The best Mad Max movie of the series so far.
Charlize Theron’s stellar turn as the battle-hardened antiheroine Furiosa was central to the success of Fury Road as Tom Hardy’s title character took a backseat to her tough Imperator. Theron made the role her own and critics were blown away by her merciless take on the part, so a spin-off movie to illustrate the backstory of Furiosa’s younger self was almost inevitable.
Now The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy is attached to the Furiosa prequel alongside Thor himself Chris Hemsworth, with Mad Max franchise creator Miller returning to direct. No matter what direction the prequel goes in, it's already clear that the Furiosa movie needs to steer clear of the character’s comic origins. Although the Fury Road prequel comics offered a backstory for the character, it was a predictable and gratuitously dark one that did little to flesh out Furiosa as a person. As a result, the Fury Road prequel should instead go further back, taking inspiration from the original Mad Max and at least partly set before the franchise continuity’s unseen end of the world.
Furiosa’s Comic Backstory Doesn’t Work
Like Immortan Joe and the eponymous Max himself, Furisoa has a comic backstory already. But unlike those two, Furiosa’s comic backstory has a lot of problems that any movie adaptation would struggle to get past. For one thing, the comic prequel is full of needlessly explicit sexual violence that many fans felt robbed the Fury Road heroines of their agency and dwelled on the pain of their pasts unnecessarily. It makes the comics an unpleasant read and it’s not a story that needs to be adapted to film, particularly because it only offers context for Furiosa’s betrayal of Immortan Joe and not the actual origins of her pre-Citadel character.
Thanks to this limited scope, the Furiosa comic issue falters as a backstory even outside of its poorly-handled graphic content. Unlike Immortan Joe and Nux’s issues of the prequel comic, which illustrate their entire rise to power, the Furiosa issue only picks up the character’s story from shortly before her Fury Road stardom. Of course, this isn't bad news for the filmmakers, as it means Furiosa's past is still a blank canvas. Since the divisive comics don’t explain where the character came from, Furiosa is still without a proper canonical backstory in the universe of Mad Max.
Furiosa Still Doesn’t Have a True Backstory
This may sound like a challenge for the filmmakers, but it could also be an opportunity for the franchise creators to revisit the Furiosa’s lost arm, and it would be an unexpected approach that could wrong foot fans who were expecting a more fantastical sci-fi film.
The Series Hasn’t Revisited Its Pre-Apocalypse World
Viewers haven’t seen the pre-apocalypse world of Mad Max since the original film way back in 1979. It’s a shame because the crime-ridden landscape of the original Mad Max is almost as striking and threatening, and far more believable, than the more cartoony environs of the later installments. While fans love the campy excesses of The Road Warrior and Fury Road, a Furiosa prequel could truly stand out by dropping this more dramatic and heightened world in favor of the first film’s more grounded setting. There is, after all, plenty of crime, gangs, and terrifying villains in the original Mad Max, but their motives seem more realistic and the tension is higher in the original movie as a result of the action taking place in the real world rather than the future. Max still has a family to lose and a civilization to uphold in the original Mad Max, making his descent into violent vigilantism more compelling and poignant.
While the sequels are full of memorable characters like Immortan Joe and Toecutter, nothing would make Furiosa’s story more believable and surprising than returning to the Mad Max franchise's past (aka, the actual twenty-first-century present). The sci-fi sequels have an emotional core in Mel Gibson’s brooding hero because audiences have seen what a horror show his pre-apocalypse life was, and the same approach could make Furiosa’s backstory stand out in both the crowded Mad Max timeline and the busy field of post-apocalyptic sci-fi blockbusters. Where most franchises opt to get bigger and bigger in scope with each sequel (despite often diminishing returns), the Furiosa prequel could excel by making her story more small-scale and intimate, something that a more recognizable and realistic pre-apocalypse setting would facilitate.
The Furiosa Prequel Could Explain Mad Max’s Apocalypse (Or Not)
By setting the Furiosa prequel before the end of Mad Max’s world, the movie could finally depict how the apocalypse occurred in the franchise’s continuity. There are plenty of potentially interesting approaches to this, whether the Furiosa prequel is an intense and intimate survival thriller which follows the character’s lone attempts to eke out an existence as society crumbles around her, or a more spectacular sci-fi story where viewers are shown the full scope of Mad Max’s apocalypse.
Given how many action movies have opted for scenes of mass destruction in recent years, it could be interesting for Miller to take the more personal approach outlined by 1979’s Mad Max, but Fury Road’s success also allows him a larger budget than that earlier movie had to work with. As a result, it may time for the director to realize the apocalypse he couldn’t afford to shoot the first time around. In either case, seeing how the world ended in the Mad Max universe would be a huge draw for fans of the franchise, and no matter how much of the apocalypse Miller opts to depict, setting Furiosa’s story in the world of 1979’s Mad Max would be the best way to pull off this sort of audacious storytelling.
