Nine years after Mad Max: Fury Road came out and blew our collective minds to pieces, the long-awaited prequel Furiosa has finally arrived. Its long stint in development purgatory and status as the follow-up to one of the greatest action movies ever made put a lot of pressure on it – so does man director George Miller have it in him to make it epic?

Starting with Furiosa’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) childhood, we see her lose both her mother and her home to the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, going full bogan). The movie then follows her journey over the next 15 years, rising through the ranks at Immortan Joe’s Citadel while constantly seeking vengeance on the man who took everything from her.

It’s almost perverse how much Furiosa refuses to be “more Fury Road”. The marketing suggested another gonzo action extravaganza with a similar propulsive pace, and that is not at all what Miller has delivered here. Aesthetically it’s absolutely of a piece with its predecessor, but the tone and feel of the thing are almost jarringly different. Fury Road was pretty much two hours of pure action, an adrenaline needle straight to the heart, and it almost feels misleading to call Furiosa an action movie at all.

To be sure, the action is superb when it arrives, but this is arguably more of a post-apocalyptic character drama, occasionally punctuated by car chases, than an outright action film. The climactic action sequence, a “40-day war”, takes place almost entirely offscreen, and the War Rig chase that’s the action centrepiece has an almost relaxed feel to it, a far cry from the mania and desperation that characterised Fury Road. But that’s quite deliberate: here, Furiosa isn’t making an against-all-odds bid to spirit the Immortan’s slaves away to freedom. She’s just going to Gastown to get some gas. It’s just another day in her life.

Furiosa recalls The Raid 2 in its determination to not simply give the audience more of what they think they want, and also in how much more of a focus there is on plot this time around. Fury Road’s plot can be summed up by two arrows, one going away and one coming back (to be clear, this is emphatically not a point against it), and there’s a lot more going on here. This is a sweeping, years-long epic which expands the world of the Wasteland beyond its predecessor’s understandably narrow scope, as well as a revenge quest narrative that summons up memories of the original Mad Max. A lot more stuff happens, which is a refreshing change of pace but does also bloat proceedings a bit.

Its insistence on not being a rehash will definitely serve it well, because Fury Road was a genuine lightning-in-a-bottle miracle movie and they were never going to top it. Nonetheless, Furiosa is definitely less focused and more meandering, as well as significantly longer. It’s something like an hour into the running time before Taylor-Joy, the top-billed star, even appears on screen, and there’s definitely material that could have been cut.

Nonetheless, the ending pulls everything – character, plot and themes – together in magnificent fashion. It perfectly crystallizes what the movie is about, and gives both Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth a chance to really shine, proper complicated character work that could so easily have fallen by the (fury) roadside. There’s a coda in Fury Road where text appears on screen reading “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?” This movie is Furiosa’s search for her better self, how she goes from being driven solely by revenge to the utterly selfless heroine of Fury Road.

Furiosa is a narratively and thematically rich, deceptively complicated movie that may well surprise audiences in how totally different it is from its beloved forebear. But Terminator 2 is also one of the greatest action movies of all time, and of its four sequels, three of them are just trying to be Terminator 2 again. Do you anything about Terminator Genisys? Of course you don’t. Furiosa has no interest in reliving past glories, and is so much better for it. You will her.