It will be a real shame if George Miller doesn’t get to make his mooted follow-up, The Wasteland, because of the low takings of such a creatively ambitious and oddball film as Furiosa

The film industry is obsessed with box office figures. The Tinseltown trades spend far more time focusing on whichever recent blockbuster has lost $200m than they do on the movies that pick up critical plaudits. There is a constant sense that, with such huge budgets flying around in the era of Avatar: The Way of Water ($350m, reportedly) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($326m, same) that the entire financial Hollywood house of cards could be about to come crashing down faster than one can mutter “massive CGI mega-budget” under one’s breath.

I was once fortunate enough to share the same rarefied air as Willem Dafoe, who asked me politely, in response to an impertinent question regarding the elevated budget of the sci-fi flick in which he had just portrayed a four-armed, green-skinned, 15ft Martian, whether I or anybody else really cared how much a movie cost. For all I know, Dafoe had trotted this one out with trademark sly and irresistible charm for every hapless interviewer that day at the Dorchester, but either way I was reminded of it this week after George Miller’s excellent Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was greeted with brickbats after only making $32m (£25m) over its debut weekend at the US box office. “Worst Memorial Day opening in three decades” screamed the Hollywood Reporter, before suggesting that Furiosa’s box office results “puts brakes on George Miller’s next Mad Max movie”.

George Miller’s world-building spectacle is an assault on the senses that’s given a human heart by its remarkable star

“The question is: do you have it in you to make it epic?” Garrulous and utterly deranged despot Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is making small talk with Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is in no mood for idle chatter. The moment comes towards the end of the movie; by this point in the film, Furiosa is a single-minded, flint-eyed avenger with a customised power tool for an arm. It’s a great line, which Hemsworth delivers with a lip-smacking relish. But given the barnstorming action onslaught that has preceded the exchange, it’s a question that is probably redundant. This is a George Miller picture, after all. Epic is all part of a day’s work. But even by the standards of the previous films in the Mad Max series (Fury Road is the closest in tone, but there are marked differences between the two pictures), this is a huge, marauding monster of a movie. See it on the biggest screen if you can; let the thunderous rumble of customised war rigs shake your seats, and the sandblasted angry ochre colour palette grind itself into your pores.

As the title suggests, we follow the backstory of Furiosa, the character played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron. Here, she’s performed as a child by Alyla Browne and as a young woman by Taylor-Joy. On the physical resemblance alone, it’s superb casting – the two look almost uncannily similar. Beyond that, they are both independently impressive in the role. Browne lets us see the wily calculation beneath the shell of trauma in the little girl ripped from her mother and her community and forced to see things no child should witness. And Taylor-Joy is a pleasure to watch in the action sequences, which take up probably 90% of the film. Her lithe agility and cunning is a refreshing counterpoint to all the lumbering muscle and firepower. She’s tiny in comparison with most of the cast, but give her a grappling hook and a set of wheels and you genuinely believe she could best any of them.

The star plays an analyst forced to see AI’s benefits in a brash sci-fi adventure that plays like it was made two decades ago

Memorial Day weekend has long been a vital, lucrative calendar date in Hollywood, a three-day stretch that’s birthed blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible, The Lost World and Top Gun: Maverick. As George Miller’s bombastic Mad Max prequel Furiosa urges those to the big screen, Netflix has something for the majority staying home – the sci-fi adventure Atlas, and it’s the kind of big, dumb, irony-free schlock that would have premiered theatrically on this very date two decades prior. And perhaps that’s the best way to view it, as knowing nostalgia bait, designed to appeal to those who prefer to look back rather than forward, an exercise in early ’00s immersion.

If only that’s how those involved with Atlas actually saw it, then maybe there’d be more fun to be had. But as with many of the streamer’s other mockbusters – its more naked attempts to compete with the biggest of boys – it’s all too synthetic and serious to possess anything close to self-awareness.

There’s plenty to still admire in Indy’s second outing but it remains an ungainly and, at times, culturally offensive adventure

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom begins with an action sequence that’s almost exactly 20 minutes long, starting with a show-stopping east-meets-west rendition of Anything Goes at a Shanghai nightclub in 1935 and ending in the whitewater rapids at the foot of the Himalayas. For the director Steven Spielberg, whose Raiders of the Lost Ark had instantly been canonized as an all-time great adventure movie only three years before, the only option was to top himself, to make a sequel so breathlessly paced and technically proficient that audiences would be whisked along relentlessly. At one point, it literally becomes a rollercoaster ride, with runaway cars zipping through a mine shaft like Space Mountain.

But the opening action sequence does end. And while there’s a generous array of other outstanding set pieces to come, The Temple of Doom has to do the ugly business of moving the story forward through characters and cultures colliding, and through the sort of mythological nonsense that brought Nazis and religious artefacts together in the original. This is where The Temple of Doom got itself into trouble 40 years ago and still hasn’t quite recovered, despite ample evidence that Spielberg, still hot off Raiders and ET the Extra-Terrestrial, was at the peak of his powers. There are so many qualifiers to liking the film – Kate Capshaw, “Short Round” and chilled monkey brains just for starters – that it’s almost too exhausting to defend.