MOVIE REVIEW
she she gets older (now played by Anya Taylorjoy) she finds her place as a black thumb mechanic, brooding over revenge, concealing a peach pit as a symbol of hope for her future.
Hope is a funny thing, the most limited resource in the Wasteland. Furiosa finds a scrap of it in Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who teaches her the art of the war rig, but time and again, her hope is snatched away by Dementus, whose chaos infects the Wasteland, his bikes kicking up dust like a swirling sandstorm that will never die down.
Taylor-joy has a challenging task stepping into Theron’s shoes, inhabiting such a taciturn character whose emotional battles are largely internal. While Theron was haunted and sorrowful, Taylor-joy is steely and silent, juxtaposed against the florid, flamboyant Dementus, an outsize role and performance that is easily the best that Hemsworth has ever delivered.
With so many more characters, motivations and motorized vehicles to track, “Furiosa” loses some of the pure clarity of visual storytelling that distinguishes the other
Mad Max films, though the story beats ring clear in the broad strokes. These characters seek power and revenge, but they battle each other out of grief, a mourning for the lives they’ve lost in the apocalypse. Furiosa’s anguish is the same as Dementus’, they just express it differently, with Dementus seeking abandon while Furiosa plots.
In these landscapes of rusty orange daytimes and silver-tone nighttimes, you can almost smell the gunpowder and chrome, the images punctuated by the most beautifully choreographed violence. The stunts are a thing of breathtaking wonder, atop cars, bikes, hang gliders, monster trucks and more. It’s not as much nonstop action as “Fury Road,” but it is just as impressively executed, and the editing by Miller’s Oscar-winning wife Margaret Sixel and Eliot Knapman is crystalclear and logically paced. It’s simply a joy to return to this world of big screen spectacle Miller has carefully crafted over almost half a century of filmmaking: flame-thrown and custom-built.
If “Fury Road” is the tale of liberation, “Furiosa” is how she got there, and our heroine’s story is absolutely worth witnessing. Through these characters, Miller allows us to ponder the end of the world, the impossible cruelty, and how we might treat each other during the downfall and beyond.