Furiosa started strong, but the movie didn’t ultimately know what to make of its title character.

 

It starts with a chase.

Like all Mad Max films, Furiosa mostly happens on the move. Furiosa is a preteen girl harvesting peaches in a hushed wooded oasis in the middle of the Wasteland. When bikers find the place and make a stop to gather the remains of a deer, Furiosa moves quietly to cut the bikes’ fuel lines. She is quickly found and captured. So begins the journey across the desert, Furiosa tied up and slung across a bike while her mother pursues.

Both young Furiosa (played by Alyla Browne) and her mother (played by Charlee Fraser) are obviously resourceful and clever. More than once Furiosa escapes to be caught again. Her mother quickly raids the downed bikes as she picks off the riders one by one, uses the spare parts from one to repair another, using the riders’ own bikes to pursue them. She works faster than a NASCAR pit crew fixing up scraps and then pauses at the peak of a dune to pick off another of the bike crew.

Ultimately, they lose this breathtaking chase. The leader, Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), has her mother killed when she doesn’t reveal the location of their oasis. Furiosa is taken in by Dementus, who sees her as a prize, and she begins her life in the chaos of the desert clans warring against one another for fuel and supplies.

Strengths of Furiosa

The first chapter of this saga was its strongest. The opening doesn’t simply fridge Furiosa’s mother, but instead shows their shared intellect and fighting spirit before she meets her end. We know Furiosa will not come home in this film (if you’ve seen Fury Road, that is), but we can’t help but be awed at how capable they are of survival. There are several high-octane fighting scenes aboard moving vehicles and in sand-blasting storms that will take your breath away. But the first part of the story is where we feel like we know Furiosa the best.

What I like about this movie is how Furiosa and the other characters embody scarcity in their quickness to act to survive. We don’t see many of them slowing down to think. They just do, Furiosa most of all. She hides herself well and works her way up the ranks of a desert clan, biding her time until she can escape back home.

Furiosa’s Absent Women

Although we only see a quick glimpse of Furiosa’s home, it’s clear that the place is peaceful. There is agriculture and well-established villagers who don’t have the rangy look of the desert people. It’s clearly a place that values women, given that Furiosa’s mother and another woman, presumably her lover, take the lead to run after her. They also carry weapons. From seeing her mother’s competent and quick pursuit, it can be inferred the women in this place are also educated in various means of survival, even for those who don’t already know Furiosa comes from a matriachal village.

For being a feminist film (at least I’d hope it is meant to be so), Furiosa’s other female characters pretty much end after her mother’s failed pursuit. We see a few desert-dwelling women in the first clan she’s stolen into, but their leadership is all male. The second clan is overtly misogynistic, holding their women for breeding and cutting them off from the rest of the world.

One of the key plot points in Fury Road is that Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron) smuggles the “wives” out of this place to bring them to her homeland. But in this movie we see no signs of connection between Furiosa (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy) and these women she eventually saves. There are some who show her kindness when she arrives, but we don’t get to know them. We see one “wife” struggling to give birth. When it is delivered stillborn and deformed, the woman pleads for another chance at making a child. The scene shows the womens’ desperation — their worth is in their womb — but not their humanity or agency. They are merely livestock to be kept and then disposed of when they are no longer of use.

But the film does not pick up on the motives that spur Furiosa’s actions in Fury Road. She does not look at the wives with understanding or even some bit of compassion. She sees the horrible way they are treated and she runs away to live disguised as a boy. The boys and men also have a hard life, but one that allows them work, carry responsibility, and have access to the rest of the clan. Though Furiosa no doubt goes through trials during this time, it is glossed over as though she has been living a fairly manageable life. She remains silent during her time as a mechanic and the others don’t seem to question it despite her overtly feminine face and presumably never taking off her shirt.

What Could Have Been, What Wasn’t

I think the story of Furiosa’s connections in this world would have been more valuable than the half-hearted story of revenge the story pursued. We could have seen her make human connections with the people around her and see what kind of human she grows up to be. Or the connections to the life she was stolen from, so we further understand what she left behind. But her character remains flat. She is driven to return home, yet she gets distracted by love and revenge, neither of which are sufficiently explored. Both have potential. Her bond with her fellow rig driver is subtle and affectionate, but we don’t see much of them interacting outside of a couple of heart-pounding action sequences and one rare scene of pure human connection where they talk in private about leaving. It is a nice moment but only serves as an attractive prop for more of the revenge plot later on.

The climax finds Furiosa with Dementus at her mercy, alone and humbled in the desert. But the writers didn’t seem to know what to do with it. The two of them talk and Furiosa beats him and considers shooting him and they talk more. Eventually, she shoots him, but then the narration suggests there were many ways he was rumored to die, and points to the real way she punished Dementus: Securing him in the citadel gardens with a peach tree growing out of his stomach and necrotizing flesh, and he lives his days (years!) near death and in agony.

This ending felt very wrong for Furiosa, who had only truly seemed to craved revenge after the second act of the story. She was not a cruel or moralistic type, and this torturous, gory punishment honestly felt beneath her. The story used the emotional buildup of the first act for a cardboard cutout of an ending. Never do we flash back to her days in the harmonious matriarchy, or the relationship she had with her mother, or anything in particular that she learned from her. Neither does any of this happen with her partner the rig driver. We presume the pain is there because we see Dementus act cruelly, and we presume what she wants because it is a time-old story. An often masculine one.

In effect, the ending felt contrived. The story leaned into revenge because the writers didn’t know what else to do. Because what else would a woman want if her mother and lover were killed? Why else would she tear off her own arm to escape? The last chapter was the most disappointing part of the movie. Because for all the silence and the trials and heartache she endures, the movie has nothing to say about who Furiosa really is, or who she is to become.