Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens with the sound of nervous Australian citizens and commentators, narrating us through the collapse of civilization.  We hear about riots.  We hear about the breakdown of civilization.  We hear that people are literally running out of water.

It’s an effective opening but, for those of us who have seen the other movies set in the Mad Max universe, it also feels a bit redundant.  We already know the story of how our world came to an end.  Mad Max opened with society in its death throes.  The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome both took place a few years after the apocalypse, with the majority of humanity reduced back to a feral existence of scrounging and fighting to survive.  Finally, Mad Max: Fury Road took place so far in the future that the only thing that really remained of the old ways were the cars and the guns that were obsessively cared for by the inhabitants of what was once Australia.  (Not even the collapse of civilization could halt car culture.)

Furiosa opens 45 years after the apocalypse, with young Furiosa (Alyla Brown) living in the Green Place, one of the few areas of Australia not to be reduced to a waterless desert.  When she’s kidnapped by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the Biker Horde, she can only watch in horror as her mother (Charlee Fraser) is crucified by the Horde.  Dementus, who was driven mad by the death of his own family, adopts Furiosa as his own and spends years hoping that she will lead him to the Green Place.  Instead, Furiosa is eventually “traded” to Dementus’s rival, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and, under the tutelage of Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), she eventually grows up to become both Anya Taylor-Joy and the fierce warrior who was at the center of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Like that opening montage of panicky voices describing the apocalypse, Furiosa is well-made but, narratively, it can feel a bit redundant.  There’s really nothing major about Furiosa’s backstory that wasn’t previously revealed in Mad Max: Fury Road.  Yes, we learn the exact circumstances of how she lost her arm and it’s a scene that definitely establishes Furiosa as a badass but it’s also reveals that she lost her arm in the way that I imagine 99% of Fury Road‘s audience assumed it happened the first place.  That’s the problem with both prequels and sequels.  If the first movie is effective, that usually means that the audience has been given all of the information that they needed to understand a character’s past and motivation.  As a result, prequels often feel narratively unnecessary.  Furiosa spends the majority of this movie plotting her escape from Immortan Joe but we already know that it’s not going to happen because Furiosa still has to be at the Citadel for Fury Road.

Compared to Fury Road (in which the action took place over a handful of days as opposed to the decade that is covered in the prequel), Furiosa can feel a little slow.  At times, it can even seem a bit draggy.  Furiosa devotes as much time to exploring post-apocalyptic society as it does to action sequences.  (It has more in common with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome than The Road Warrior.)  That said, there’s a lot about Furiosa that works wonderfully.  No one directs a chase or a battle as well as George Miller.  Chris Hemsworth gives a good performance as Dementus, playing him as a tyrant who learned how to lead from watching the Marvel movies that made Hemsworth famous.  Hemsworth is particularly strong in his final scene with Furiosa.   Dementus may be hateful but, in a strange way, he can be understood.  Having lost everything he once cherished in life, Dementus’s actions are as much about his own self-destructive impulses as his own thirst for pwoer.  Though she doesn’t take over the role until fairly late in the film, Anya Taylor-Joy gives a fierce performance as Furiosa.  Furiosa doesn’t speak much in the film but, when she does, both Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Brown make those words count.

Furiosa is an uneven film that falls victim to the same trap that has hindered many prequels.  But, ultimately, it’s still a watchable and frequently compelling vision of a disturbing future.