by Oscar O’Sullivan

Rarely does a prequel feel so consistent with the work it’s attached too. Aside from it’s sometimes jarring visual style and the obvious difference in actor for the titular character, this feels like a natural extension of 2015’s Fury Road. The production design is identical, supporting characters from the original film appear in unexpected places, and the final scene is a direct lead-in to the plot it’s setting up. One quibble that people may bring up is that it feels different from Fury Road, as vague as that may sound. A far cry from the non-stop intensity of the original, Furiosa can feel positively tame by comparison, especially in it’s early chapters, where the child Furiosa is a passive observer of the rise of wasteland warlord Dementus, a mercurial maniac played with gleeful abandon by Chris Hemsworth. While the film is not without action to begin with, the building intensity is so gradual that it’s barely noticeable, as each chapter features longer, larger, more frequent and ludicrous action scenes, while the stakes and scale of the story also escalate from petty desert raids to continent-spanning warfare. The five-chapter structure is essentially a cue to the audience that everything is about to take another step up in intensity, and also that Furiosa is about to gain another level of agency in her own story. Chapter 1 sets the stage with the abduction of the child Furiosa from her Eden-esque home, a helpless observer as her mother dies trying to save her. Chapter 2 sees her largely confined to a cage, merely along for the ride as Dementus builds his empire and clashes with Immortan Joe, who takes on a new dimension in this story as a level-headed tactician and a pillar of stability in a world of lunatics. By the end of this chapter, she uses what she has learned from observing life in the wasteland to escape captivity and begin to make her own way in the world. Chapter 3 is the true genesis of Furiosa as a character, and fittingly marks the point where Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role for the remainder of the film. It also contains the film’s central action set-piece, an extended chase sequence where Furiosa is forced to learn ‘Road War’ on the fly, teaming up with stoic veteran driver Praetorian Jack to fight off an escalating army of airborne raiders. With her first taste of combat, Furiosa is ready for the next step in her story, and Chapter 4 picks up after a period of training with her and Jack as a legendary driving duo. The reappearance of Dementus, losing his grip on his empire and his sanity, derails Furiosa’s plans to return to her lost home, and leads directly into the fifth and final chapter. The transformation from scared child into the Furiosa we meet in Fury Road is complete – head shaved and arm lost, Anya’s performance fully crystallises in this final act, pulling off an uncanny impression of Charlize Theron both physically and vocally. While the shift in appearance and performance across chapters may seem inconsistent, it’s clearly an intentional choice – Furiosa is a different person by the end of the film, each chapter reshaping her into a new, hardened form, a fully-fleshed out origin for one of the iconic action heroes of the 2010s. This does unfortunately mean that Anya doesn’t really get a chance to make the character her own, but it is a role that requires an actor to disappear into it, and she once again proves herself as one of the most versatile young actresses working today. Now conventional wisdom would say that a saga has to be six chapters, and Furiosa clearly comes up one short. But we’ve already seen Chapter 6 – the climax and payoff for this film’s slowly building tension is a two hour action extravaganza where the little girl we watched grow up in hellish conditions finally takes her destiny into her own hands and passes into legend. While Fury Road is still the superior film to this one, the inevitable back-to-back viewing of this completed saga will surely be legendary. For now, Furiosa is a 9/10, held back only by some wonky images and the fact that it’s one set-piece short of perfection. Bring on the combined cut.