Two things I wish George Miller had done differently in ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’

The “Fury Road” prequel is a satisfying return to the world of the demented 2015 film—but there were two missed opportunities, relating to Immortan Joe’s Wives and Furiosa’s revenge.

George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a blast, and, while its box-office crash and burn is disappointing on a number of levels, it’s well-made enough that I’m sure it will go on to be watched, discussed, and even studied for years. (Read my review at U.S. Catholic.)

No, it doesn’t outdo Mad Max: Fury Road’s most insane set pieces, above all the Pole-cats attacking the War Rig, defended by Vuvalini crones along with the Wives and Max himself, all scored by the Doof Warrior’s flame-throwing electric guitar. And, honestly, I wouldn’t want Furiosa to outdo the highlights of Fury Road. This is the prequel; Fury Road should play as the grand climax—and, indeed, the two films fit together so well that it’s no surprise that the stories were developed together before Fury Road was shot, with a plan at one point to shoot them back-to-back.

Furiosa’s action centerpiece—a War Rig assault that plays like an amped-up, land-based version of the Somali pirate attack sequences in the 2013 Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips—includes no Pole-cats, but the attackers find other ways to get airborne. Some viewers may also be disappointed at the heavier reliance on CGI this time around, given Fury Road’s much-celebrated focus on practical stunts and effects, though the reality is that Fury Road leaned more on CGI than has often been recognized.

My own nagging issues with Furiosa in relation to Fury Road are thematic. Fury Road stands out to me as the series high point not just cinematically, but morally. The Mad Max trilogy starring Mel Gibson leaned heavily on two interrelated forms of violence: a) women suffering sexual menace and violence, and b) men raining vengeance on their enemies. On the first front, Fury Road’s feminist revolt against toxic patriarchy was a welcome corrective. “We are not things” is the message left by the Five Wives—in reality, sex slaves in a eugenic program to produce genetically normal children—of the monstrous tyrant Immortan Joe as they make a desperate bid for escape along with Charlize Theron’s rogue Imperator Furiosa. On the second front, I appreciate that Immortan Joe’s gruesome death at Furiosa’s hands is a quick, efficient bit of business in the heat of battle, not a prolonged or sadistic revenge scene.

“Wives” who are more than passive victims

Fury Road is a master class in establishing characters and themes through constant action rather than dialogue. Its juggernaut storytelling covers about two days in his characters’ lives, without much room for exploring character development or psychological motivation. Consequently, Furiosa’s character as well as that of the Five Wives is seen in what they do without much concern about their back stories, inner worlds, and so forth.

Furiosa is a different kind of movie, unfolding over many years, and giving us a great deal of insight into Furiosa’s formative experiences and character. What about Immortan Joe’s “Wives”? Of course these aren’t the same Wives as in Fury Road, which is set many years later; it’s an earlier version of a community with regular turnover rates. Still, the culture of a community is passed down over time, and there was an opportunity here to establish both a culture of covert resistance and a bond between Furiosa and the other women oppressed by Immortan Joe.

What might this have looked like? Consider this: After arriving at the Citadel, young Furiosa is placed among the Wives. In a brief scene, the sickening exploitation of the Wives is established: One of the Wives gives birth to conjoined twins—her third “failure” to produce a healthy offspring—and she is banished from the relative comfort of the harem to industrial milk supply. Shortly after this, Immortan Joe’s hulking son Rictus Erectus attempts to sexually assault Furiosa. She manages to escape—but what if she were unable to escape on her own? What if the Wives played an active role in helping her hide from Rictus and sending him on his way? Afterward the Wives might have said something about it to young Furiosa: something, perhaps, about how men like Joe and Rictus “treat us like things” (or, if that were deemed a callback too on the nose, “like animals” or some such thing).

This would have given the Wives some agency, foreshadowing the escape attempt that a later set of Wives will make, as well as more firmly linking their fates with Furiosa’s. By not doing something like this—by not establishing some kind of culture of resistance among the Wives—Furiosa regresses somewhat, portraying women who are not action heroines like Furiosa (and her mother) as passive victims of male violence and domination.

Beyond revenge

Then there’s the theme of revenge. Unlike Fury Road, where the characters were focused primarily on survival, Furiosa ends with a veritable thesis statement on revenge. Chris Hemsworth’s twisted Dementus has visited incalculable suffering on Furiosa, first by torturing and murdering her mother, and ultimately by torturing and killing a good man (Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack) with whom Furiosa shared a special bond and with whom she hoped to escape. In the end Furiosa methodically hunts down Dementus along with his last lieutenants, and has him at her mercy—but Dementus is determined to give her no satisfaction. Stoically ready to accept death, he nevertheless heaps ridicule on the idea of revenge: “I too crave revenge—a big bellyful of revenge,” he sneers. “You idiot! You can never balance the scales of their suffering!” In the end, finally realizing the full extent of Furiosa’s grievance against him, he tells her triumphantly, “You do this right, and you become me!”

Furiosa is divided into chapters with titles; this fifth and last chapter is called “Beyond Revenge.” Between this and Dementus’s deconstruction of revenge, I was hoping that Miller had one last twist up his sleeve: some kind of redemptive rejection of revenge. Instead, Miller has dreamed up a fate for Dementus so twisted and ridiculous that he gives himself a bit of breathing room by positioning it as one of a number of possible fates Dementus may have suffered, albeit the one that the film’s narrator, a character called the History Man, says he heard whispered from Furiosa herself. This account finds Dementus, years later, immobilized in a niche high up in the Citadel, his wasted but living body at the base of a peach tree that has engulfed his crotch. On this account, Furiosa has presumably kept Dementus alive all these years so that the peach tree can feed on his body, poetically returning a stolen peach from the film’s opening act.

This bizarre image, for me, brings the movie to a screeching halt. It’s so weird that it makes me wonder what Miller means us to make of it. Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps Miller simply wanted the freakiest ending he could imagine. Perhaps, in some bizarre logic, it’s meant to be somehow redemptive. Or perhaps it’s simply a testament to the depravity of human imagination, which was unsatisfied with whatever more conventional vengeance Furiosa might have taken. Whatever the case, it doesn’t remotely work for me.

Thinking about this, I’m reminded how in Fury Road Furiosa says she’s seeking “redemption.” There’s no need, of course, for Miller to spell out what it is that Furiosa needs redemption from—unless, you know, he makes an epic prequel detailing her entire back story. And that makes me think this: What if Furiosa had ended with its heroine giving into real sadism and bloodlust? What if she were allowed to be as compromised, for one day, as Max Rockatansky at his worst?

And then what if, afterward, she came gradually to the realization that Dementus was right: She had become him? Before she had suffered his cruelty; now it has infected her. It is not what her mother would have wanted. And that might have set up her quest for “redemption” in Fury Road as nothing in this movie does.

Well, it’s not the movie that Miller made, and as a critic my duty is to write about the movie he made, not the movie I wish he had made. Well, I did my duty. And now I’ve done the other thing too.