Preceding Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, George Miller directed ten full-length narrative features. Of those, half were sequels. Considering how creatively dynamic Miller is in his filmmaking craft — how truly visionary he can be — it’s strange to think of him so consistently circling back to the familiar. His latest film is directed connected to his debut, released forty-five years ago, though the relative simplicity and sparseness of the original Mad Max feels as distant from where the ongoing story has wound up as Miller’s native Australia is from Neptune. Maybe unique among modern cinema creators, Miller is driven to take what he knows and go more and more daring with it, as if seeing how much risky excess and feverish emotion any given narrative can bear.

Furiosa narrows in on the title character, who was introduced in Mad Max: Fury Road and originally played by Charlize Theron. The film is an origin story, beginning as Furiosa is a young girl (Alyla Browne) and follows her as she grows into spindly, angry adulthood (when Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role). Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Nico Lathouris (who was also credited on the Fury Road script), Miller fills in Furiosa’s history in the dystopian wasteland where the film takes place. He details how she came to be at the fortress city known as the Citadel and the set of circumstance that led to her losing an arm and replacing it with a steampunk-ish prosthetic. The freshly revealed backstory is notably thorough and arguably an unnecessary embellishment.

I don’t know that these questions were even smoldering, much less burning, and much of what plays out just isn’t that compelling without the context of the preceding film. Part of the problem is that Furiosa is something of a cipher in this new effort. Taylor-Joy snarls and glowers effectively enough, but can’t find the depth that Theron had. That shortcoming is partially attributable — maybe largely attributable — to Furiosa’s goals remaining elusive throughout the film that bears her name. Her longing to find her childhood home that was a potent motivation in Fury Road feels remote here, merely residual from the other film. For a movie that is ostensibly about Furiosa’s empowerment, the character is almost entirely defined by how others see her, whether the benevolent motoring mentor Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) or the buffoonish warlord-wannabe Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, hamming it up) who inspires her vengeance.

Where Furiosa falters in some of its fundamentals, it compensates with Miller’s sense of action spectacle. The new film doesn’t match the grand kinetic astonishments of Fury Road, but that’s not a fair measure. Few collections of meticulous mayhem could slam together into the perfect storm that will undoubtedly stand as Miller’s pinnacle. Taken on its own merits, Furiosa is loaded with action sequences that seem beyond the reach of mortal men, and yet there they are up on the screen. In conceiving of and staging these scenes, Miller’s almost peerless expertise remains undimmed. If Furiosa doesn’t fully satisfy, I can’t deny Miller’s virtuoso style. He keeps pushing that engine hard.