Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dir. George Miller, written by George Miller and Nico Lathouris; produced by Kennedy Miller Mitchell/Domain.
In an early scene in Furiosa, the fifth film in the Mad Max series, the Guardian of ‘Gastown’ (Peter Stephens) is found patiently painting atop his comically high tower, completing a scale reproduction of Hylas and the Nymphs, a legend from Greek and Roman mythology in which nymphs seduce a brash, youthful male hero while he searches for drinking water, painted initially by British artist John William Waterhouse in the late 1800s. Gastown, for those few who’ve never caught a Mad Max movie, is the reserve holding the petrol that powers the all-important vehicles in the Wasteland, the landscape in which the film cycle is set. The Guardian is unaware that a ‘great horde’ is descending upon his Wasteland fortress to depose him. When interrupted by a phone-call warning, the Guardian turns towards the camera, revealing his sallow beard and almost Bonapartist regalia, while surveying the impending threat. The following shot is trained on the horde leader Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), rapidly encroaching on the Wasteland’s sole ‘guzzolene’ refinery, riding in on a tri-motor cycle-powered Roman chariot.
In a few fleeting moments of flourish, we gain several insights into the world of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the latest film from renowned Australian director and Mad Max creator George Miller. For one, we learn that in Miller’s groundbreaking postapocalyptic Wasteland, as in our factual world, the practice of and access to the arts are defined by class exclusivity. Similarly, those atop the Wasteland’s pile of bureaucratic warlord regimes enjoy a leisurely life. Such pleasures are foreign to their underlings and all those who scrounge for survival outside one of the land’s three known strongholds. Miller juxtaposes this meditativeness with the breakneck pace of Dementus’s blitzkrieging battalion and the rhythms of Fury Road, the 2015 action landmark to which Furiosa is a prequel.
But the breadth of Miller’s fictioneering strengthens its stark meanings rather than distracting from them as some critics suggest. The sequence, with its contrasts, reminds us of Miller’s debt to Australian Gothic—an approach that has dominated the national imagination for decades, from the art of Drysdale to popular and high fiction, from Wake In Fright to the works of David Ireland and Murnane, from new wave cinema such as The Cars That Ate Paris to its urban appearance in Tsiolkas’s Loaded, and the new suburban horror of films such as Talk To Me.
The Mad Max saga is the most complete expression of the style to date, somewhat innovated on in Furiosa which constructs a range of ‘civilising’ barbarisms within the Wasteland. Hence Miller plays with the classic trope of an environment that actively rejects settler incursion and updates the tradition for the Capitalocene, an era in which capitalism has provoked Mother Nature’s ire. The fortified Citadel of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and Dementus’s roaming mob form counterposed models of organising Wasteland society, reflecting something of the despotic regimes that have littered humanity’s history ever since the development of class society. The most notorious moment of Fury Road saw the Immortan warn his thirst-crazed underclass not to become ‘addicted to water’ while pouring it down on them from above, lest they come to ‘resent its absence’.
In this latest film, Furiosa (Alyla Browne, later Anya Taylor-Joy) is a stolen child snatched from the pre-catastrophe Green Place, a solarpunk paradise that, we learnt in Fury Road,was eventually destroyed. The Green Place was‘A place of abundance’, its verdant natural equilibrium and renewable energy systems powering a matriarchal and implicitly Indigenous society, the Vuvalini, defined by communal care. Despite not wearing shoes in the outback desert, the Vuvalini are no flyweight hippies. Oral traditions of knowledge and stewardship for nature reinforce a militant duty to each other and the collective. It is from the Green Place that a pack of ‘roobillies’—effectively bikie raiders affiliated to Dementus’s megagang—steal a young Furiosa, yet to develop into the hardened Road Warrior played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road.Despite receiving strict instruction from her mother Mary (Charlee Fraser) to escape on her own and ‘protect the Green Place’, Furiosa’s love for and attachment to Mary draw her back into the clutches of Dementus. Here, a tiny Furiosa witnesses her mother’s grotesque crucifixion—a macabre and ritualised interrogation intended to extract the location of their lush home. Mary chooses death over dishonour, never jeopardising the Green Place, and so begins a strangely compelling game of cat and mouse, defined by a twisted mentorship between Dementus and Furiosa. Dementus wants the Green Place. Furiosa wants revenge.
Once again,in the Mad Max saga, we find ourselves accompanying a rogue protagonist driven by a lust for vengeance, struggling through an unforgiving series of survive-and-destroy missions. The crucial distinction is that Furiosa’s journey not only fills out the past of the iconic character we first met on the Fury Road but also reveals the Wasteland’s history. This quasi-historical Wasteland myth aims to answer a fundamental question raised by the setting of the film cycle, from its factions to its trade negotiations and, ultimately, its wars and revolutions. Furiosa opens with a figure known as the History Man (George Shevstov) asking, ‘As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?’ A Mad Max fixture, the purported teller of the tale, here we find the History Man retained under Dementus, dutifully offering the power of knowledge. Throughout Furiosa, little Furiosa always resists: she sabotages her captors at multiple points, appropriates the History Man’s tattoo gun to imprint astral navigation back to the Green Place on her forearm and adopts silence as a cunning survival tactic. She then elects to break this silence during an eventual bargaining standoff between Immortan Joe and Dementus, revealing her capacity for strategic thinking.
After a dizzying series of confrontations and an opportunistic alliance with the punk petrostate of the Wasteland,Furiosa exacts her revenge. The most breathtaking of these action sequences involves nearly 200 stunt performers and runs for fifteen minutes of screen time, exceeding even Fury Road. At its conclusion, a wounded Furiosa stumbles out onto the open highway. Suddenly, Tom Holkenborg’s thunderous score gives way to the ambient nothingness of the outback landscape for the first time. Intuiting Furiosa setting out for a place he doesn’t yet believe exists, Jack, a Praetorian guard in the hierarchy, counsels, ‘There is nowhere else. This is the Wasteland’. Furiosa agrees to ride with Jack and learn ‘everything […] about Road War’, a partnership that leads to a tender romance. But the Wasteland eats everything, including the purest of loves. Jack and Furiosa, now a Praetorian herself, never reach the Green Place. Instead, Dementus hunts them down.
But with Dementus at her mercy, Furiosa decides that she cannot live for revenge alone, refusing Dementus’s ceaseless assertions that she is but a miniature copy of himself.Her refusal to reproduce the petty brutality of the Wasteland’s freakish ruling class, together with the liberated alternative of the Green Place, can be read as, in the last moment, the saga’s rejection of the pessimistic notion that it is human nature to construct dystopias. To prove the existence of the Green Place to those enslaved and initiate the infamous Fury Road escape, Furiosa uses Dementus’s live body to grow a peach tree from a seed bestowed by her mother (it’s complicated). In doing so, she goes from seeking personal revenge to finding redemption in the struggle to create a world anew from her immense, irreclaimable loss and Wasteland ash. In the end is the beginning. The History Man’s very telling of the Furiosa legend shows that some who serve Wasteland dictators hold misgivings about the actions of their rulers. Does Furiosa’s epic offer a hopeful indication of how we can transcend our present crisis, tempered by an agonising—if not simply realistic—helping of profound suffering? From the converging myths of this place, from ancient Greece to the future Wasteland, the search for the waters of life sustains us. The ultimate suggestion of this extraordinary five-decade masterpiece of Australian art is summed up by Furiosa herself: that despite our sufferings, ‘perhaps…some uncorrupted life will rise to adorn’ our earth with hope.