Filmmaker Dr. George Miller’s been entertaining audiences for nearly 40 years, either with tales of desperation (Mad Max (1979)), tales of greed (The Witches of Eastwick (1987)), or tales of hope (Happy Feet Two (2011)), to name a few. In 2015, Miller returned to the wasteland with Mad Max: Fury Road, a story featuring a brand-new Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) in a supporting role for the indomitable Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). This near-two hour car chase broke minds and won six Oscars, rejuvenating audiences’ excitement through visionary storytelling and mind-blowing practical effects. Some nine years later, Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris (Fury Road) unveiled unto audiences a high-octane tale of resolve, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel story centered on the journey of a younger Furiosa, to mixed results (a shame if there ever was one). Part origin story, part mythology, Furiosa is an epic poem as trial upon trial tests the resolve of a young survivor across time in a quest to go home. If Miller’s Furiosa spoke to you, rejoice as the 4K UHD edition includes roughly 103 minutes of bonus materials to explore every aspect of the making of the film.

An action scene being filmed on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Some time after war ravaged all of Australia, leaving behind radioactive dust and a turn toward savagery among the survivors, there exists a small and hidden oasis protected by the Vuvalini. It’s a place of peace as people have food, water, and greenery unheard of at this time, a place meant to be kept secret from all except those who live there. That secret is going to be broken when soldiers of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) find the place and kidnap Furiosa (Alyla Browne) as evidence of the oasis, except she doesn’t give up the location. So begins Furiosa’s entrance into the wasteland as Dementus seeks to expand his control by challenging Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and the other Citadel-connected wasteland warlords. Over a period of 16 years, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) will wait until the right moment to strike, to take her vengeance and return home.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

From the opening moments of the film, Miller and Lathouris make it clear that what we’re about to experience is something truly different from Fury Road’s more typical narrative approach. A cacophony of voices quoting lines from various Mad Max stories play until we’re shown an older gentleman in a robe, standing before a tree, the sand black and the night sky a vibrant-yet-dark blue. We come to know him as The History Man (George Shevtsov), a member of Dementus’s crew with all the stories he can remember written on his skin and clothes, an act of preservation when the written word is lost and the oral traditions return in earnest. We’ve seen elements of oral stories carrying mythic power in prior Mad Max tales, but, now we find ourselves directly in one as The History Man instructs us that what we’re about to experience is a story, thereby creating the narrative device that Miller will use from that moment on to twist time, to bend reality, to bridge the tangible, natural world of Fury Road’s technical execution with Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) fantastical, fever dream of ideas powered by storytelling. Driving home this idea, the film is, itself, partitioned into chapters, denoting a new significant sequence, whether it’s the kidnapping of Furious, the rise of Dementus to Red Dementus, Furiosa as stowaway, or Furiosa’s final form as a dark angel. These title cards help to convey a sense of mini-arcs in her life (as all lives possesses more than one significant moment), help to portray the passage of time, and carry forward the notion that what we’re seeing is being told to us by The History Man. We may forget it among the sound and fury, but Furiosa is, without question, a fairytale of one woman’s targeted rage at a world destroyed due to vanity.

L-R: George Shevtsov, Chris Hemsworth, and director George Miller on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

As a prequel story, there are some beats that Furiosa chooses to hit as a means of filling in potential gaps between the start of this tale and Fury Road, but each are done in a way that serves Furiosa herself in the moment of telling the story rather than looking forward. Rather than relying on intertextual meaning, Miller and Lathouris are so focused on the here-and-now as to make the choices that make Furiosa whom we know in the future sensical for the present. For instance, a lesser director would make the loss of Furiosa’s arm (Theron’s version incorporates the use of a prosthetic) a key factor in her character creation, whereas the loss is a thing that happens as a result of other choices and is treated as such. In the wasteland, losing a limb is not treated as weakness, but as an expectation, and both the script and Taylor-Joy’s performance bring this notion to its fullest sense. It is but another element of who Furiosa is, not a defining component. Furiosa is not the first character in any of Miller’s stories, canonical to Mad Max or not, with some form of disability and, at no point, is it treated as a defining characteristic. In one of the bonus features, we learn that the person who ran the shop that Furiosa uses to build her prosthetic suffered their own issues due to age and we’re shown the mobility device they built so they could keep working, which includes a built-in toilet. None of this is for jokes, but practicality in a world in which survival is paramount and adaptation is critical. Additional key moments in the film are treated with similar care, so much so that audience perception of characters may change as a result. Immortan Joe doesn’t appear as the tyrannical despot that he seems from Fury Road, who shouts “don’t become addicted to water” at his people whom he towers above quite literally in his own mechanical oasis with water reserve and garden. Through Furiosa’s experience, we come to see him as someone tactical, clear-headed, and willing to listen to those outside his circle, which is partially how Furiosa ends up as with the title Imperator thanks to her work with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) and the transitional trust bestowed to her by virtue of how Joe sees Jack. Stories are all about perspective, all about shaping a POV, and this one helps clarify that, in the wasteland, villainy is a matter of degrees that shifts from moment to moment, from person to person. Furious’s story is one of rage and sorrow, of peace destroyed in favor of propping up delusional children whose tragedies gave them a false sense of owed glory. The main difference between Joe and Dementus being that Joe is smart enough to give himself as much as he can while providing for his people so as to maintain control whereas Dementus only knows gluttony. Between them lies Furiosa and her desperation to get home.

Center: Chris Hemsworth as Dementus in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

As mythic as Furiosa is, the bonus features luckily match, providing an opportunity for home-viewing audiences to learn as much as they can and want about the making of the film. If you purchase the 4K UHD edition, the home release includes five featurettes of varying lengths exploring topics broad (making of the film) and specific (deep dives into the cars, the characters, the narrative). The longest is “Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa” at just under an hour which covers literally everything as it bounces between on-set footage, storyboards, archived footage of prior Mad Max Saga productions, and other production-related moments. Want to learn how the score and sound design intersect? Curious how Miller’s background as a general practitioner doctor provides guidance for many of the wasteland-related ailments that makeup and the prosthetics team need to tackle? Wonder how Taylor-Joy approached the driving sequences or the use of the arm prosthetic? Want an inside look into the development, blocking, staging, and shooting of the confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus? You get all of this and more as close up as one can get without being right there. Building off of this are four featurettes, each over 10 minutes in length, which drill into the characters of Furiosa and Dementus respectively, the development of the cars, and a deep dive into the “stowaway” sequence wherein Furiosa and Praetorian Jack begin to build their trust. Each featurette fills in gaps with maybe only one piece of overlap, which is merely a redundant recitation that everything used on screen needed to come from the world (such as a mirror made of cell phones, a hat made from a soccer ball, or clothes made from waste bags and other trash).

L-R: Tom Burke, Anya Taylor-Joy, director George Miller and Chris Hemsworth on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Be advised that the only way to watch everything is through the 4K UHD edition of the film. If you purchase the Blu-ray, only “Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa” and “Furiosa: Stowaway to Nowhere” are included. It’s likely due to the amount of available space on the single Blu-ray disc (more on the ramifications on that shortly) that the featurettes are cut-off in that manner. As Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided a 4K UHD retail copy for review, there’s no way to confirm currently if the digital edition of the Blu-ray is similarly limited, but the press release clearly states that these two featurettes are only included on the Blu-ray, so take care when purchasing your edition. All the bonus features are included with the 4K UHD digital copy and on-disc.

L-R: Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack and Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For many fans of Fury Road, that 4K UHD is often used as a reference disc when breaking in new 4K UHD set ups between the breathtaking cinematography, sound design, and scoring. It’s less likely that Furiosa will serve the same function for a number of reasons, but the most telling is that the bitrate hovers around the low 50s Mbps throughout the film. This could be because Miller utilized a lot more CG to enhance the stunts and amplify the mythical elements of narrative, but the more likely culprit is that there’re 103 minutes of bonus features on the same disc as the film. Rather than include the film on Blu-ray or merely include a Blu-ray of the bonus features, by placing such a lengthy amount of behind-the-scenes materials it reduces the available space for the film, leaving no other options than to reduce image quality. Is it something that most audiences are going to notice? Likely not as the video and audio elements are still beautiful and immersive, but when action rom-com The Fall Guy (2024) has a higher bitrate over this epic war poem, one begins to question the business decisions of those in charge of the home releases. Sure, it saves money to keep everything on one disc, but at what cost?

L-R: Anya Taylor-Joy and director George Miller on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Speaking of cost, for fans of Furiosa and the Mad Max Saga, be advised of two upcoming new releases: Furiosa: Black & Chrome edition and a 4K UHD five-film collection. These will be available on digital August 13^th, 2024, with the physical edition coming available on September 24^th, 2024. If all goes to plan, look for a review of Furiosa: Black & Chrome next month.

L-R: Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus, Josh Helman as Scrotus, Lachy Hulme as Immortan Joe, and John Howard as The People Eater in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

If you come to Furiosa looking for Fury Road, you’re going to be disappointed. Miller did not bring us back to the wasteland to do the same thing again nor does he shift to Furiosa merely to capitalize on past success. If that were true, Furiosa would’ve come out far sooner than nine years since. If that were true, audiences wouldn’t be given a career-best performance from Hemsworth who makes us delight in watching the charismatic con-man Dementus on screen even as we’re repulsed by him. If that were true, audiences wouldn’t be captivated by the silent ferocity of Taylor-Joy, commanding space with a largely physical performance that pushes the actor to places we’ve yet seen. If that were true, Furiosa wouldn’t be worth watching more than once in order to investigate the cross-section of practical and CG effects in creating outstanding stunts that push reality into hyperreality, anchored by the very nature of the framework of the film —that it’s all a story being told to us. Furiosa is a rich and compelling myth all on its own and it’s one that this reviewer wishes could’ve been seen in the theater. If you’re the same, rejoice, the dark angel of the Fury Road is yours to observe as you wish. Just be mindful of your edition and the others to come before you buy.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Special Features:

4K UHD

• Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa (56:59)
• Furiosa: Stowaway to Nowhere (11:13)
• Metal Beasts & Holy Motors (14:42)
• Darkest Angel: Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa (10:19)
• Motorbike Messiah: Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (10:01)

Blu-ray

• Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa (56:59)
• Furiosa: Stowaway to Nowhere (11:13)

Available on VOD and digital June 25th, 2024.
Available 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD August 13th, 2024.

For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga website.

Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.

Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming

Tags: 4K UHD, action, adventure, Alyla Browne, Angus Sampson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlee Fraser, Chris Hemsworth, CJ. Bloomfield, Clarence John Ryan, David Barnett, David Collins, David Field, Domain Entertainment, drama, Dylan Adonis, Elsa Pataky, Florence Mezzara, George Miller, George Shevtsov, Goran D. Kleut, Guy Spence, home release, home video, Ian Roberts, John Howard, Josh Helman, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, Lachy Hulme, Lee Perry, Matuse Paz, Nathan Jones, Peter Stephens, Quaden Bayles, Rahel Romahn, Robert Jones, science fiction, Sean Millis, Tim Burns, Tim Rogers, Tom Burke, Village Roadshow Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures