Fury Road jolted the Mad Max franchise back to life with concentrated doses of high-octane, practically produced spectacle ripped directly out of director George Miller’s twisted imagination. The film framed its titular hero as more of an idea than a man and, by doing so, created space for one of Miller’s most riveting new characters to shine.

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Furiosa: A Mad Mad Saga — Warner Bros’ new Fury Road prequel — attempts a similar kind of mythologization as it jumps back in time to a point when green things still grew in the apocalypse. Compared to Fury Road’s deranged bombast, Furiosa feels like a leaner, more artfully realized vision of raw humanity struggling to survive in spite of itself. But the new film has a tendency to treat its namesake as the fulcrum around which a story is happening instead of someone participating in it, which is a shame considering how she’s the big draw.

Whereas previous Mad Max films have essentially been snapshots from a war-torn future, Furiosa chronicles the entire young adulthood of Furiosa (Alyla Browne in flashbacks and Anya Taylor-Joy closer to the present), one of the last people to know what it was like to grow up in the fabled Green Place of Many Mothers. Furiosa is just one of many kids able to truly thrive in the Green Place thanks to its natural abundance (read: fresh food and water) and relative seclusion within the treacherous Australian wasteland. But for all the safety Furiosa feels in her early years, she’s also keenly aware of how tenuous that security is. When her people are ultimately attacked by raiders, she knows the Green Place’s survival in secrecy hinges on the outsiders’ deaths.

By opening Furiosa in the Green Place and foregrounding it as the environment that first shaped Furiosa herself, Miller establishes early on how interested he is in using this film to illustrate the durability of ideas. As Furiosa’s snatched away from her idyllic home and enslaved by sadistic warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the film spotlights how life in the wasteland can turn people into their most monstrous selves. But Furiosa’s memories of the Green Place, and its impact on how she sees the world, are part of what make her so well-suited to deal with the outside horrors.

Whereas Fury Road often felt like a gasoline and piss-soaked lucid dream punctuated with guitar riffs and the roar of flamethrowers, Furiosa unfolds much more like a stage play told in bookended acts that all crystalize how Furiosa became a warrior. Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris emphasize the importance of Furiosa’s perceptiveness as the film fleshes out the cast of weatherbeaten ghouls who serve Dementus. These include The History Man (George Shevtsov) and interpretive dance proclaimer Smeg (David Collins). Though none of Dementus’ goons can make sense of why the enslaved girl won’t speak, through them, she’s able to learn what it means to live among predatory strongmen who harness fear as a weapon.