“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” enjoys and is burdened by a glorious inheritance. The first three installments of director George Miller’s dystopian vision, starring Mel Gibson, are cult classics. The fourth, “Mad Max: Fury Road,” suffered a gestation period of 30 years before emerging a triumph and earning six Academy Awards, after its release in 2015. Now comes “Furiosa,” the prequel, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, to stake its claim in Mr. Miller’s Valhalla. 

About midway through the two-and-a-half-hour film, one of its two villains, Dementus (played with charismatic camp by Chris Hemsworth), asks, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Mr. Miller clearly does. The movie’s setting, the Wasteland, is so desolate it possesses its own kind of majesty. His gears, cars, and rusty motorbikes are rendered with such detail that they appear to possess personalities. A physician, he is a poet of bodily deformity.

The plot of “Furiosa” possesses the simplicity of myth. Furiosa is born at the Green Place, a site of lush abundance among endless tracts of sand. She is kidnapped by henchmen of a local warlord — Dementus — who kills her mother in an effort to extract the location of the verdant homeland. Played with mute fury by Alyla Browne, the young Furiosa is bartered to an even more malevolent warlord, Immortan Joe, the last film’s primary antagonist.

Intended to serve as one of Joe’s wives, Furiosa instead shaves her head and blends in with the hoard of mechanics cum slaves that staff the Citadel. That redoubt is, along with the Bullet Farm and Gastown — functions self-explanatory — all that is left of human civilization. It is a bleak world of iron and petrol where a guzzle of gas is more valuable than a human life. Hobbes’s summary of life as “nasty, brutish, and short” has rarely been more apt. 

Furiosa, like a post-apocalyptic Horatio Alger, comes of age in this broken world. She tattoos a map home onto herself and is bent on blood. Ms. Taylor-Joy’s wide-set eyes are extraordinary instruments — pools that can draw in or cast out, at once slivers of the moon and swirling black holes. To call her character a heroine would be to obscure the switchblade efficiency, the steampunk flavor, of the violence she endures and exports. 

To plot a course home, Furiosa must navigate the war between Joe and Dementus. It is a conflict fought with exuberance and stupidity over dwindling resources and the mauling savagery that accompanies scarcity. Mr. Miller’s capacity, though, for rendering the berserk with beauty remains unmatched. His camera swoops and swerves, zooms and zags. The cadence of his wide shots and claustrophobic closeups amounts to a distinctive vernacular. 

If “Furiosa” lacks some of the weird wonder of “Fury Road,” that is only because it precedes it in plot but is being released a decade later. Mr. Miller’s exacting and exhilarating choreography is familiar, his Wasteland no longer terra incognita. Prequels also suffer from a structural shortcoming — the audience knows that the story ends where the next film begins. Furiosa’s future, played by Charlize Theron in “Fury Road,” is already written.

There is little that is entirely new in “Furiosa,” but the new movie gives depth and heft to the sorrow that seeps through the franchise like an oil spill staining the sand. Dementus declares that “there is no hope,” and Mr. Miller appears inclined to agree, if not entirely. Hope here is a feral and itchy thing, but it is slender and ailing. The places of abundance are perpetually vulnerable to rapacity. They might already be gone, replaced by terrains of terror.

Correction: Alyla Browne is the name of the actress who plays the young Furiosa. An incorrect name appeared in an earlier version.