Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review: Strap in for cinema at its most soul-pricklingly primal

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in George Miller’s pile-driving, stunt-filled new follow-up to 2015′s Fury Road.

Alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A train is hammering across an arid landscape when suddenly, out of the wilds, bandits descend. Scrambling along the vehicle’s flanks like ants on a picnic basket, the raiders daringly do battle with the crew. Bodies are yanked from windows, and sizzling bundles of dynamite lobbed back in, as the ground hurtles treacherously past.

This could be a description of a sequence from a western made 100 years ago. In fact, it’s the centrepiece action scene from one of the most anticipated blockbusters of 2024. But then Furiosa, the new Mad Max film that premiered at Cannes, is cinema at its most soul-pricklingly primal. It’s the sort of film that makes you feel like the past century of Hollywood might have been a detour, and the machine has now been hauled back on course.

Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga CREDIT: Jasin Boland, Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. Source: The Telegraph

Mad Max’s creator, George Miller, is a known silent-film fiend — it was no coincidence that his previous entry in the series, 2015′s Oscar-winning Fury Road, shared both its structure and breakneck spirit with Buster Keaton’s The General. And with its adrenalin jabs of fast motion and pared-down approach to dialogue (as Furiosa herself — a younger version of the character played in the previous film by Charlize Theron — lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy has only about 30 lines), this latest entry’s debt to the olden days is every bit as plain.

Its debt to the even older days, however, is something else. Furiosa’s posters are selling the film as “a Mad Max saga” — and while the S-word is often just a marketing euphemism for “long”, here it’s entirely correctly applied. Miller and his co-writer Nico Lathouris have structured their screenplay like an epic told by firelight.

In place of plot, we get a run of discrete yet connected tales that feels less like a speculative sci-fi forecast than an attempt from within the film to explain how things got where they are now: storytelling as both myth and map.

Only after about an hour of episodes from Furiosa’s childhood does Taylor-Joy appear — at which point she’s immediately forced to come of age as a warrior in a high-speed skirmish that runs for about 15 minutes, but somehow feels like it lasts for both 10 seconds and a couple of weeks. (The stunt work is every bit as wondrous — if less relentless — than Fury Road’s.)

Australian actor Chris Hemsworth plays Dr Dementus in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Photo / Instagram

And then there’s a tribal war to survive, waged by her two male captors: Dementus, a chariot-straddling firebrand-cum-diabolical father figure played by a smartly cast-against-type Chris Hemsworth, and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the scrofulous lord of the desert citadel from which Fury Road blasted off at pace.

Despite its vast scope, Furiosa wastes no time setting the scene. It tears off from the starting line — and like Max always had to, we grab what we can on the hoof. And with Miller in flame-grilled Tolkien mode, there’s much to snatch at: he knows the sound and feel of things, like the way Hemsworth’s character pronounces piquant “puh-quaint”, can evoke more of a world than hours of narration ever could. The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.