Furiosa tells the story of a world (almost) without hope

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens with a God’s-eye view of a fragile sliver of green in a vast expanse of rust orange: an oasis of life in the post-apocalyptic desert landscape of George Miller’s Mad Max films. How fragile the Green Place is, even its guardians don’t know. All they know is that if this place of abundance is discovered by the rapacious hordes jockeying for control of the Wasteland, that will be the end of the abundance. So, when serpents invade this Eden, its guardians will go to any lengths necessary to crush their heads. Yet the garden’s days are already numbered; in less than two decades, the water will turn sour, and nothing will grow. The world is already broken.

Is there no hope? This desperate question hangs over the previous film in the saga, Miller’s 2015 extravaganza Mad Max: Fury Road. Now, the same question haunts Furiosa, an epic origin-story prequel for Fury Road’s stealth protagonist, Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. Here Furiosa is no less memorably realized, first as a child by Alyla Browne and then as a young adult by Anya Taylor-Joy. From the riveting opening act — a taut, fierce chase sequence resulting in Furiosa’s loss of paradise, the first of several traumatic losses in her life — Miller establishes his heroine as canny, resourceful, and single-minded in her determination to survive and find her way home again.