Fury Road is an action masterpiece for the ages so I’d originally planned on watching this prequel in the cinema. But then the reviews turned out not so good, I held off and now I see why. This is a decent action movie but it’s no Fury Road and more interestingly, it never even attempts to be. In recounting Furiosa’s backstory, it consistently keeps the action on a smaller personal scale and it’s more episodic, jumping between her key formative moments. Both the effects work and the action choreography are also inferior. The one upside is that it builds up the world of George Miller’s imagination, turning it into a setting that finally feels more real to me.

Furiosa is a child in the Green Place, one of the last remaining places in the Wasteland of Australia after the nuclear apocalypse. When a biker gang finds their sanctuary, she attempts to sabotage their motorcycles but is kidnapped. Her mother Mary sets off in pursuit and manages to pick off many of the gang’s members but a single rider makes it to the camp where Dementus has gathered an entire horde of bikers. Mary is captured and tortured to death in an attempt to extract the location of the Green Place. Dementus adopts Furiosa as his daughter but she sullenly remains mute and uncooperative. After Dementus fails in his siege of the Citadel, he does succeed in taking over Gastown which supplies the Wasteland with critical gasoline. As part of his deal with Immortan Joe, he hands over Furiosa who is placed with the other women of the warlord’s harem in his vault. But she manages to escape and reinvents herself as one of the War Boys instead, slowly rising up the ranks through valor in battle.

The film spends a surprisingly long amount of time with Furiosa as a child and establishes her as being competent and iron-willed right from the start. There’s no psychological depth in the character at all and no discernable growth except physically. This is just a straightforward vengeance flick like a million others except set in the post-apocalypse. That might have been acceptable if the action and the visuals were good enough but they’re not. The CGI created Green Place looks terrible. Gone are the physical stunts which made Fury Road feel so viscerally real. The setpieces are all scaled down. We’re shown the aftermath of large battles but not what happens in them as Furiosa isn’t personally involved. Anya Taylor-Joy is less believable as an intimidating action heroine. We’re just expected to believe that both Furiosa and Mary are both really good at all kinds of skills like sniping, fist-fighting, driving and so on. The best battles are still the ones involving multiple moving vehicles which is really the heart of the franchise. Even here, on top of the encounters being smaller in scale, the action choreography is less legible. Sometimes it’s legitimately hard to make out what the combatants are trying to accomplish.

What it unexpectedly does rather well is fill in the details of the wider world. I never really understood Furiosa’s journey to the Green Place in the previous film and the significance of the Vuvalini and now I do. Showing that truck convoys regularly carry trade goods between the three major settlements to maintain what passes for civilization in the Wasteland is a great worldbuilding detail. I love how Dementus is a completely different kind of warlord from Immortan Joe. Joe might be cruel and evil but he is undeniably a competent strategist and leader. Dementus by contrast is a charismatic demagogue who is unable to deliver on any of the promises to his followers and so never builds anything that lasts. He is only able to hold on to power by endlessly expanding and never staying still, like the Mongol Horde that obviously inspired his character. It’s unfortunate that he’s a much more interesting character than Furiosa who barely has any lines of dialogue.

I never expected this to be as good as Fury Road but it was still disappointing how far this falls short. In addition to perhaps not having enough time to bake, I’d argue that it suffers from one of the pitfalls of having a woman become an action heroine. Since that character now represents all women, any flaws or imperfections are ascribed to the class as a whole. As a result, the character must never be seen onscreen making any mistake or being weak. In the end, what we get is a flat character with no individual personality traits whatsoever. This is a passable action movie but you wouldn’t be missing much if you chose to skip it.