🧂 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

George Miller spends two and a half hours proving a prequel nobody asked for can still out-build almost everything else in the genre, then forgets to give its lead a voice.

Directed by George Miller. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 5 / 10. A film this meticulously constructed shouldn't need to borrow Fury Road's momentum just to keep its own chapters moving. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. A gorgeously mounted origin story with a villain performance worth the price of admission on its own.

Some men will watch an entire empire get built on gasoline and still ask where the good guy went.

Furiosa opens in the Green Place of Many Mothers, the one scrap of fertile earth left in the Wasteland, and spends the next two decades methodically taking it away from her. A child named Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is snatched by Dementus's biker horde and dragged across the desert while her mother Mary Jabassa chases after her and dies trying to get her back. What follows isn't a chase movie so much as a very long apprenticeship: Furiosa survives Dementus's roving warband, gets traded to Immortan Joe's Citadel, disguises herself as a boy to avoid becoming one of Joe's wives, and spends years quietly learning engines from Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) before growing into the Imperator (Anya Taylor-Joy) who'll eventually drive a War Rig into franchise history.

Chris Hemsworth's Dementus is the best reason to watch this movie, full stop. Playing a warlord with a prosthetic nose, a flapping cape, and the cadence of a man who's convinced himself he's funnier than he is, Hemsworth turns a stock wasteland tyrant into something genuinely unsettling: a narcissist who mistakes cruelty for charisma and never quite notices nobody's laughing with him. It's the rare blockbuster villain who's scarier for being pathetic instead of imposing.

Anya Taylor-Joy spends most of the film saying almost nothing, and the movie trusts her face to do work the script won't. It's a bold choice that mostly pays off, her eyes do real damage in the final act, but stretches of Furiosa feel like watching a protagonist happen to a story rather than drive it, which is a strange note for a film building toward the woman who'll out-will every man in Fury Road.

The Stowaway chase, Furiosa's ambush of Jack's War Rig across open desert, is as good as any set piece Miller has ever shot. Polecats swinging between vehicles at highway speed, a flame-throwing motorcycle sidecar, and a sandstorm that swallows half the convoy whole: it's practical stunt work doing exactly what CGI can't fake, and it's the clearest argument this film belongs in the same sentence as Fury Road.

The chapter-title structure, carving the film into segments like "Lessons from the Wasteland" and "Beautiful Days," keeps a five-year timeline readable but drains momentum every time it stops to reset. It's a sensible solution to an unwieldy amount of story, and it also means Furiosa plays less like a chase and more like a very handsome history lecture with excellent production design.

The digital backdrops standing in for the Citadel's distant canyons and skies are noticeably softer than Fury Road's sunburnt practical grit, and it shows. Miller built his reputation on real stunt performers doing real damage to real cars in real sand; the moments where the Wasteland clearly becomes a screen behind the actors are the few times this franchise's illusion visibly cracks.

The verdict: a patient, handsomely brutal origin story that nails its villain, its stunt work, and its sense of scale, and loses some of its nerve exactly where Fury Road never did, in trusting momentum over structure. Hemsworth is magnetic, Taylor-Joy is doing more with silence than most actors do with monologues, and the Stowaway sequence alone justifies the ticket.

So why only five shakers? Because this is a genuinely strong piece of blockbuster filmmaking getting docked for comparing itself, chapter cards and all, to the tightest two hours of action cinema this century produced, and a prequel that invites that comparison has to survive it.

So does Furiosa earn its place next to Fury Road, or just live in its shadow? A little of both, but the shadow's a lot bigger than the Wasteland usually allows.

Pass the salt. 🧂