In George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road—a sequel to the post-apocalyptic chronicle Miller kicked off in the late 1970s, with Mel Gibson as a scrappy lone warrior seeking to preserve some vestige of civilization—Charlize Theron played Imperator Furiosa, a one-armed nut-buster fixed on a single goal: to free a bevy of sex slaves kept by a mouth-breathing warlord named Immortan Joe, who also happened to be her old boss. Though the movie’s ostensible star was Tom Hardy, as the reincarnation of Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, Theron gave the film its glamorous sandstorm grit. There are lots of men in Fury Road, zipping around on motorbikes and other assorted juryrigged vehicles, but it’s Theron’s Furiosa who dominates the movie’s godforsaken landscape. With her stubbly shaven head and her get-it-done-already glare, she’s a model of impatient efficiency, a tough-gal ballerina ever ready to crack a skull or two.
Theron’s character now has her own movie, arriving, like a potentate on a cushion, with the puffed-up title Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—it’s premiering, out of competition, here at the Cannes Film Festival, just as Fury Road did, to audiences’ delight, nine years ago. The character Furiosa had seemingly come out of nowhere in Fury Road, but Miller had already written her backstory; he knew exactly who she was and why she had so much invested in this harem rescue mission. Furiosa fleshes out that story, with Anya Taylor-Joy playing the younger version of Theron’s character.
If, in theory, it’s easy enough to buy Taylor-Joy as a Theron-to-be, the reality is more disappointing. Furiosa is loaded with storytelling, which isn’t the same as telling a story. Miller is going for something majestic here, and Furiosa does at times look imperiously handsome: he and cinematographer Simon Duggan know how to make the movie’s trillion or so mounds of sand look positively silky. But despite its many, many action sequences, and a symphonic cacophony of…
