(Bloomberg) -- Flies buzz around a skull rotting in the desert. One lands on the brow, but immediately, a lizard wriggles out of an eye socket to swallow it whole. No sooner does the animal lick its lips than a roaring motorbike rolls over it, smashing flies, lizard, skull and all into the dust.

Welcome to the pitiless world of Australian auteur George Miller. The director is back with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the Oscar-winning reboot of his celebrated 1980s post-apocalyptic trilogy. For the first time, despite being all over the title, Max himself is nowhere to be found. (Well, he’s got a cameo, but if you blink you’ll miss it.)

This movie belongs to Furiosa, the steely badass first brought to life by Charlize Theron in Fury Road. It starts with Furiosa as a small girl (Alyla Browne) being ripped from her home, slung over the back of a motorbike and spirited across the desert to begin a life of horror enslaved to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Episode by traumatizing episode follows as she grows into a young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy)—and a simmering revenge machine.

Or, the movie would belong to her if her nemesis, played with fearless relish by Hemsworth, weren’t so fascinating. Brawny and tanned, wearing a crazy, scraggly beard and a goofy cape dyed blood-red, Dementus makes an irresistible psychopath, cracking jokes as he motors over bystanders, sets people on fire or savors a human-blood sausage.

Compared this roaring beast, Taylor-Joy, who doesn’t appear in the film for the first hour, seems uncomfortable pulling off the physical feats Theron swaggered through in Fury Road. She’s trying awfully hard, and it shows against Hemsworth’s naturally larger-than-life ease.

Eventually, he passes her off to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), another sadistic warlord; thenceforth, she plots her revenge against the broader canvas of the Wasteland, whose chaotic landscape and rival factions are pictured in detail here for the first time in the film cycle. 

Taylor-Joy does have one feature that no one else in this movie—or any movie—can match: her huge, anime eyes. They may make her the ideal actor for this sort of film, which is essentially a graphic novel. (One wishes Bette Davis had lived to do some blockbuster action or sci-fi flicks!) Miller and cinematographer Simon Duggan lean perhaps too heavily on Taylor-Joy’s ocular assets, often shooting her from about 18 inches away so she can burn us alive with a glare.

And even if we don’t quite buy her brawn, those eyes definitely sell her rage. “You fabulous thing,” Dementus tells her in the movie’s climax. “You crawled out of a pitiless grave deeper than hell. Only one thing’s gonna do that for you. And not hope. Hate! No shame in hate, it’s one of the great forces of nature.”

The wonder of Furiosa, like Fury Road before it, is that it succeeds in unleashing just such forces, despite being utterly, irredeemably ridiculous.

For starters, there’s this central bit of nonsense: The Green Place—the paradisical home from which Dementus’ henchmen snatched Furiosa—is about a day’s ride from his camp and the other hellish spots in the Wasteland, tucked into a ravine and surrounded by unique rock formations. Yet in several decades of searching and generally tearing up the surrounding desert, no one in all those packs of hog-riding marauders has ever found it?

Also, what kind of psychopath names their little girl Furiosa? The inhabitants of this hell, male and female, follow only the logic of machismo. Consider their preposterously amped-up vehicles—an insane motorbike troika-chariot; some utterly unwieldy black-feathered parasails; the war-machine oil rig outfitted with a deadly Cuisinart sort of thing. They’re all totally impractical, but they do look fierce.

And when all these screeching machines collide, as in a nerve-racking set-piece battle between the rig and the parasailing motorbikes, the film is truly exhilarating.

Furiosa is not the tour de force that was Fury Road. Its episodic structure doesn’t build to the same crescendo—and along the way, the CGI has some surprisingly janky moments. But it’s also not so self-serious. For a movie about a post-apocalyptic dystopia, it’s very funny, particular when Hemsworth is chewing the scenery. 

Speaking to the New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger, Miller said he’s always admired the purity of early silent films. “How can you take a series of events, none of which are in themselves really spectacular, and create a sequence of shots like a passage of music?” With the Mad Max films, which have precious little dialogue, he’s done something awfully close. Furiosa is an action ballet, a melée of metal and smoke and dust and blood.

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