Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is smart enough to avoid trying to replicate Fury Road’s miracle formula and relentless pacing, but doesn’t always hit the mark. ‘Too much of a good thing’ is indeed a valid complaint here.
Clocking in at around 148 minutes, Furiosa is far weightier than you’d expect from a Mad Max movie. In a way, it’s all the extra runtime that allows it to embrace a unique voice and more complex structure that make it more than just a riff on Fury Road or a simpler, Rogue One-ish prequel. It dovetails right into the 2015 masterpiece, much like the first-ever live-action Star Wars spin-off movie, but it’s a far more expansive tale about the Wasteland and every major player involved in Fury Road and then some.
The severely underrated Mad Max video game by Avalanche Studios, which also arrived in 2015, also acted as a canonical prequel to the events of the last mainline movie, and Furiosa even acknowledges a couple of major characters and small plot points. If we assume Mad Max: The Wasteland is happening sooner or later and is yet another prequel, it seems that George Miller had a lot of mad worldbuilding done around the fourth Max-led flick.
