Furiosa and Mad Max’s parallel backstories make Fury Road even better

polygon.com:

The Mad Max series has always thrived on reinvention. No two consecutive movies in the franchise have ever been the same, and most of them aren’t even remotely similar to each other, save for the themes of the Wasteland and the idea of a lone wanderer doing their best to survive. Furiosa, the newest movie in the series, may be the biggest exception to that rule: While the movie is explicitly a prequel to Fury Road, it draws its biggest inspirations from the original 1979 Mad Max, giving Max and Furiosa similarly tragic origin stories.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Mad Max and Furiosa.]

Five movies into the series, with each bigger, louder, and more bombastic than the last, it’s easy to forget that George Miller started Max Rockatansky’s story with a simple movie about roving gangs and a man facing a personal tragedy.

The original Mad Max starts before Australia fully descends into the Wasteland chaos the series would later be known for. While Max’s homestead, where he lives with his wife and child, isn’t as idyllic as Furiosa’s Green Place, it seems as beautiful and peaceful a place as anyone could ask for. At least, until a marauding band of highway raiders comes along. Once they arrive, they quickly kill Max’s family, setting him on a path of eternal vengeance and turning him into the Road Warrior we know him as in the rest of the films.

In this way, it feels like Furiosa is almost a remake of the original movie, done up with the budget and beautiful fury Miller has spent the last 45 years perfecting. Furiosa similarly had her peaceful life stolen from her, and her closest family murdered by a gang of marauders, but Miller has adjusted the story this time. Instead of taking most of the movie to show us the bad guys and set up the deterioration of the world, Miller leans on the history of the series, letting Fury Road’s strong world-building in particular fill in the blanks for us.

We already know the important players and landmarks here: Furiosa