In the Mad Max franchise he established in 1979 and continues to the present day, Australian filmmaker George Miller has demonstrated a rare command of movement across vast spaces. Arguably, no director — not even masters of the form like William Friedkin or John Frankenheimer — has wrung more sheer kinesis out of his chase scenes than Miller has. That facility is on striking display in the opening section of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which depicts, in the sort of exhaustive detail that is implied by the inclusion of the word “saga” in the subtitle, the prehistory of the character of Furiosa.
Played by Charlize Theron in the earlier, hugely successful Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Furiosa is one of a series of ruthlessly efficient crusaders against tyrannical gangs in a postapocalyptic realm in which, improbably, all living inhabitants retain the ability to operate motorcycles, trucks, and other motor vehicles at high speeds. Fittingly, the new film opens with a chase, and it’s a good one: After being kidnapped by a band of skull-wearing, self-serving, exceedingly ill-mannered brutes, young Furiosa (played, as a child, by Alyla Browne) is secreted off to the encampment ruled by their employer, the self-aggrandizing Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
Following Furiosa, seemingly in a straight line across the endless desert, is her devoted mother, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser). Here, Miller’s gift for geography remains intact: because of the relative simplicity of the scen.