with a very different pace to Fury Road: polyphonic, episodic, harder to love but no less fascinating.

Taken together, Furiosa and Fury Road complement each other: the former sets the rules of the game and places the players on the board, while the latter takes off at full speed. Furiosa’s (Alyla Browne) adolescence, in a “place of abundance” where peaches grow in the middle of the “Wednesday, 50 years from now” Australian wasteland (where Miller sets the future of his film), is interrupted by her kidnapping by a gang of sadistic bandits. Years later, through a series of events I won’t dwell on, the young woman (played in her adult version by the expressive Anya Taylor-Joy) becomes the main pawn in a battle for supremacy between our old acquaintance Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) – plus his sons Rictus and Scrotus (subtlety was never something Miller intentionally sought) – and Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, savouring every syllable), with his allegorical chariot pulled by three motorbikes.

At the three ends of the Wasteland lie the Citadel – Joe’s stronghold – and the other main resource depots, Gastown and Bullet Farm (providing exactly what their names suggest, unexplored in Fury Road), with their entire economic system, based on barter (with the only unit of measure: the tanker) between the supplies each has to offer – vegetables, breast milk, weapons, and fuel. The map’s geography and the missions Furiosa and the tanker driver, Praetorian Jack (a surrogate of sorts for Max, played by Tom Burke, from The Souvenir), undertake resemble those of a role-playing game, with various factions attacking the transported cargo – a scene in the first half of the film, meant to introduce Taylor-Joy in the role and lay the foundations of an alliance, rivals the most spectacular moments of the series, with stunts you haven’t seen elsewhere and the same soundtrack by Junkie XL.

Where Fury Road (whose action takes place over three days) would run at full throttle, Furiosa has a catch-and-release dynamic, akin to a Western film, with the seized-up engine of revenge as a catalyst; it also moves sideways, not just forward. When the film stops racing, and it often does, the dialogue doesn’t clutter the story (the few conversations are dominated by the antagonists), it lets you listen to the revving of the engines and observe the densely detailed and multi-layered world – from the poorest, living underground, feeding on maggots grown on corpses, to those atop rock skyscrapers. The change in pace (it’s by far the longest film in the series) leaves room for glimpses of humanity in the pervasive macabre.

When Fury Road was released, I wrote that a film like this coming from the hands of a septuagenarian is like finding jam made out of pears poached in whiskey in your grandmother’s pantry. An unlikely fact that can only make you happy. Meanwhile, the old man, now octogenarian, has released the jazz version of the previous hit.

Pragmatically speaking, there are no aspects in the protagonist’s biography that are truly essential to understanding what happens in Fury Road: Charlize Theron’s Furiosa was already a fully-rounded character, bearing a life of loss and suffering on her body and in her eyes. Nonetheless, the question of whether Furiosa’s story was worth telling is less relevant in the face of the evidence that this kind of blockbuster with personality is light years away from the same identical versions we are delivered weekly.

When Fury Road was released, I wrote that a film like this coming from the hands of a septuagenarian is like finding jam made out of pears poached in whiskey in your grandmother’s pantry. An unlikely fact that can only make you happy. Meanwhile, the old man, now octogenarian, has released the jazz version of the previous hit.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now in theatres.

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.