Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Essential, and watch it after Fury Road, not before, despite the chronological toggle on this site putting it first. It ends at the exact moment that film begins, which makes it look like the natural opening and makes it a bad one. Almost everything here gains its weight from knowing what Furiosa becomes, and the final scene is a handover that means nothing if you have not seen what it hands over to.

It is also built on a completely different principle. Fury Road is one chase in two directions with almost no exposition. This is a saga in chapters covering fifteen years, with title cards, a narrator, a sprawling cast and long stretches of politics between three strongholds. Anybody arriving expecting two hours of the same propulsion will be disoriented for the first hour. It is the better film for having refused to repeat itself, and it is the harder watch.

Chris Hemsworth is the surprise. Dementus is a warlord who is funny, needy and completely unserious about his own mythology, a man running a biker gang on charisma and improvisation, and the performance is the most interesting thing either modern film has done with a villain. Anya Taylor-Joy speaks very little; Alyla Browne carries the first third as the child and is remarkable.

The one fair criticism is texture. Fury Road's effects were overwhelmingly real things photographed in a desert. This leans much harder on digital compositing, and in daylight it occasionally shows. The Stowaway sequence is as good as anything in the series.