Lessons from the Wasteland

The keyboard cover thing on my tablet is broken. It still works as a cover, but as far as typing goes, not so much. So I bought a JLab Go wireless Bluetooth keyboard on sale and it’s great and I’m chugging right along. Hooray!

We won’t have keyboards in the wasteland. We won’t have Bluetooth either, or tablets, or anything much at all. George Miller’s Mad Max movies made it pretty clear: When it all goes down, we’ll salvage as much as we can from the broken stuff, but there won’t be any computers. Or phones, or even radios. We’ll be going backwards, socially as well as technologically.

Until now, all of that was taken as read, built into the fabric of the Mad Max movies as Miller’s vision grew more sophisticated and frenzied. Whether it’s Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy at the wheel, the world Max lives in is held together by chains and spot-welding, and the internal combustion engine is the only thing anyone can depend on. Maybe that’s because Miller started making these movies at the very beginning of the digital age, or maybe it’s because he just likes the harder, more concrete mechanics of cars, roads and deserts. It doesn’t matter. Here we are.

When we spoke for Fury Road, Miller told me the end of the world is always “forty years from next Wednesday”, and any details provided in the films always allude to an oil crisis that precipitates a global collapse. By the time we catch up to the characters, they don’t give a shit: This is the world they’ve inherited, and they know nothing else.

The four previous Mad Max films each take place over the course of a few days, give or take a prologue, and Max Rockatansky lives in the perpetual now. (He lives his life a quarter-tank at a time, if you will.) So it was a shock to realize that for his latest installment, Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, Miller covers fifteen years in the life of the eponymous warrior woman, starting with her childhood in the Green Place and ending with her bundling the wives of the despotic Immortan Joe into a tanker truck and setting off down the Fury Road.

I don’t know that Furiosa is the masterpiece that its predecessor was – it’s a different animal, a more thoughtful, at times almost contemplative take on what it would be like to live in the Mad Max world – but good lord it’s a great movie.

Even when he’s not orchestrating a feature-length car chase, George Miller – who will turn 80 next year – remains an unparalleled director of action. His unerring sense of visual and kinetic choreography, his clockwork pacing and his enthusiasm for each new stunt are as strong as ever, and maybe even stronger; I had the sense, during certain Furiosa set pieces, that he was executing ideas he’s been refining for decades, at a scale he couldn’t attempt until he had the budget, the technology and the ability to point to Fury Road and say: “Look, we did that and no one got hurt. Let’s go bigger.”

Furiosa is bigger, in every way. Where Fury Road was action stripped down to its essential elements – “real cars, real people, real desert,” as the man said – Furiosa expands its frame to the whole of the Wasteland, seen through the eyes of an adventurous innocent (Alyla Browne) ripped from her peaceful home by the soldiers of the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who adopts her as his daughter (sort of) and tries to raise her as a warrior. He’s not very good at it, though, and eventually Furiosa slips his leash and finds herself hiding out in the Citadel, disguised as a boy and working on Immortan Joe’s machinery.

Time passes, and Furiosa – now played by Anya Taylor-Joy – rises to become one of Joe’s Praetorians, driving war rigs on supply runs to the outposts of Gastown and the Bullet Farm and fending off attacks from Dementus’ raiding party. She finds a friend and mentor in Praetorian Jack – played Tom Burke, looking not at all like the louche user he played in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir – who teaches her how to drive and fight at the same time. Or rather, he shows her the best way to do something she’s already very good at.

The Wasteland is vast, but it’s also a pretty small town, and eventually Dementus – who’s not an especially good warlord, but is a particularly greedy and self-preserving one – decides he maybe ought to be the king of everything. The fact that Dementus is nowhere to be seen in Fury Road might give you an idea how well that works out for him, but there’s a lot in Furiosa that still feels unpredictable. Fate moves like a ballistic missile through this story, setting characters on literal collision courses with one another.

My usual cautions regarding prequels apply: Theron’s performance in Fury Road tells us everything we need to know about Furiosa’s suffering and endurance, and there’s nothing in Furiosa that changes our understanding of the events of the earlier movie. But rolling back time gives Miller an opportunity to slow down a little and expand on the ideas that have always been floating around inside the Mad Max movies – how this new society forms, how barbarism always benefits a certain type of person, and how everyone else has to scramble to be useful to the people in charge. It’s the first lesson Furiosa learns in captivity, thanks to the History Man (George Shevtsov) – on whom Dementus relies to know the meaning of words and the functions of things, as Dementus can’t be bothered to acquire knowledge himself – and an invaluable one, as it turns out.

Also, there are car chases. Incredible, thrilling, poetic car chases, which turn vehicles into weapons and battlegrounds, playing out smaller conflicts within larger battles as Simon Duggan’s camera zips us back and forth with dizzying but never disorienting effect. There is no one who directs vehicular action like George Miller, and it is pure pleasure to watch him work; the central chase, a fifteen-minute set piece smack in the middle of Furiosa, is goddamn symphonic, with Taylor-Joy and Burke set upon by some very determined bandits and fighting back with every gearshift, fuel line and secret weapon at their disposal, and then some.

In the world of the Wasteland, it’s not just the strongest who triumph; it’s the strong ones who can improvise, and Miller builds an appreciation of their resourcefulness into his payoffs. His heroes earn their survival, by blood and sweat and scars, and Furiosa – more than any of the other movies – shows us how.

So I guess maybe it is essential, after all.

Warner’s 4K disc is a reference-quality presentation, offering a razor-sharp image and immersive, unrelenting Dolby Atmos sound. Something about the circumstances of Furiosa’s UHD mastering plays up the jitter created by Miller’s trademark undercranking in a way that’s far more noticeable than it was in any of the previous Mad Max UHDs, but that’s not a complaint; it’s an aesthetic that works, and like every other technical tool in his belt he knows exactly how to apply it.

Extras include an outstanding one-hour documentary, “Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa”, which unpacks the production from every angle and leaves one with an even greater appreciation of the impossible tasks Miller sets for himself and his collaborators each time he sets out to make one of these monsters.

Additional featurettes zoom in on specifics – “Darkest Angel: Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa” and “Motorbike Messiah: Chris Hemsworth as Dementus” let the stars discuss their characters and the preparation required, with supporting notes from Miller, while “Metal Beasts & Holy Motors” is gearhead bliss, offering an even closer look at the handmade vehicles that populate the movie’s world, repurposed from existing and improvised parts. But if you really want to lose yourself in shiny, chrome mayhem, check out “Furiosa: Stowaway to Nowhere”, which breaks down that central set piece in exacting detail. Total running time for the four extra extras is 45 minutes; you won’t feel it.

As with Fury Road, Miller has made Furiosa available in a B&W version, the Black & Chrome edition; it arrived on digital earlier this week, and 4K and Blu-ray discs are coming in September. I'll tell you all about it after the festival.

Furiosa is available right now in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Home Entertainment; only “Highway to Valhalla” and “Stowaway to Nowhere” are included on the Blu-ray, mind you.

Up next: Titans clash and Seth Rogen observes. Paid tier only, though, so best level up that subscription!