(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s always risky to make a sweeping generalisation – but highly enjoyable which is why we do them – but by and large films set in grimly apocalyptic environments are usually big on the shock and awe, the blockbuster and the epic and harrowingly short on engaging characters and heartfelt emotion.
That’s fair enough in one sense; we’re watching these stories, on screen especially, because we want the visceral of watching the world gone royally to the proverbial without actually having to go there ourselves because who wants to lose running water, plentiful food and streaming services?
But while the visual excitement is there, and you can simply lose yourself in that, there’s something ultimately unsatisfying about not seeing how this cataclysmiscally adverse world has affected the people in it and how they either buckle under to its violent privations or stand and fight against it.
Thankfully there are films when we got both the end-of-the-world thrills-and-spills and a huge dose of raw, broken humanity trying to fight back and make a way and right now, that movie is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a sequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
If you have watched any of the films in the Max Max series, and given it’s huge and still burgeoning popularity there’s a good chance you have, you will know that George Miller’s enduring creation goes big, bleak and utterly all-consuming in the sheer terribleness of a world that has lost all vestiges of reasonable civilisation.
What is left is a desert landscape, full of men in leather on bikes, macho posturing of the most shockingly brutal kind and a mania for survival that has all but shorn humanity away from the very people who are supposed to be its exemplars and flag bearers.
It’s horrific, it’s nasty and while you have to admire humanity’s ability to survive in the face of nightmarishly overwhelming odds, the question passes your mind more than once of what are they actually trying to survive for?
That question is answered in a very personal way indeed by the titular character, Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a girl, Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult), who, kidnapped by raiders who stumble upon the verdant sliver of a paradise in which she and her community live, spends her life fighting back against a man so monstrous and twisted that he goes by the name of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth in full futuristic bogan mode).
While she tries to fight back at first and she and her mum, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser) come close to succeeding in staying both safe and guarding the secret of their life-nurturing sanctuary, they eventually lose to supreme power and unstoppable mania and Furiosa becomes a plaything of sorts for Dementus who treats as a surrogate daughter for the children he lost to a global catastrophe which is alluded to in the opening credits by sound grabs only (and frankly it sounds like everything went wrong which sounds about how it will all go down when it does).
To all intents and purposes Furiosa looks beaten and compliant but as Furiosa goes on, the titular character takes every chance she can get to strike back in ways big and small and to craft some sort of life that allows her to survive long enough to wreak some vengeance and presumably get back to the community she was ripped out from with little warning and no care or concern.
As Dementus, who is big on brawn and brute power and extraordinarily short on strategic nous and long-term survivability planning – it’s clear he’s doomed from the start but he’s too stupid to see the end coming – sets out to war against the great strongholds of the desert, Furiosa observes and plots and schemes to not only stay alive but to ensure that her life will be matched by Dementus’s equally gruesome and well-deserved death.
It’s a long time coming of course in a sprawling epic of a story that takes 2.5 hours to play out, and while there are times when Furiosa feels like one gargantuan boys’ toys battle after another and you tire a little of the endlessness of its toxically masculine posturing (though Miller takes care to paint these people as the loud fools they are), what keeps you absolutely riveted to the story is the incredibly, emotionally accessible person of Furiosa.
She might be broken in many ways by the horrors she has witnessed and lived through, and you can only wonder what it must be like to live in a world where all the rules twist towards brutish survival and nothing more, but she retains a strong spark of humanity within, and while you don’t necessarily like her – she is a product of her apocalyptic world after all – she definitely admire how she hangs on and sticks to her plan to take down the man who almost took down her.
Sure Furiosa is still very much about the banging and the booming and the sheer destruction of all that is good and perfect in favour of a world run on demented tribal ritual and petrolhead culture as a pan-societal construct, and it does get a little wearing, but when Furiosa is front and centre, as she obviously often is, the film comes wildly and tragically and even movingly alive.
We see Furiosa almost find love, scrabble to carve out a covert and the clearly-defined place in the world for herself, and strike back against a massive cast of very, very broken people, and every time she is on screen, you are mesmerised by how much she wants to live if only to ensure someone dies.
Now, of course, we know that Furiosa will not just live but thrive because we have Fury Road to show us her future, but that doesn’t take away for a second from the immersive thrill of watching the lead character battle theatrically muscular, leather-clad monsters and idiots with names like Scrotus and Dementus, all while knowing that though the world has lost all its trappings of civility, that one small flame of humanity burns on in the determined, vengeful person of one Furiosa who may yet remake this world in her own image.