‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ 4K UHD Review: Warner Home Video

George Miller gets biblical in the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment in his postapocalyptic action franchise. The young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) picks a ripe piece of fruit from a tree growing at the edge of a verdant forest. “We’ve come too far,” says her companion, emphasizing the forbidden nature of the act with the perfect amount of allegorical on-the-noseness. What happens next certainly has the aura of divine punishment, as Furiosa is whisked away from her home (“the Green Place” first mentioned in Mad Max: Fury Road) by a masked group of motor bikers.

She’s no helpless waif, mind you, and with her steadfast mother, Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser), in hot pursuit, Furiosa gives as good as any of the lecherous brutes tormenting her. But the fates, not to mention the narrative dictates of an origin story with an already fixed outcome, soon place her in the clutches of a lunatic prophet named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), one of several warlords vying for control of the desertscape known as the Wasteland.

Furiosa’s kidnapping and imprisonment is practically a movie unto itself. And Furiosa is best viewed as a series of interwoven tales charting her steely coming of age. There’s more here of Miller’s previous feature, the headily fanciful, eras-traversing romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, than there is of the compressed and propulsive Fury Road. The film is divided into five chapters spanning 15 years, and the ostensible star, Anya Taylor-Joy as the older Furiosa, doesn’t appear until about 40 or so minutes in. Her dialogue is honed to a bare minimum, and her eyes do most of the performing since the rest of her face is frequently obscured.

Miller tends to approach the people he films like objects, though they’re ones that he treats with great and loving care. He fixates on some aspect of them—Taylor-Joy’s peepers here, Susan Sarandon’s flaming red hair in the medical melodrama Lorenzo’s Oil, John Lithgow’s sweat-soaked brow in the unbearably tense “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie—that brings out their larger-than-life humanity, making them effectively mythic. This scalpel-like focus on the iconic possibilities of the individual, something surely shaped by Miller’s years studying and practicing medicine, helps to ground his mammoth flights of fancy, of which Furiosa has enough to fill several battle-ready tanker trucks.

The film’s standout set piece involves just such a vehicle, an early version of the War Rig that Charlize Theron’s Joan of Arc-esque Furiosa eventually captains in Fury Road. There the chase goes wildly off path, while here it sticks mostly to the straight line of highway separating the slave-labor Citadel, lorded over by the skull-masked Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, ably stepping in for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), from its sister outposts Gastown and the Bullet Farm.

For what feels like a real-time 15 minutes, the rig is attacked from all sides by rogue warriors driving decked-out autos of destruction and parachuting in from the heavens above while being propelled by massive backpack fans. It’s all violent, colorful, insane, and more than a little CG-augmented, though not to the point of senses-dulling detachment that afflicts many a Hollywood behemoth. In large part this is because Miller, cinematographer Simon Duggan, and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel keep the action centered around a stowaway Furiosa’s Herculean effort to work her way from the underside of the War Rig to the under-siege driver’s cabin where her eventual mentor and confidante, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), awaits.

Here and elsewhere, spectacle never ever trumps human motivation. There’s a case to be made, though, that something essential is lost between Miller’s first three Mad Max movies (particularly the stellar second entry, The Road Warrior), which use mostly practical effects, and the at times soupy mix of F/X stylings in Fury Road and Furiosa. The visuals here occasionally tread into unnervingly uncanny territory, particularly in long shots of vehicles that move with a computerized smoothness. What ultimately mitigates such technological flaws is the sense that Miller is forever experimenting, thinking and rethinking his art on the fly.

No image or sound is indifferently conceived and executed here. And there are plenty of poetic possibilities to be mined from the mechanized mire of 1s and 0s, as Miller demonstrated in Three Thousand Years of Longing’s multiple fantasy sequences, which suggested Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman as recalibrated for the digital age.

In Furiosa, it’s as possible to be moved by the very realistic clink of the heroine’s necklace against a rock as it is by a patently false-looking yet exceedingly painterly time lapse in which a cliffside sapling sprouts outward and upward toward the sky. Though the film’s greatest special effect might very well be Hemsworth as Dementus. In his first appearance he resembles some unholy Aussie-accented amalgam of Moses and Jesus Christ, but by film’s end he’s effectively Prometheus bound (no spoilers as to what that entails, but it’s certainly a doozy).

In between, Dementus spits and sputters, ragingly monologues about hope and despair, even willfully tears his nipples off with a device that might have been concocted by Clive Barker’s S&M-adjacent Cenobites. That he also manages to be a staggeringly tragic figure, both the catalyst for Furiosa’s vengeful rage and the conduit for her innocence-obliterating damnation, speaks to Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Image/Sound

Warner’s disc looks magnificent in native 4K with Dolby Vision enhancement. The film’s scorched yellows and reds really pop, and the hints of green in the last vestiges of poisoned earth that can still grow plants are radiant. Color separation and contrast are consistently strong, and day-for-night after-dark scenes showcase a range of dark blues and deep black levels.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is a roaring beast, with the low rumble of automobile engines bowel-loosening in its intensity and the sharp crack of gunfire revealing subtly brittle notes amid the larger blasts. Dialogue remains consistently crisp and clear amid the surrounding fray, always centered cleanly in the mix as the score and sound effects erupt around it.

Extras

The hour-long “Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa” interweaves set footage, concept art, and interviews with cast and crew to provide a holistic overview of the project from conception to post-production, while shorter featurettes delve into Furiosa and Dementus and Anya Taylor-Joy’s and Chris Hemsworth’s performances. An extended breakdown of the “Stowaway” action sequence reveals just how intricately planned and laborious its execution was, and is a helpful reminder to those who objected to Furiosa’s heavier reliance on CGI compared to its predecessor that practical stuntwork was still a major component of the film. The disc is rounded out by a featurette on the film’s imaginative vehicular designs and their construction.

Overall

George Miller’s lysergic latest entry in his Mad Max franchise receives a glorious 4K transfer and a clutch of informative extras from Warner Home Video.