If there’s one film from the 2010s that will live on in the canon for decades, if not centuries to come, it’s probably Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s long-awaited return to the post-apocalyptic road war series he debuted with the original Mad Max in 1979. More than a mere legasequel, Fury Road feels like both an extension of and innovation on classic films like Stagecoach or Ben-Hur, a desert epic that’s constantly in motion, whose script practically invented its own dialect, and whose daring blend of practical effects and CGI create an invigorating visual language that made those words feel entirely secondary. 

But, if there is one downside to Fury Road, it’s how broad its themes can feel. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any themes at all (freedom and redemption being the most prominent), but they’re often drowned out by the rumble of the War Rig, the shouts of the warboys, and the sick riffs of the Doof Warrior – a fact that I think very well may have cost the film at the 88th Academy Awards, where it lead the night with six awards but failed to break through in Best Director or Best Picture. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Miller’s return to the franchise, feels like an attempt by the director to wrestle back some of the focus to those themes, and to ensure that the series’ legacy is as well remembered for its characters as it is for its stunts and effects. Of course, there are still some excellent action sequences in Furiosa, as well as a twisted sense of humor that was a bit more muted in Fury Road, but this is also a slower, more methodical, and at times more impressionistic film, with a structure more akin to an ancient Greek myth than that of a Hollywood blockbuster. Like its predecessors, Furiosa’s story is still lean and sleek, but it leads to an end point that’s at once more hopeful and more melancholy, locating a beating but damaged heart buried somewhere beneath its irradiated sands.

Set in the same post-nuclear Australia depicted in The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and Fury Road, Furiosa tells the story of how the titular character became the buzzcut wearing, bionic arm sporting Imperator of the War Rig, beginning with her abduction from the oasis-like Green Place of Many Mothers (where she’s portrayed as a child by Alyla Browne and an adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) by flunkies of the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). After foiling a rescue attempt by her mother Mary (Charlee Fraser), Dementus adopts Furiosa as his daughter, before trading her to Immortan Joe (Lachly Hulme, taking over for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne) in exchange for a tenuous alliance that puts Dementus in charge of the oil-producing Gastown. Escaping her fate as one of Immortan Joe’s concubines, Furiosa disguises herself as a man and works her way up the ranks of Immortan Joe’s mechanic team, befriending original War Rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) all while plotting her return to the Green Place and revenge on Dementus.

Considering that Fury Road was essentially a movie about driving really far in one direction only to turn around and drive all the way back, Furiosa has a relatively dense plot for a Mad Max movie, and, as such, its 149 minutes make it the longest film in the franchise by nearly half an hour. Thankfully, very little of that extra runtime is boring – the first “chapter” of the film follows Mary as she pursues two of Dementus’ bikers through the waste land, sniping them off one by one – but its purpose isn’t always evident. We spend a lot of time with Dementus’ caravan before he finally crosses paths with Immortan Joe and kicks off the plot in earnest, and while what we see is always entertaining, many of the set pieces are a little too reminiscent of the prior Mad Max films to feel entirely fresh, leaving the viewer wondering why, exactly, Miller wanted to make this film in the first place if he was intent on making it so similar to an already beloved film. 

If there’s one element that feels completely original to Furiosa, it’s Hemsworth’s performance as Dementus. Possibly the chattiest and most overtly comedic major character in a Mad Max film, Dementus allows Hemsworth to shed the heroic persona he built across a decade playing the MCU’s Thor ham it up as a villain who’s equal parts flamboyant and vicious, and whose ambition far exceeds his own leadership abilities. Rolling into Immortan Joe’s Citadel on a chariot of motorcycles, Dementus’ pleas to the water-starved subjects surrounding him to overthrow their corrupt and decadent leaders and replace them with him, a true man of the people, will feel eerily reminiscent of any number of the right-wing demagogues who have risen to prominence over the past decade or so, as will his incompetence to properly run Gastown once he finally gains the power he so desperately craves. An undercurrent of nihilism has always run through the Mad Max universe, but no character has articulated it as thoroughly as Dementus, whose contempt for Jack’s attempts to help Furiosa return to the Green Place seems to offend him not just because it threatens his power, but because it displays a sense of hope and tenderness that contradicts his Nietzschean will-to-power mindset.

That question of hope, and whether or not it can thrive in even the most dire of circumstances, is one of the themes Miller seems most interested exploring in Furiosa. Despite witnessing the murder of her mother and being traded around like chattel, Furiosa remains intent on returning to her home by any means necessary, even as seemingly every character she encounters is intent on preventing her from doing so. Of course, after getting tripped up multiple times by Dementus, this thirst for hope hardens into a hunger for revenge, a revenge that, as Dementus points out, will only be so successful in satisfying Furiosa’s desire to restore her old way of life. 

This fairly straightforward revenge plot is similar in many ways to the original Mad Max, a curiously structured film in which the deaths that cause Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky to go mad don’t happen until there are roughly 20 minutes left in its runtime. But whereas the Max of that film gives into his bloodlust with little doubt, Furiosa finds herself struggling to determine what killing Dementus would actually accomplish, and what she would do next when she finally executed her revenge. It’s a cosmic dilemma that gives the film the feel of a parable, a story passed down to generations of the Wasteland about how to wrestle a glimmer of light from a life of darkness. It’s a reading that’s aided by the film’s editing and cinematography, which uses old school fades to take us through the “40 Day Wasteland War” and frames Furiosa’s dismembered arm like a Catholic relic. Miller’s action set pieces have always been so technically proficient that they almost feel abstract, but these flourishes make certain sequences almost feel like a Vincente Minnelli dream ballet, adding to the mythic qualities the director is already trying to imprint onto the film. 
Maybe this is why Furiosa has been something of a box office disappointment, grossing approximately $144 million compared to a $168 million budget after its first three weeks in theaters, and dropping out of the U.S. top ten this past weekend. Despite being marketed as a blockbuster, it doesn’t share much in common with the few tentpole films that are currently propping up the modern movie economy, and its second-guessing of the natural urge to root for the protagonist’s quest for revenge makes it a bit more demanding than, say, Bad Boys: Ride or Die. That’s a frustrating state of affairs for any serious film fan, and yet another harbinger of doom for the theatrical experience as a whole. But in an ironic twist, it may just be the kind of thing that turns Furiosa into a cult favorite, the underseen cool kid choice presented as the actual best Mad Max movie as opposed to the overexposed Fury Road. That’s not an opinion I’ll likely ever share, but, much like the film’s title character, it offers us beleaguered movie obsessives some slim vision of hope that bold filmmaking like Miller’s will live on, even as the modern movie landscape inches closer and closer to becoming a creatively barren wasteland.