The evening after seeing Furiosa, I was visiting with a friend who had attended a different screening, and although they admitted that they had “been fighting for their life” after taking an edible, they spouted off a piece of criticism that I was stunned to hear: “I just wish there had been more action and less dialogue.” I couldn’t believe it; I’ve been teasing them about it for weeks now. I can’t conceive of how this movie could have tweaked the mayhem/monologue ratio of what was happening on screen in that direction even the tiniest bit. People have slept on this one, and the long time between the last installment and this one means that I can hardly blame them, but Furiosa is every bit as good as Fury Road, in that they’re both instant classics. 

The film opens on child Furiosa, living in a green oasis somewhere in Australia (and trust me, we start in orbit here and dive down to the continent because George Miller wants you to know for sure that we are in Australia). She and another little girl are picking peaches when they come upon a group of scavengers feasting on a horse, with the intention of bringing the head back to their leader as proof of their discovery; Furiosa attempts to sabotage their motorcycles but is captured. Her mother pursues her captors and the two of them manage to pick off most of the bikers, with the last survivor making it back to the scavenger encampment with Furiosa, managing only to tell that he found a green place but not where before Furiosa fatally wounds him. When Furiosa’s mother is tortured to death by the leader of the camp, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), she stops speaking and becomes Dementus’s prisoner/replacement child, and she learns a great deal about the world that was through the teachings of Dementus’s “History Man” (George Shevtsov), who also serves as this film’s narrator. Through various changes of circumstance and squabbles among the disparate groups of scavengers, young Furiosa ends up taken by Immortan Joe, the main villain of Fury Road, to be one of his broodmares; she escapes from this by weaponizing the attention that she receives from Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), cleverly giving him the slip when he tries to “have” her for himself. She slips out into the Citadel and disappears … for now. The rest of the film picks up years later, with Anya Taylor-Joy now in the lead role, but I don’t want to give away any more than I already have. 

I came to Fury Road a bit late, having only seen it for the first time within the past couple of years. There’s a whole Sliding Doors other world where I saw it on early release. Nine years ago, a friend and I were going to meet up to go see Jurassic World, but because we got confused about which theater was which, we ended up getting there too late. This was back when the theater chain in question, Alamo Drafthouse, wasn’t owned by Sony and hadn’t already started to go downhill because it was starting to spread itself too thin too quickly, so although it was their (good) policy to not allow us into the movie after it had started, they gave us a raincheck for another movie in the future and offered us an open in spot in either of the next two films that were starting, both in ten minutes: Mad Max: Fury Road or … Terminator Genisys. We chose Genisys, of course, because obviously the new Terminator was going to be so much better than a different decades-too-late addition to a genre defining sci-fi franchise. Right? Obviously, no one remembers Genisys fondly (except for me, and I’ll come right out and say right now that my appreciation was 90% hormonal and not really related to the text as an artistic endeavor), but Fury Road has been touted as one of the greatest movies ever made since it first hit the big screen. Even as a latecomer to the phenom, I was completely captivated by it — its audacity, its scope, its vision. It’s a work of genius, and the only problem with that is that this film, which rivals it in many ways and even occasionally surpasses it in others, is being measured against it and found wanting. And I just don’t get it! 

There does seem to have been a cult of personality that has been built up around Fury Road that has pushed past the limits of what the film is into making up legends about it. That is, there are people online who seem to think that every effect is practical and that there’s no CGI in the film. For one thing, Huh? and for another, Whuh? See, my friend that I went to see this with had never seen Fury Road, and when her mom came to town and wanted to see this one (because of her general affection for Anya Taylor-Joy as a performer rather than out of any interest in Furiosa in character or concept), she was hesitant. She decided to give it a shot based on the fact that this was a prequel and thus she wouldn’t be missing anything; she enjoyed it a lot, and we started watching Fury Road the following day, and the difference in these two movies and what is demonstrably computer generated … there’s no light between them. Fury Road starts with Max eating a two-headed lizard that’s just as cartoony as the mammal that we see in the desert in Furiosa. You have to be a fool to believe that there’s no CGI in Fury Road, and the same things that look fake in one look fake in the other. 

That’s fine, actually! There are all sorts of fun new desert weirdos, methods of “road war,” and plans within plans in this one. Since it’s the past, we get to see one of Joe’s other sons that’s dead by the time of Road in the form of the hilariously named Scrotus (Josh Helman), who’s even more unstable than Erectus. The real standout here, though, is Hemsworth’s Dementus, who almost steals the show. Furiosa, by her nature, is a quiet, nearly silent character who deflects attention, while Dementus is a gloryhound with the temperament of a child, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. The guy gets around in a chariot drawn by three motorcycles; that’s just cool, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Even his entourage is fun, with one of his allies in the first of the film’s chapters is “The Octoboss,” a gothy gang leader whose presence is established throughout the film by the sudden appearance of a giant, tentacled, Lovecraftian kite, which wasn’t even my favorite new thing in the sky in this one (that would be the paratroopers and kite-sailors, which are super awesome but get taken down so swiftly and easily that you understand why they don’t appear after this). I know it seems like I’m going from topic to topic really quickly here, but that’s the pace at which this film is moving, so take it all in. 

Furiosa doesn’t seem to have done very well financially, which means it may already be too late to see it in your market as you read this. That’s a shame. It’s not lost on me that, nine years ago, what was most readily available for me to access via the theater was all IP franchise material: Terminator, Jurassic World, and Fury Road. I made the wrong choice that day back in 2015, but you could just as easily make that mistake at the movies this year, as right now my closest multiplex is screening Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, and … Fury Road. If you still can see this one on the big screen, you should take advantage of that opportunity. This is going to be a long, hot, franchise driven summer, and if there’s something that’s worth spending money for a ticket and popcorn for, it’s Furiosa. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond