One of the primary lines of dialogue in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is an issue: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?”
Across its 148-minute running time, Furiosa offers various responses to that inquiry, presenting a post-apocalyptic set of scenarios sure in blood, gasoline, and bullets. Ultimately, the film settles on hope—nevertheless silly it could appear—because the only way forward. The desolation of what’s old, it insists, could make a way for ‘all things latest” (Rev. 21:5).
George Miller returns to direct this spinoff and prequel to his thunderous 2015 epic, Mad Max: Fury Road. That film took place over the course of three days and two nights; Furiosa occurs over almost 20 years, told in five pulse-pounding chapters. Miller takes his time exploring the transformation of an innocent young girl into the liberation warrior we discover in Fury Road.
We first meet an adolescent Furiosa (Alyla Browne) together with her mother (Charlee Fraser) of their home, the Green Place of Many Mothers. The remainder of the world is a barren wasteland, ravaged by the compounding effects of climate change and nonstop warfare. The Green Place, in contrast, is a literal Garden of Eden, rife with foliage, wildlife, and fresh water. In a playful riff on the Genesis story, Furiosa opens the film by picking a ripe peach from a tree.
All too soon, paradise is lost. Marauders kidnap Furiosa, searching for to bring knowledge of the Green Place to their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a cruel and histrionic warlord who dreams of plundering the abundance for himself. Unable to save lots of her daughter, Furiosa’s mother gives her a peach pit to recollect home by and urges her to search out her way back. From the moment Furiosa is forced into Dementus’s muscled coterie, she schemes and fights to return to the garden.
This prolonged allusion to Genesis sets the stage for Furiosa’s surprising spiritual heft. In this incendiary, “post-Fall” world, to live is hell and to kill is gain; evil is real, and redemption is desperately sought. Apocalypse is now—but that may not be all bad.
The word apocalypse, especially in movies, often connotes wanton destruction, horror, and violence for ever and ever. But the word’s origins are more nuanced. The Greek word apocalypsis is continuously translated as “a revelation.” In biblical times, apocalyptic literature served “as an intensified type of prophecy.” Critic Alissa Wilkinson and scholar Robert Joustra expand on this concept in How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics on the End of the World. The apocalypse, they write, “renews because it destroys; with its destruction it brings an epiphany concerning the universe, the gods, or God.”
Apocalypses create realizations that may only include razing. The disruption they cause is just not change in and of itself; but it surely does provide the foundations for change to be built upon. Apocalyptic revelation—even revelation of injustice, misery, and sin—is all the time an invite to construct something latest.
Held captive and compelled to serve different warlords, Furiosa realizes that the tyrants she’s ruled by haven’t any desire to do anything latest with the apocalypse they’ve been given. The vile men waging war for the planet’s resources, including Dementus and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), merely recapitulate the identical cruelty and barbarism that led to the world’s destruction in the primary place, hoarding scarce goods for themselves fairly than imagining a more communitarian alternative. When Furiosa is captured by Dementus after one in all her many escape attempts, he sneers at her: “Where were [you] going, so stuffed with hope? There is not any hope!”
At the film’s climax, Dementus and Joe wage a scorched-earth war, launching the total brunt of their forces at one another. Instead of shooting a typical motion scene, Miller frames this battle as a montage; it’s not clear who’s winning, and even whose army belongs to whom. The carnage attributable to two small-minded rulers is each brutal and meaningless.
As Furiosa ages (actress Anya Taylor-Joy steps in to play the older character), her weariness and despair deepen. And yet she also realizes that true tragedy can be resigning herself to fatalism. Resolving to maneuver forward without “the old ways” of revenge and malice, she puts aside corrupt cravings for power and commits to different motivations. The world won’t be saved by repeating what’s been done before. And apocalypse alone isn’t sufficient; she’ll must take motion.
When Jesus began his earthly ministry, his gospel was so radical as to be considered destructive by the powers that were. His message of an upside-down kingdom (Matt. 20:16), his radical solidarity with those that were missed and oppressed by the empire (Mark 2:15), went against the dominant worldviews of his day. Even his closest disciples rebuked him; even they didn’t understand his teachings (Mark 8:30–33). It was easier for them to assume Jesus’ deliverance working inside the framework they already knew; they couldn’t envision how transformative and total Jesus’ vision for the world can be.
Whether Jesus was healing on days of his selecting (Luke 6:6–11) or dining with society’s outcasts (5:27–3), his seeming disregard for the law was not transgression for transgression’s sake. He got here to be a greater success of those laws; his radical amplification of their commands—including extending the definition of who one’s “neighbor” is—was an invite to a latest way of life.
This invitation is similar to the believer today. The work of bringing God’s kingdom doesn’t end simply after we eliminate evil, but fairly after we construct higher things instead. And (without spoiling an excessive amount of) it’s exactly this type of constructing that the last scene of Furiosa evokes.
In Furiosa’s final standoff with Dementus, he sardonically commends her for learning the teachings of brutality and resilience he’s taught. “I’ve been waiting for somebody like me,” he says as Furiosa . “We’re just two evil bastards within the wasteland. … We are the already dead.”
This comparison gives Furiosa pause; she realizes that she’s seeing what she could grow to be. While her arc won’t be complete until Fury Road—she creates a utopia where the captives are free (Is. 61:1), the hungry are fed (Matt. 25:35), and the stranger is welcomed (Deut. 10:18)—by Furiosa’s end, we see the beginnings of her revelation.
Oftentimes, after a climactic motion sequence (specifically, a standoff between Furiosa and a few raiders that takes place on a truck under siege) Tom Holkenborg’s rattling rating decrescendos to a whisper. We’re left with the ambient sounds of the desert, the scorching sun upon the sands, and scraps of blue sky peeking through the smog and smoke.
In these moments of quiet beholding, the words God spoke to the prophet Isaiah come to mind: “See, I’m doing a latest thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I’m making a way within the wilderness and streams within the wasteland” (43:19). Possibility may persist in our own wastelands, if only we’d have eyes to see and ears to listen to. Not all is dead here. We plant our peach pit, and wait for it to grow.
Zachary Lee serves because the Managing Editor at The Center for Public Justice. He writes about media, faith, technology, and the environment.
