Operatic Furiosa is bigger, but not better, than Fury Road. That's still more than enough

Even in the face of the murder, explosions, subterranean cannibals and more murder, writer and director George Miller says Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a hopeful movie — one with a question it intended to answer. 

"Are we doomed to keep fighting wars, and [to] have aggression against each other? Are we? Or is there hope?" he asked CBC.

It's a pretty lofty ambition for a franchise essentially built on explosions, mutated pustules and a guy named Toecutter. 

But utilizing his beautifully weird, legend-obsessed writing style, Furiosa is a fantastic evolution of Miller's vision. It is an operatic expansion of the storytelling potential of Mad Max's "western on wheels" — the now five-part cinematic universe based around a marauding stranger eking out an existence in a V-8 worshipping world falling apart after a nuclear holocaust. 

And while stuffed with nearly as much dieselpunk coolness as its direct predecessor, Fury Road, Miller leans way into the hero's journey, testing the limits of how much complexity an obsessively action-oriented movie can get away with. 

Furiosa bears similarities to virtually all post-apocalyptic stories: a wafer-thin warning of what seems like an ever-present Armageddon, with a message to maintain our humanity even in the darkest of times. That convincing — if somewhat simple — cliche gets tangled up with a story that's more disjointed than the prior film's clear trajectory barrelling straight across the desert. 

Combine that with fewer innovations like war boys or guitar-strapped Doof Warriors, Furiosa does operate less like a Godfather II, and more a Lion King 1 ½ — an in-between prequel intended more to shore up the narrative roof of Fury Road than build on top of it.

With those relative shortcomings in mind, it makes it especially useful that Furiosa also happens to be one of the best prequels of all time. 

Of course, all that would've been impossible without Miller's new star. As the first Mad Max film to dive into Australia's post-apocalyptic wasteland without the titular Max Rockatansky at its helm, Furiosa follows its new title character — played this time mostly by The Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy