Furiosa’s journey takes the audience back to the Green Place, where we are only given a glimpse of the place where she was raised by a community of women called the Vuvalini of Many Mothers. Played by the brilliant Alila Brown, she is just a young girl when she is kidnapped by a biker gang belonging to Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. With a fake nose and large unkempt beard, he looks cartoonish in his savagery. Revenge is a word that is thrown at young Furiosa from the very beginning, as she is thrown and held captive, and eventually sold to the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).

Furiosa grows up in this hellish landscape, now taken over by The Queen’s Gambit actress Anya Taylor-Joy. With her ocean blue eyes glistening with black oil smeared across her forehead, the actress has molded the rage boiling within Furiosa to thrilling effect. It’s this rage that does the heaviest work here, as the script, co-written by George Miller and Nico Lathouris, ultimately isn’t capable of giving her much dimension. Furiosa is given hardly any words, and in more ways than one, is often subservient to the majority here. Even in the film’s most dazzling action set piece—a circus-level massacre of fire and scale on a moving truck, brilliantly edited by Margaret Sixel and Eliot Knapman—Furiosa is almost entirely beneath the vehicle. What’s in the driving seat is her unexpected partner in the form of the Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke in fine form).

The issue with Furiosa is that even though Miller charges the narrative with an intense desire to know about his unlikely heroine’s origin story, we are only left witness to her passive reactions. We see her observing the feud that erupts between Dementos and Immortan Joe over gasoline. We see her take charge of her own destiny, but at what cost? Her relationship with the women who are passed off as sex slaves, which created an amusing subtext in Mad Max, is completely missing here. Even Furiosa gets a back story, where is the story in which she once grew up? Furiosa’s loss of innocence is an important factor, but that impulse itself becomes tangled in the larger framework of this episodic narrative.

The anticipation and breathtaking pace that made Fury Road so exceptional is ultimately missing here. Miller’s world-building is more interested in subtle aggressions that eventually tire, and more importantly, doesn’t fulfill the claim Furiosa makes in the final confrontation with Dementus. We were with Furiosa all this while, stuck by her in her worst moments, yet why didn’t we anticipate the question posed to her? Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga works as long as it sees a clear road ahead over the desert, but loses focus when it decides to listen to the rumble of the first vehicle being built. Furiosa contorts and dazzles, enrages, and sets the screen on fire. It’s still a welcome thrill to see the director take a risk and ask, ‘Shall we see, where the road ends?’