Furiosa: What to remember from Mad Max: Fury Road

Nfirst 10 years later Mad Max: Fury Road secured his place in the canon of all-time great action films, Australian filmmaker George Miller has returned with a prequel that transports viewers back in time to Wasteland.

With Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy playing younger versions of Charlize Theron’s character in Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagain theaters May 24, charts Furiosa’s rise from prisoner of warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to one of the fiercest road warriors serving under the command of tyrant Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme in Furious and the late Hugh Keys-Burne in Fury Road).

As Fury Road, Furysa is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia devastated by a nuclear war fought over oil and other resources. Despotic rulers reign with an iron fist over the brutal remains of civilization, while savage motorcycle gangs roam the desert in search of fuel and anything else they can find. As lord of the Citadel, a fortress built atop a natural aquifer, Immortan Joe rations water to a desperate population while he and his inner circle live luxuriously above the fray. Your cult of “half life” War Boys worship him as a god, ready to die in his name at any moment, while high-ranking officers drive decked-out War Rigs across the Wasteland to exchange water, crops, and other supplies for “guzzolene” and nearby ammunition. Gas Town and Bullet Farm strongholds.

Furious explores how its titular heroine rose to the rank of Imperator and came to drive the War Rig she uses to smuggle Immortan Joe’s prized sex slaves – his so-called “Five Wives” – out of the Citadel in Fury Road. Here’s What You Should Remember Fury Road and the Mad Max universe as a whole before seeing Furious.

See more information: George Miller can’t give up Mad Max

What do we already know about Furiosa?

As Miller had already developed an origin story for Furiosa while making Fury Roadthe 2015 film revealed a number of important details about his life up to that point.

“To tell the story of Fury Road we had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not just the backstory of every character, but every accessory, every vehicle,” Miller said about his process at CinemaCon 2024. “We wrote Furiosa’s story in the 15 or 16 years of her life, before we met her in Fury Road, we wrote a story about Max a year before he got there, and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one of them a soap opera. We did it just for the actors and crew, so they could understand.”

We know that Furiosa was kidnapped as a child from a hidden matriarchal oasis known as the Green Place of Many Mothers – a tribe of women also known as the Vuvalini. Furiosa’s mother died three days after she was kidnapped and Furiosa spent the next 15 years fighting to survive and return home. At some point during this period, she lost most of her left arm and had it replaced with a MacGyver claw prosthetic.

In Fury Road, Furiosa makes her long-awaited escape to Green Place with Immortan Joe’s wives in tow, only to discover that the once fertile land has turned sour and most of the Vuvalini are dead. Furiosa’s crew then fought their way back to the Citadel, killing Immortan Joe in the process and ushering in a new era in the Wasteland.

As for young Furiosa’s relationship with her captor Dementus, Hemsworth told IGN that her character sees her as a sort of replacement for her dead children. “We get a little insight into his story that he also lost someone at some point,” he said. “I think he sees in her a strength that is familiar [and reminds him of] their own children. In his eyes, he believes he is preparing her for the Wasteland. He’s trying to ‘toughen her up,’ as he says.”

However, Furiosa doesn’t see things the same way, according to Taylor-Joy. “Does Furiosa love Dementus?” she asked rhetorically. “No.”

When is it Furious defined within the Mad Max universe?

While the events of Furious directly precede those of Fury Roadgiven the inconsistencies in the schedule between Fury Road and the original Mad Max trilogy, the 2015 film is intended to serve more as a spiritual sequel/reboot of the first three films in the saga.

In 1979 Mad Max and 1982 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, starring Mel Gibson as the titular Max Rockatansky and set in the mid-1980s, Earth is still on the brink of total collapse. At the beginning of the first film, a global oil crisis has caused a social and economic collapse. In the second film, society has collapsed, but the world has not yet been decimated. It is not until some time between the events of The road warrior and 1985 Mad Max beyond the Thunderdomeset about 15 years after the nuclear apocalypse occurs.

However, a Max Mad: Fury Road The comic book prequel series released to coincide with the 2015 film, which recast Tom Hardy as Max and is set to take place around 2050, retcons several aspects of the franchise. In the new timeline, the nuclear apocalypse occurred shortly after the events of the first Mad Maxwith Hardy’s Max having fled to the Wasteland as fallout and contamination spread across Earth sometime after 2015.

In the future, Miller said he is interested in returning to Mad Max universe with a film tentatively titled Mad Max: The Desert that would be “tangentially connected” for Fury Road.