When you think of great directors, you may think of Hitchcock, Spielberg, Scorsese, and David Lean, to name a few. Not many mention the name George Miller on that list. Maybe it’s time we did because with his latest film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, he has definitely cemented his name as one of the most incredible action directors. With his Mad Max movies, he has created a world in which the stuntwork, the inventiveness of the set pieces and the sheer jaw-dropping visuals have his name up there as one of the greats. Furiosa is a film that, while not as relentless as Mad Max: Fury Road, is still an impressive big-screen adventure that needs to be seen in a cinema.

Young Furiosa is kidnapped by a group led by the almost god-like Dr Dementus. Having watched her mother being murdered, she is brimming with hatred and longing to seek revenge. As the years go by, she finds herself working for Immortal Joe as part of the various cities that have grown through the apocalypse, which Dementus wants complete control over. What he doesn’t know is that Furiosa wants him dead.

Fury Road first introduced the character of Furiosa, the woman who wants to free the brides from Immortal Joe and teamed up with Max. This film is almost like an origins tale of that brutal, no-nonsense woman, a prequel taking the focus away from Max and looking at just her. Unlike Fury Road, a breath-taking, adrenaline rush of a movie that relentlessly refused to stop with the action, this is a much more controlled affair that, while still delivering precisely what you’d expect from Miller, allows the audience to breathe.

Miller uses the vast desert landscape to depict his apocalyptic battlefield, where tribes have set up camps supplying gas, bullets, and food. This has always been a perfect playground for Miller’s incredible action sequences, where bikes, cars, trucks and anything else that can be used as transportation chase each other over the rich, orange-coloured sand. Once again, Miller employs some incredible stunt people to perform the awe-inspiring scenes, and there are moments when you are hanging off the edge of your seats.

Miller has been building this world since the original Mad Max in 1979. A low-budget Ozploitation movie that surprised the world by being a huge hit, it has led to three sequels and now this prequel, expanding that post-apocalyptic world. Delivering another carbon copy of the previous movie would have been easy. Instead, he has allowed the characters to breathe, breaking the film up into chapters and spanning the action of several years as we watch Furiosa grow from a helpless child to a woman brimming with vengeance and waiting for the right time to take Dementus down.

Yet it is Miller’s direction that really carries the film. Every inch of the screen is used, and you do not know what to focus on. A simple scene in which Furiosa drives a broken-down beach buggy follows her journey through the wasteland where bodies are being piled up, and the sheer scope of the scene puts other directors who go for simplicity to shame. His camerawork is sweeping, imaginative and never, never dull. If there is a criticism, and it’s a tiny one, the film is slightly too long. Running at 2 and a half hours, it is the series’s longest.

Apart from the star being Miller, the actual actors are terrific, with the two leads being chalk and cheese and yet complimenting each other. As Dementus, Chris Hemsworth is magnificently over-the-top. Almost unrecognisable, the star of Thor has gone down a different dimension for this role. An egomaniac who loves to talk, as he drives around on a chariot being driven by bikes, he is both hilarious and purely evil in equal measures and shows he is more than just muscle. Taking on the role made famous by Charlize Theron, Ayna Taylor-Joy may not be the first person you’d think of as a replacement, but it’s a perfect choice. Speaking around 10 lines throughout the film, she has one of those faces that explodes with emotion, her eyes telling us everything we need to know. She handles the action scenes as if she was born to wear that suit,

Furiosa easily fits into the Mad Max world while being a very different creature. It’s a film with fantastic sound that rattles the seats and eye-popping sequences that will have you questioning how they did that. It’s time to give that mantle of the king of action to Miller, the master of grinding metal.

5 out of 5

Director: George Miller

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, George Shevtsov, Lachy Hulme, John Howard, Angus Sampson

Written by: George Miller and Nick Lathouris

Running Time: 148 mins

Cert: 15

Release date: 24th May 2024