Modern Hollywood is rife with franchises. Unfortunately, most are inconsistent and disappointing. Thankfully, at least one franchise regularly knocks it out of the park when a new movie hits theaters. What helps is that every movie in the franchise has been directed by the same guy.
George Miller’s Mad Max saga rules, and that’s particularly true of Mad Max: Fury Road and its prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. If you’re looking for something to watch on Netflix this month, Furiosa is the perfect place to start. Here are three reasons it’s worth checking out:
It doesn’t just retread the beats of Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road was, justifiably, a phenomenon upon its release and went on to become something of an Oscar juggernaut. Furiosa was not met with the same response, which is dumb because it might be even better than Fury Road.
Crucially, though, this prequel has a fundamentally different structure than Fury Road, telling Furiosa’s story in five parts as she’s taken away from her home, becomes a driver for Immortan Joe, and eventually gets her revenge against the man who killed her mother. The action set pieces are amazing when they come, but Furiosa is not defined by action in quite the same way Fury Road is, and that’s to its credit.
It features two killer central performances
Charlize Theron’s work as Furiosa is so indelible that it felt impossible that anyone could live up to it. Anya Taylor-Joy manages to do just that, though, and she’s matched beat for beat by Chris Hemsworth, who is allowed to be far weirder here than most movies will let him be.
As Dementus, Hemsworth is a power-hungry demagogue who bumbles through various leadership positions despite realizing nothing is left in the world to fight for. The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus is one of the best scenes of 2024 precisely because it allows these two actors to finally square off.
It’s a reminder of what big-budget filmmaking should be like
Anyone who goes to the movies will see an abundance of options in blockbuster entertainment. However, so many of the most expensive movies made these days feel like they’re coming straight off a conveyor belt.
Furiosa doesn’t feel compromised in that way for a single second of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, and even though it’s more reliant on CGI than Fury Road, it’s always searching for new visual ideas. There’s plenty of desert here, to be sure, but Furiosa knows how to take the settings we’re familiar with from Fury Road and use them to do something fundamentally different.
Stream Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on Netflix
