George Miller becomes biblical in the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagathe fifth installment in his post-apocalyptic action series. Young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) picks a ripe piece of fruit from a tree growing on the edge of a green forest. “We’ve come too far,” says her companion, emphasizing the forbidden nature of the act with the perfect amount of allegorical candor. What happens next certainly has the aura of divine punishment, as Furiosa is thrown out of her home (“the Green Place,” first mentioned in Mad Max: Fury Road) by a masked group of motorcyclists.

She’s no helpless orphan, mind you, and with her devoted mother Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser) on her tail, Furiosa is no match for the lecherous beasts that torment her. But fate, not to mention the narrative dictates of an origin story with a predetermined outcome, soon lands her in the clutches of a mad prophet named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), one of several warlords vying for control of the desert landscape known as the Wasteland.

Furiosa’s kidnapping and imprisonment is practically a film in itself. And Furious is best viewed as a series of interwoven stories that chronicle her steely coming of age. Here’s more from Miller’s previous film, the intoxicatingly imaginative, era-spanning romance Three thousand years of longingthan it is from the compressed and driving Fury Road. The film is divided into five chapters spanning 15 years, and the real star, Anya Taylor-Joy as an older Furiosa, doesn’t appear until about 40 minutes in. Her dialogue is kept to an absolute minimum, and most of the performance comes from her eyes, as the rest of her face is frequently obscured.

Miller tends to treat the people he films like objects, although he treats them with great and loving care. He fixates on one aspect of them – here on Taylor-Joy’s eyes, Susan Sarandon’s flaming red hair in the medical melodrama Lorenzo’s OilJohn Lithgow’s sweaty forehead in the unbearably tense “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie– that highlights their larger-than-life humanity and effectively mythicizes them. This scalpel-like focus on the iconic possibilities of the individual, something surely shaped by Miller’s years of medical study and practice, helps ground his gigantic flights of imagination, from which Furious has enough to fill several combat-ready tanker trucks.

The film’s outstanding set design includes just such a vehicle, an early version of the War Rig that Charlize Theron’s Joan of Arc-like Furiosa eventually pilots Fury Road. There, the chase goes completely off-route, whereas here it mostly stays on the straight line of the highway that separates the slave-worker citadel ruled by the skull-masked Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, cleverly standing in for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne) from its sister outposts of Gastown and Bullet Farm.

For 15 minutes that feel like real time, the facility is attacked from all sides by renegade warriors who ride in souped-up destruction cars and parachute from the sky while powered by giant backpack fans. It’s all brutal, colorful, wacky and more than a little computer-generated, but not so detached that it dulls the senses, as plagues many Hollywood behemoths. That’s largely because Miller, cinematographer Simon Duggan and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel center the action on the herculean effort of a stowaway, Furiosa, who fights her way from the underside of the War Rig to the besieged driver’s cabin, where her eventual mentor and confidant, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), awaits.

Here and elsewhere, spectacle never trumps human motivation. However, there is an argument that between Miller’s first three Mad Max Films (especially the outstanding second part, The Road Warrior), which mainly use practical effects, and the sometimes soupy mix of F/X styles in Fury Road And Furious. The visual effects here occasionally veer into disturbingly eerie territory, particularly in long shots of vehicles moving with computer-generated smoothness. What ultimately makes up for such technical shortcomings is the sense that Miller is constantly experimenting, rethinking and rethinking his art on the fly.

No image or sound is conceived and executed indifferently. And there are plenty of poetic possibilities that can be extracted from the mechanized swamp of ones and zeros, as Miller in Three thousand years of longingThe numerous fantasy sequences that are reminiscent of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Hoffman’s stories recalibrated for the digital age.

In Furiousone can be just as moved by the very realistic clinking of the heroine’s necklace on a rock as by an obviously fake but extremely picturesque time-lapse of a young tree sprouting outward and upward into the sky on a cliff. The film’s greatest special effect, however, may be Hemsworth as Dementus. In his first appearance he resembles an unholy mixture of Moses and Jesus Christ with an Australian accent, but by the end of the film he is practically chained to Prometheus (no spoilers on what The brings with it, but it is certainly a blast).

In between, Dementus spits and stammers, delivers angry monologues about hope and despair, and even deliberately rips off his nipples with a device that might have been invented by Clive Barker’s S&M-loving Cenobites. That he also manages to be an incredibly tragic figure, both the catalyst for Furiosa’s vengeful rage and the conduit for her innocence-destroying damnation, speaks to Miller’s enduring gift for using the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Image/Sound

Warner’s DVD looks great in native 4K with Dolby Vision enhancement. The film’s burnt yellows and reds really pop, and the greens in the last remnants of the poisoned earth where plants can still grow shine. Color separation and contrast are strong throughout, and the scenes shot during the day and night after dark showcase a range of dark blues and deep blacks.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is a roaring beast, with the deep rumble of car engines turning your stomach and the sharp cracks of gunfire revealing subtly brittle tones between the louder explosions. Dialogue remains consistently crisp and clear amidst the surrounding combat, always neatly in the middle of the mix as the score and sound effects explode around it.

Extras

The hour-long Highway to Valhalla: In Pursuit of Furiosa weaves together set footage, concept art, and interviews with cast and crew to provide a comprehensive overview of the project from conception to post-production, while shorter featurettes explore Furiosa and Dementus, as well as the performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. An in-depth analysis of the “Stowaway” action sequence shows just how elaborate and laborious its implementation was, and is a helpful reminder for those who objected to the “Stowaway” scene. FuriousAlthough there was more emphasis on CGI than its predecessor, practical stunts were still an important part of the film. The DVD is rounded off with a featurette about the imaginative vehicle designs and their construction in the film.

In total

George Miller’s lysergic latest entry in his Mad Max Franchise gets a great 4K transfer and a number of informative extras from Warner Home Video.