It's a hard movie to talk about without spoiling, but I'll try; You know its bones anyways. Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is a little girl, abducted from her family in a hidden, verdant land in the middle of post-apocalyptic Australia. She will at some point grow up and become a complete, stone-cold badass (Anya Taylor-Joy), lose an arm and gain the trust of a petty tyrant warlord (which she'll betray by sacrificing everything to do the right thing in the next movie).
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (sans the Mad Max) fills in those fifteen years by creating an antagonist for Furiosa, the Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). He's the one responsible for abducting her, he's the one who kills her mother, and he's the one who introduces her - in a way - to Inmortan Joe.
And what a fantastic creation he is; A megalomaniac asshole with an irresistible swagger who just absolutely knows he's the protagonist of the piece - at one point he starts narrating his own, twisted hero's journey. A truly despicable villain whom the script (by George Miller and Nico Lathouris) provides with a wealth of choice Mad-Maxisms, those wonderfully playful word-nuggets which Hemsworth milks for all they're worth. Also, his main toady is called Smeg. We've reached peak art, people, stop trying. It can only go downhill from here.
Events follow Furiosa's character as she grows up bouncing back and forth between Dementus and Immortan Joe across five discreet chapters, aided by a mentor in badassery: The previous imperator (Tom Burke). Their mutual loyalty in the face of insurmountable odds gives the movie several kicks of bittersweet humanity.
This is the first movie in the series where you don't have to do a huge amount of mental gymnastics and overlook a bunch of stuff to slot its continuity with the movie that came before; It's as straight a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road as we could have expected (not a given, with this director).
Furiosa is 100% the same character, a lot of the degenerates from the 2016 movie make a return, and it carefully seeds many of the elements that would bear fruit later. Or earlier, depending how you look at it. We get to see how Furiosa loses her arm and where she got the idea for her facepaint (or is that a badge of her station? Hmmm). We go to places only alluded or seen from far off before (both Bullet and Gas town feature prominently). Hell, it even confirms a fan theory about what the Fury Road is.
Compare this with the previous Mad Maximilians, where each one seemed to be a recounting of a tall tale maybe loosely based around the same historical character. It fulfills its prequel duties admirably without feeling forced, and what's more important, it finds a story to tell that stands on its own merits while also informing and deepening the themes of Fury Road. It's of a piece with that movie, and when we consider it's still one of the best action movies of... well, possibly ever - I can't think of higher praise.
I do however think that this one is at a slight disadvantage - it would probably kick all sorts of ass to watch them in chronological order, but Fury Road is more perfect as a standalone movie, while this one gains a lot of power from knowing how things will shake out, the resonance certain actions will have. Not to mention a few visual references to other movies in the series.
So I'd still recommend watching them in the order they came out, with this one as the capstone.
The action is brutal, thrilling, elaborate, imaginative, and it made me laugh out loud multiple times with excitement (and also just laugh out loud, because a lot of it *is* pretty damn funny). Cars crumple in every which way, things explode real good, and bodies are hurled around with abandon, often while on fire. There may be nothing quite as memorable as the pole cats, but I won't hold it against a movie that is as wildly inventive with its violence and stunts as this one is.
It looks great in motion, very stylized - some (not a lot) of it looks a little too aggressively artificial but, well, that's a trait it shares with part Fury Road, and we later learnt from the internet that absolutely all of that movie was 100% real, absolutely no CGI or digital trickery except for some colour grading (I especially like that part they shot in Australia's famous fire tornado zone; All those brave stuntmen definitely didn't die in vain).
And it's shot beautifully. George Miller keeps making a case for being one of our greatest living directors, and the crew he's assembled keep justifying how essential they are. The blocking on some of the action sequences, the way the camera tracks a character while, say, showing a motorcycle circling and later crashing messily behind them (action designer: Guy Norris), or the way heavy colour filters are used to give the desert a hellish bent (Cinematographer: Simon Duggan, the rare newcomer to the series), or the way the footage is cut in a way that keeps building up a hellish, chaotic energy while still keeping the action crystal clear (editors: Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel). And the music (by Tom Holkenborg), even without the Doof Warrior to provide it diegetically (except for a cameo), is incredible.
There are so many wonderful, weird, detailed and beautiful inventions and developments here that are so idiosincratic to the way George Miller's brain works. So many indelible images. I adore that he very pointedly makes it so that the movies don't fit perfectly together - even if it's an almost straightforward prequel/sequel duet, they still feel like whoever's telling the story is assembling it from different sources at some point in a distant future... and every so often says 'oh fuck it, this doesn't make sense but it's too cool to leave out'.
George Miller is a very smart cookie who's obviously thought a lot about what makes stories work. He's even made a movie explicitly about that.
The guy was blessed and talented enough that he could create a modern-day classic in Fury Road, a story that many of us have internalized the same way our predecessors did the tales of Cú Chulainn, Odysseus, Coyote or the Monkey King*.
With this movie he both delves into that classic and heightens it, providing a number of shots and scenes that echo what came before - what will come after, strengthening its impact. It might not tell as perfectly a self-contained a story, not quite, but its power - alone and paired with its sequel - is undeniable. The Saga in the subtitle is warranted.
Make it epic? Fuck that, he's made it mythical.
*: Insert .gif of someone making exaggerated wanking motions while rolling their eyes here.
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