Furiosa origin tale gives us story and characters as well as great action

When Mel Gibson either aged-out or got-cancelled-out of the Mad Max franchise, its producer-director George Miller made the inspired decision to slip a new story into the franchise with a younger Max, now played by Tom Hardy, in the 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road.

It was a brilliant and unhinged film with too many characters to keep track of and so much fun post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies inspired silliness.

Who were these characters? Why didn't anyone in post-nuclear-war Australia just want a quiet life somewhere? Did only car buffs survive the apocalypse? Just some of the dozens of questions flitting through my mind as its warring tribes blew the heck out of each other, but it was so loud and so fun, I didn't care that answers were hard to come by.

Just as Fury Road was a younger Max tale, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga takes that film's Charlize Theron character and gives her an origin story.

Along the way, it lays out explanations and backstories to a number of Fury Road figures and places it all in some kind of better-understandable future-historical setting.

It is not as non-stop high-octane as Fury Road, and I think that's a good thing.

Director Miller is brilliant and inventive throughout, one single action sequence doesn't let up for almost 15 minutes and apparently took 70 days to shoot, and the quieter moments give you time to unpop your ears.

In the middle of Australia, small segments of population have survived a catastrophic war and in one rare protected green valley a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) has been brought up.

But biker vandals have discovered the valley and Furiosa is captured and taken to the domain of the biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).

The young girl is traded by Dementus and goes to live with ... actually there is so much world-building that goes on in this film it's hard to describe without sounding like nonsense.

Suffice to say that we see a girl grow up (into Anya Taylor-Joy in the film's second half) in violent times and rather than let it destroy her, she becomes the kind of warrior needed to redress some of this new world's harshness.

Both the actresses playing Furiosa, Browne and Taylor-Joy, give intense and physical performances, expressing more through their eyes than through dialogue - they don't have much dialogue.

The real fun of the film, though, is Hemsworth who wears a pretty flawless false nose, great make-up work, which I can only imagine was to make the man not so damned handsome and become a believable post-nuclear character performer.

It works, starting with a vocal performance that channels David Wenham's character from The Boys, broadly Australian, darkly menacing and occasionally comic.

Miller and his screenwriting collaborator Nick Lathouris are far more interested in character and story here than in any of the previous four Mad Max films, and just as they disguise Hemsworth so his character comes through, Miller's team inventively cast folks whose faces and bodies bring their own sense of character.

Among the cast is Quaden Bayles, the young Indigenous boy who broke the internet's heart in 2020 when his mother posted a video of the kid traumatised by his school bullies.

He does a terrific job, hopefully the beginning of a career, as does teenage Tasmanian burn victim Spencer Connelly, holding their own against the film's Hollywood big names.

Footy hero Ian Roberts has a significant bad-guy role and Brit Tom Burke quietly stands among an enormous cast.

The real star of the film, though, is the heavy metal grunt of its motorbikes, its trucks and cars, all souped-up and burning rubber, full of post-nuclear Danny Zuccos racing an outback Thunder Road.