“You fabulous thing. You crawled out of a pitiless grave, deeper than hell.”

Dementus

Returning to the wasteland with a revenge-fuelled origin story for Fury Road’s Furiosa, George Miller delivers a solid prequel with more of the same visual spectacle. The vibrantly oversaturated desert and high octane action are still arresting if not as if not quite as astounding as they were a decade ago. Although the marketing pushes Anya Taylor-Joy, she does not appear until almost an hour into the film; prior to that it is Alyla Browne who impresses as the child Furiosa. Both Browne and Taylor-Joy succeed in matching the intensity and determination of Charlize Theron’s performance in Fury Road, and Taylor-Joy ably demonstrates her prowess as an action hero with a character of very few words. The narrative is driven largely by Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a theatrical villain in a cape and a codpiece who rides a three-bike chariot, injecting perhaps a little too much levity into the proceedings. We are are largely treated to the same wasteland locations — most of the battles taking place between Immortan Joe’s Citadel and Gastown — which hurts a film that relies on fresh spectacle. Indeed, even with a large screen and rumbling sound system, the vehicular violence can begin to feel repetitive as Furiosa stretches to nearly two and a half hours. It is undeniably assured action filmmaking of the highest technical calibre, but it has little new to show us.

7/10