Motorcycles Star in Latest Trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

It’s an origin story for the female lead character Furiosa, played in the last installment by the Academy Award-winning Charlize Theron. This time a younger version of Theron’s character, played by Taylor-Joy, is snatched from “the Green Place of Many Mothers,” what appears to be a man-free Eden, by raging bikers led by a hairy, bearded Hemsworth as Dr. Dementus. Thereafter, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa must battle villains to return to the bucolic paradise of her upbringing.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, you say, but in between it looks like there are lots of great motorcycle chases.

While information is not as forthcoming at this point as the last Mad Max movie, we do have two trailers and a small handful of stills through which to guess about the motorcycles, since we’re assuming you’d rather hear about the bikes than the bios.

Hemsworth leads the bad boys in a wild, three-motorcycle chariot. You may have seen two-motorcycle chariots raced in support events at small-town dirt tracks, and those do look like a lot of fun. You bolt two bikes together and control the throttles and steering from the rolling, standup chariot contraption attached behind. But the chariot in the movie is three bikes bolted together, with Hemsworth wearing a cape and belting out leadership as the gang marauds along.

Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy out of costume. Note the rat rod.

At least one of the three—and a separate, blower-fan-powered bike next to it—looks like a BMW, with flat-twin heads poking out from the case. To Helmsworth’s left is another BMW that looks like a police cruiser setup. In fact, zooming in, almost all the bikes look like Beemers. An email to BMW seeking clarification resulted in a single-line confirmation: “Yes, BMW Motorrad was involved in Mad Max Furiosa.” Just about any BMW would make a good mount for raiding random civilized outposts.

There are other cool cars: a six-wheeled tow truck, several rat-rod dune buggies, and various musclecars.

The rest of the movie? Here’s what the release promises:

“As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.”

Hard to see but a bad guy just got crushed in the descending gate spikes!

Taylor-Joy gets to drive what looks like an early-’60s Plymouth Valiant made into a pickup truck, so she has fun as well, in an existentialist way.

We hope to have more for you as we get closer to the movie’s release date of May 22. Until then, ride on!

Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed Ford, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.