The future has rarely been portrayed with the same ferocity as in George Miller’s “Mad Max” series. A lifeless desert landscape where your only choice is to hang out with a violent motorcycle gang or a fascist sect. To kill or be killed.
The great thing about Millers bleak vision is that there has always been an unpredictable madness in it. Things are not explained, they just are. Someone plays an electric guitar on a large, accelerating truck, someone rides a Roman chariot pulled by three motorcycles. Two powerful brothers named Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. You still don’t want to know what a Piss Boy is.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) is the magnus opus of the film series. A refinement of Miller’s universe in every way. The film introduced Furiosa, played by a grim and one-armed Charlize Theron, loading a tank with five childbearing women and fleeing the despot Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).
Nine years later explains “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” why. How the hatred and anger came to take over her entire being (and also how she lost her arm).
While the aesthetic experience is perfected here as well – from the doom-laden environment and the fantasy-inducing clothing to the spectacular, pulse-pounding action scenes – something is missing.
While Furiosa fightr to exact their own personal revenge, the world’s “leaders” (despots is probably a better word) fight for the same things they have always fought for: oil, ammunition and power. It’s violent and it’s beautiful. But the incomprehensible and unpredictable is gone. And in that also disappears the incomprehensible and unpredictable evil. Because true evil is often completely incomprehensible.
Instead, “Furiosa” is a classic storytelling with the hero as an archetype, seasoned with Christian symbolism and Mad Max mythology. It feels like something of a concession.