Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens with snippets of panicked audio, a 911 call, a scream of terror, disorienting fragments of pain and suffering and fear, setting the scene for a landscape of mass catastrophe and casualty. One voice rises above, and the dystopian world of Mad Max is summed up with the question “mankind has gone rogue, terrorizing itself… as the world falls around us, how may we brave its cruelties?”
Furiosa is barraged by endless cruelties throughout the film’s two and a half hour runtime, and braves them all with gusto, spirit, and tenacity. The film follows Furiosa’s evolution from kidnapped little girl to ferocious road warrior. But make no mistake, even from a young age Furiosa is established as fierce, cunning, and capable of far more than those around her presume. Once she is captured, and her mother tortured and killed in front of her after a failed rescue mission, she becomes selectively mute, a quiet act of defiance that reminded me of Jane Campion’s feminist masterpiece The Piano, wherein the central female character who has suffered in an intensely misogynistic society also rebels through silence, by cutting off verbal communication with the outside world entirely. Furiosa’s captor, Dementus, is a uniquely constructed villain. Chris Hemsworth oozes charisma, but is at times borderline unintelligible with his thick Australian accent and garrulous, muffled jabbering. Half barbarian, half carny, Dementus wears a teddy bear strapped to his body, a reminder of the family he lost. Furiosa is a rarity due to her full-blooded human status and her health, and he tries to pass her off as his daughter to the all powerful Immortan Joe during a showdown. Immortan Joe calls his bluff, and addresses Furiosa, who breaks her silence to condemn Dementus, and is thus traded to Immortan Joe and his half-witted sons, Rictus and Scrotus. She sees through the artificially constructed paradise for the women Immortan Joe enslaves, and narrowly escapes an attack from Scrotus. She cuts her hair and chooses to live incognito, cutting her hair and disguising herself as a boy, as she makes her way up the ranks of the worker bees.
Director George Miller is a master at showing not telling — even Anya Taylor Joy, the titular Furiosa, only had 30 lines of dialogue. Furiosa is an immensely visual feat — not just for the fast paced engrossing action scenes, or the sprawling, gorgeous landscapes of the desert. But Miller also puts immense care into the smaller details. A moment that captures the essence of the reality he has constructed is a short sequence wherein a lizard emerges from the eye socket of a decaying skull, eats a fly that has been feeding on the detritus, only to be crushed by the high speed motorcade of Dementus’ warriors. It demonstrates a hopeless, violent, dog eat dog world where machines reign over human sensibilities, almost every action is a mad dash for survival. There’s no time for frivolities or indulgences except at the top of the pyramid — everyone else fights and scrounges for scraps of sustenance.
Kindness is a luxury that almost no one can afford, absent from the narrative — until Furiosa meets Praetorian Jack, a noble war rig driver who sees Furiosa for who she really is, a talented, capable and valuable human being, and decides to take her under his wing, nurture her, teach her, and aid in her quest to find her way back home. But he is a rarity, and a much needed foil from the constant barrage of cruelty and depravity. Most of the population of the Mad Max universe is so devoid of humanity because they are solely invested in their own survival. The masses are heartbreaking, bottom feeders, victimized by demagogues, rowdy and violent, they have nothing to live for because they already have so little, there’s nothing for them to lose and almost nothing for them to gain. They have become animalistic, simplistic, desperate for the resources necessary for survival that are hoarded by those in power — food and water. Meanwhile, those with power, Immortan Joe and Dementus, fight over resources needed for their technology — gas.
While watching Furiosa, my thoughts kept coming back to Donna J. Harroway’s groundbreaking essay A Cyborg Manifesto, a posthuman feminist work wherein she theorizes a future where humans and machines reach a level of symbiosis that allows mankind to transcend societal and physical limits and binaries, including delineations between human vs animal, human vs machine, and man vs woman. In the post apocalyptic future of Mad Max, the toxic, violent misogyny is potent. The gender binary is anything but destroyed, as the few women we briefly glimpse besides Furiosa are commodified for their reproductive potential, discarded by Immortan Joe when they are unable to deliver a healthy baby on their try. Although humanity has become more animalistic, primal, and savage, there is a strange and frightening symbiosis between human and machine, in a similar vein but perverted compared to Harroway’s imagined for humanity’s future. Watching the action scenes of Furiosa, Jack, and the warboys fighting on the road, the way they move is beyond teamwork. It feels mechanized, calculated— they are utterly devoted to their fight to survive, codependent on each other, but ultimately exposable, expendable, and the deaths of the warboys amount to very little, narratively and emotionally. Maybe because they are already subhuman, pale freaks desperate for martyrdom. Or maybe we become less human when we are absorbed in a world that doesn’t value humanity.
Furiosa is arresting. It has you on the edge of your seat with its gripping action sequences, which is just as intense, compelling, and brilliantly choreographed and executed as its predecessor’s, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). George Miller is able to actualize a vision that resonates and enthralls, the film feels like a shot of adrenaline is racing through your veins. While the storyline adds to the lore of the pre-existing Mad Max universe, it’s a strong enough film to stand on its own, comprehensible and enjoyable to those unfamiliar, it certainly has the capacity to be a worthy introduction to the franchise.