The following post contains SPOILERS for the end of Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagashould you decide to witness them.
Prequels don’t usually end with mysteries. They exist to explain; to illuminate the backstories and secrets of characters and events from other films. In case of George Miller Furiousthe film reveals more than a decade of tragedy and pain in the life of the title character, who was introduced in 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road as a haunted survivor (played by Charlize Theron) who wants to escape the clutches of the brutal dictator of her future, Immortan Joe.
Where did this woman come from? What happened to her? This is what Furious is about.
And most of the film’s 2.5 runtime answers these questions. Furiosa (now played as a girl by Alyla Browne and a young woman by Anya Taylor-Joy) is kidnapped from her childhood home, a mythical oasis known as “The Green Place,” by bikers loyal to a rival of Joe’s named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Although Furiosa’s mother tries to mount a rescue, Dementus kills her and makes Furiosa his slave. He then swaps Furiosa with Joe in a power play for control of “Gastown,” the refinery that produces the seemingly endless supply of “guzzoline” that fuels Mad MaxThe nightmare cars.
Furiosa manages to escape Joe’s harem and becomes a mechanic in his garage, disguising herself as a boy and gradually working to manage supplies with another reluctant warrior named Jack (Tom Burke). Furiosa and Jack whisper about running away to Green Place to start a life together, but that kind of thing doesn’t happen in Mad Max. Instead, the pair are ambushed by Dementus’ forces, Jack is killed, and Furiosa loses an arm.
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She survives, of course – it wouldn’t exactly be a prequel to Fury Road if she didn’t. But this moment seems to harden Furiosa forever. Soon she shaved her head and added a robotic prosthetic to her arsenal, while Anya Taylor-Joy starts speaking in a much deeper voice, so she sounds more like Charlize Theron. Joe and Dementus start an all-out war for control of the future, and eventually Furiosa makes her move against Dementus and confronts him for all the years of misery he has caused her.
And then… well, that’s when Furious is intentionally vague. Furiosa takes revenge again and again as an unseen narrator describes different versions of the story. In one of them, Furiosa simply shoots Dementus in the back of the head. In another, she drags him from the back of the car, an echo of how Dementus killed Jack. We also see Furiosa crucify Dementus, another return to her despicable acts. (This is how Dementus killed Furiosa’s mother near the beginning of the film.)
Then, the narrator tells a final version of the ending that he supposedly heard directly from Furiosa herself. In this scene, an old, decrepit Dementus is somewhere in Joe’s Citadel with a tree – a fully grown tree – growing out of his body. This tree is supposedly the product of the seed that Furiosa’s mother gave her as a child. Throughout the film, we see the extreme lengths that Furiosa goes to to protect this seed, even going so far as to make a wig out of her own hair to hide it.
After this strange revelation, Furiosa goes to visit Joe’s wives — the same ones we recognize in Mad Max: Fury Road. She takes them to the War Rig and how FuriousThroughout the credits, we see glimpses of her journey in that previous film, including footage of Charlize Theron as the original Furiosa.
FuriousThe climactic moments of have already inspired quite a bit of debate among those who have seen it. Which ending is “true”? What “really” happens to Dementus? Should we take the end of the tree literally? And how much time passed during this conclusion? He does Fury Road start immediately after Furious ends?
Last first: yes and no. If for FuriousBy the end of you mean the scene where Furiosa meets Joe’s wives and they sneak into the War Rig, so yeah, Fury Road starts right after that. But while Miller isn’t explicit about this, some time definitely passes between Dementus’ death (or his transformation into human tree soil) and that final moment between Furiosa and the wives. On the one hand, Furiosa is still Anya Taylor-Joy (28 years old) when she kills Dementus and is Charlize Theron (40 years old at the time) in Fury Road. It took at least a few years for this change to make sense.
As for the specifics of what happens between Furiosa and Dementus, the lack of clarity is part of the issue. Narration and the use of chapters as a resource for telling stories give Furious the structure of a myth. And myths like the Oedipus tales or Icarus, passed down orally for centuries, were often told in different versions based on who was telling it and where they learned the story in the first place.
Greek myths were also full of impossible events; gods and magic and moments that defy rational explanation — like, say, a tree growing out of Chris Hemsworth’s desiccated body. The world of Mad Max likewise, it exists outside the bounds of rational science. This is a fictional universe inhabited by War Boys and various weird mutants with all kinds of robotic appendages. This place does not follow our rules and laws.
If you planted a seed inside a guy’s body, nothing would grow from it. (You would probably also be charged with attempted murder.) Mad Max, it’s not very difficult that something like this could actually happen. A tree growing on Chris Hemsworth is stranger than the Doof Warrior, the guy who rides in the back of one of Immortan Joe’s trucks playing a flame-throwing electric guitar? In truth.
But it’s also possible to read this sequence as the moment when Furiosa transforms from a young girl into a mythical heroine whose deeds take on grandiose qualities. And the tree scene itself is loaded with symbolism. The first images of Furious are the title character of Green Place, picking a piece of fruit from a tree, an obvious allusion to the Garden of Eden and the story of Adam and Eve. Not long after Furiosa takes the fruit, it is stolen from her home by the henchmen of Dementus; cast out of Eden, so to speak, into a world full of violence and pain – and without any trees.
Therefore, turning Dementus into a tree is the ultimate act of revenge; not just killing him, but restoring some of what he took from Furiosa in the first place. Coming after Furiosa’s more than ten years of suffering, it also brings to mind the old expression “patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”.
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