So TLDR: Furiosa A Mad Max Saga, is amazing. Go see it.
But it’s more than the standard summer popcorn action flick. It’s art. And like good art it is layered, complex, and challenging. It keeps you thinking as it’s more than one thing and just when you think you have it figured out, it throws you a curve ball. So it’s not just art but great art. This article from the Atlantic and this one from i09 helped me appreciate how Furiosa and Fury Road work together. They also give satisfying insight into the writing process. Also kudos for Miller for daring to make Furiosa different and embracing that, instead of making a retread of his 2015 masterpiece (sending side eye at you, Star Wars producers).
Fury Road and Furiosa are in conversation with one another. As described in the Atlantic article, Fury Road takes place nearly in real time, so of COURSE Miller and the screen writer had to basically have a second script that fleshed out the backstory for Fury Road. There was almost no room for exposition otherwise.
Furiosa is definitely a film about the limitations of revenge. The second article from i09 that unpacks the ending sheds some light on the complexity of this theme. But the ending is still ambiguous in my opinion, even uncomfortable. (But that makes it good. It challenges us).
[SPOILERS FOLLOW]
In writing we often say the protagonist must learn something from a “good” antagonist. Dementus is a great antagonist in that sense. His comparison of himself and Furiosa in his final scene should convince you of this. Furiosa defeats him by becoming like him. It's the theme in Dune Part II when Paul Atradies says, "We will defeat the Harkonens by becoming Harkonens." It’s Max learning to be like Vincent the hit-man in order to defeat him in Collateral.
This is standard fare for us writers. We see Miller craft this visually (of course, because he is a visual master): when we first see Dementus he is wearing a robe fashioned out of a parachute. It's pristine and white. It’s downright messianic. You could even read the parachute as a reference to a heavenly descent.
But as the movie progresses, we see what a fallen savior Dementus is. There is no way but down for him. As we watch him make darker and darker choices, we witness his descent ever deeper into moral corruption. Miller signals this to us as well: the parachute becomes stained with red and black as the scenes play out.
(Side note: this also takes place on Bruce Willis' undershirt in Pulp Fiction. As he descends the steps into the white supremacists’ lair to slay Zed and his companions who are raping Marcellus Wallace, his white shirt becomes redder and redder. Then, after saving Marcellus, the shirt becomes less bloodstained as Willis ascends out of the basement/dungeon. I was never sure whether this was intentional with Quentin Tarantino or just bad continuity. In Furiosa, we can be confident it is intentional).
So in the final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus, what has Furiosa done? She's retrieved the cloak/parachute that was used to distract her and donned it herself.
There are heaps of meaning in that, good and bad. Read what you want into how the parachute and the moral darkness it represents is a false path for her (literally and figuratively as Dementus’ men used it to fool her into following them). What struck me most powerfully as Furiosa stood over Dementus wearing his cloak, was that yes in some ways she has triumphed, but as Dementus says, she's only triumphed by becoming him, (again) literally and figuratively.
So we're facing up to that theme of the limits of revenge and the toll it takes on our souls, a central conceit of the film. The reviewer from the i09 article says that planting the peach tree seed in Dementus' body and allowing his body to nurture it becomes a sort of redemption of the hell Furiosa has been through.
This is the part I don't know if I buy completely (at this point in the story). For me, the choice to keep Dementus alive and let a tree grow out of him, is just the same type of torture and body horror that is Dementus' modus operandi. In this choice, I don't know if the brutality Furiosa has endured is redeemed (yet). Rather we see she has become a master of the very type of darkness that has so harmed her. She did it to survive and to stop a monster, but mastery came at a steep cost (her soul). It’s an ambiguous note to end the film on (at best). The child in her is dead. Dementus lives on in her. In her cruelty, she is his spiritual daughter.
So who has really won?
That is where the importance of the second (first?) 2015 film, Fury Road comes in. Again, if we follow the visuals, (and the commentary of the i09 review) Furiosa picks the first peach, the fruit from the tree planted in Dementus and takes it not for herself, but for the captured “wives” of Imorten Joe. Their garments are also white, again, a visual reference to purity, potential, beauty, all the things otherwise squelched in the destructive ultra-patriarchy of the Wasteland.
So the final frames of Furiosa show her seeking out the wives and helping them to sneak into the war rig, the very moments leading up to Fury Road.
It reminds me of something one of my old friends in AA says: “You can make all the motions of being a ‘good’ and ‘sober’ person. But if you don’t make that shift from being a taker to being a giver, you’re not going to make it.”
What he’s talking about is the emotional, even spiritual, transformation of our characters.
And that is what makes good drama and good stories. It’s character arcs 101.
The 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road then becomes the redemptive end of Furiosa's character arc where she transforms her pain into something that transcends the horrors around her. She turns towards good things (saving, serving others), but she herself is only able to save those women because she has become a balance of help and brutality through sacrifice. The innocence of her childhood is gone. Dementus took it. But in its place are the skills and knowledge of the Wastelands, skills the wives, trapped all their days in a posh dungeon, lack. Only Furiosa can save them—as a result of her journey. She puts the lessons she has painfully learned to work for a "righteous" cause—a righteous cause that her mentor, Pratorean Jack, and his parents, searched in vain for.
Furiosa has become her best self, as the closing quote of the film, “How far must we wander in this wasteland in search of our better selves,” asks of all of us. In becoming her best self, Furiosa also transforms her world, returning to the Citadel, toppling the patriarchy, freeing the women and children, and replacing a culture of scarcity with one of abundance. This captured in the image of the milk mothers freeing themselves and opening the sluices of life giving water to rain down on the people.
That transformation of the Citadel, that “fixing the things that are broken” instead of running from them, as Max says she must do when he convinces her to return, is Furiosa’s redemption, not planting a tree in her tormentor. That left her trapped in the past, in her pain. She had not transcended her torture. She had only become a torturer herself. The cycle was unbroken. Revenge was, ultimately, unfulfilling.
Don’t take my word for it. Furiosa says this for herself in Fury Road. When Max asks her why she’s taking the wives with her in the war rig to the Green Place, her reply is one word: “Redemption.” Given how she defeated Dementus, whom she had become to do so, Furiosa knows she crossed a line into a level of darkness too much like her enemy. She desperately wants to come back. Frankly, that also works as powerful motivation for her seeking out her home, the Green Place, when she does. She wants to return to a place where she was a different, more innocent, person, after witnessing the horrors she is capable of.
Given we don't see this full picture of redemption in Furiosa a Mad Max Saga, I can see how the film makers themselves felt compelled to splice scenes from Fury Road into Furiosa’s end credits. Considering the closing image of Dementus and his grotesque body-horror fate, which is a dark and uncomfortable reflection of Furiosa herself, we the audience likely need that reminder that there is a path of redemption out of that horror for Furiosa—eventually. We just saw it in 2015.