You have to hand it to George Miller’s franchise, now five films in: it has kept the end of the world going for the better part of half a century. A big, busy, ornately designed prequel to 2015’s delirious series peak the new-to-streaming (2024) isn’t exactly meant to be cosy or comforting. It takes place in the same scorched, uninhabitable desert wasteland as its predecessors, a landscape that essentially defined the idea of a post-apocalyptic Earth in the popular imagination.
And yet it’s so familiar now as to feel almost nostalgic. Most of ’s pleasures relate to the past rather than the future. Miller has assembled another driving, visually lavish, slam-bang adventure of rising to power in a hopeless place, but its iconography abounds in callbacks to previous entries, while you can’t watch Anya Taylor-Joy’s impressively steely turn in the title role without thinking of Charlize Theron’s more hardened interpretation.
The shock of the new, and the terror of the future unknown, is missing. Of course the post-apocalyptic drama is a genre so increasingly well-worn that it’s getting ever harder to truly unnerve viewers with a vision of a worst-case future. John Hillcoat managed it with his handsomely parched 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize winner , in which Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee trudge unknown miles to an unknown destination.
Shrouded in dun-coloured smog and tangible layers of ash and dust, the film’s construction of a wo.