Furiosa: Mad Max Saga, The Odyssey of Anya Taylor Joy in The First Official Trailer
Warner Bros Pictures has released the first official trailer for Furiosa: Mad Max Saga, the new film directed by George Mille. George Miller is one of the most underrated directors ever: some remember him for The Witches of Eastwick, those who have no idea he is the man behind well-known children’s films such as Babe Goes to Town and the two overflowing Happy Feet, those who regret it the unfinished film about the Justice League and who finally discovered it only recently with the imaginative Three Thousand Years of Longing, but his greatest (and at the same time unknown) contribution to the modern pop imagination is the Mad Max saga, which started as an indie dystopian film and became a multi-million dollar franchise over the decades. The “post-apocalyptic wasteland” setting takes its cue from Miller’s ideas, which have been plundered over and over again (starting with Ken the Warrior, who represents a martial epigone).
Furiosa: Mad Max Saga Trailer
The first Mad Max in 1979 led to the creation of a unique franchise, which had two direct sequels in the 1980s and a late but excellent sequel in 2015, Fury Road. In Miller’s ideas, there were still other stories to tell, specifically the final one on the character of Max (which, hopefully, we will be able to see in Mad Max: Wasteland) and that of the origins of the character played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road, Furiosa, who now has a film dedicated just to her, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga… Anya as Charlize
Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in the film, arriving sometime in 2024. This new feature from Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures is produced by Miller and his longtime partner, Oscar-nominated producer Doug Mitchell, through their Australian-based Kennedy Miller Mitchell.
Furiosa: Mad Max Saga: Story Plot
As the world falls to ruin, young Furiosa is torn from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by Warlord Dementus. Traveling through the Wastelands, they come across the Citadel presided over by Immortan Joe. As the two tyrants battle for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials and muster the means to find her way home.
Alongside Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth, the film’s protagonists also include Alyla Browne and Tim Burke. Miller co-wrote the screenplay with Mad Max: Fury Road co-writer Nico Lathouris. Miller’s creative team behind the camera includes first assistant director PJ Voeten and second unit director and stunt coordinator Guy Norris, director of photography Simon Duggan, composer Tom Holkenborg, sound designer Robert Mackenzie, editor Eliot Knapman, visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson and colorist Eric Whipp. Other long-time collaborators are part of the team, such as production designer Colin Gibson, editor Margaret Sixel, sound mixer Ben Osmo; costume designer Jenny Beavan and makeup artist Lesley Vanderwalt, already Academy Award winners for their work on Fury Road.
The Trailer in Detail
What could we expect from the Furiosa trailer? Lots of spectacular action artistic photography and iconic characters… and we certainly weren’t disappointed. Two and a half very intense minutes, which overall do not make it easy for us to understand what happens in the film… but at the same time reveal to us, if observed, several spoilers or connections with Fury Road. There are three characters around which the trailer revolves: Furiosa, Dementus, and Immortan Joe.
And as in Fury Road, while two men compete for everything that may be truly valuable in a world in ruin, Furiosa is the true protagonist, engaged in a fight against everything and everyone for freedom. Abandoned (by?) a motorcycle in the middle of the desert, our heroine stands up while the words of a female voice resonate, urging her to find her way home, at any cost, however long and difficult it may be. And we already know that Furiosa will not back down from anything to keep this promise. The character is shot from behind, but we soon see her face and can recognize in her the youthful features of the one who, in the adult version, was played by Charlize Theron. Here she still has long hair… and her left arm, which as we know will become a singular multifunctional metal prosthetic limb.
The trailer specifies that we are forty-five years from the “collapse”, and we presume that this means that of modern society as a whole which will then lead to the wild west situation seen in Interceptor, rather than the post-atomic one… otherwise Max would have to be over seventy years on Fury Road! Which is impossible. This very precise temporal reference sounds important and decisive, and we are very curious to know what else it can mean, also considering that a little further on there is a scene in which a group of women flee into what is a wooded landscape very dense and certainly pre-apocalyptic. This scene in which the voiceover narrates the background of Furiosa in search of a home (a quest bluntly defined as “Odyssey”) sees a group of motorcyclists continue in formation, led by a car. These are not raiders: the formation is too well-ordered and linear, but Furiosa doesn’t seem to be leading it, but she could be one of the motorcyclists.
