I just reread my Mad Max: Fury Road review and boy, was I enthusiastic. Nine years later and my five-star rating hasn’t changed; it still might be the best action movie of the 21st century. So how is it that I’m finding myself scoring its prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, half a Pulse lower, yet feeling like I liked it even more than Fury Road?

Furiosa (the terrible SEO subtitle will be dropped henceforth) tells the years-spanning story of its title character, starting when she was just a girl. Broken into chapters, the first is as exciting a prologue as I’ve seen in recent memory. A young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped by a small group of bandits. Her mother, Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser), is electric as she tracks her daughter’s kidnappers by moonlight through the desert. The film is chock-full of characters so magnetic as to warrant their own spin-offs or prequels—a practice I don’t casually condone. When Furiosa’s captor, Dementus (Hemsworth), gets the better of Mary and Furiosa, it puts into motion the epic tale of revenge that follows.

What makes this opening sequence, and indeed the entire film, so compelling, is George Miller’s mastery over storytelling. The story is nothing fancy, simple as a mother chasing after her stolen daughter, but in the telling of it we learn that they are from a hidden oasis, the location of which must be protected at all costs, that Furiosa has already been raised to be resourceful, and that she gets it all from her mother. All this unfolds while the action sequences themselves, which comprise about 70% of the movie, follow a logic that raises the stakes with each escalating action and reaction resulting in each scene’s explosive conclusion, all while being shot with gusto and immaculate craftmanship. Spielberg is a master at this. Miller might be better.

By dint of this being a prequel, we basically know how this story ends. This is my one detraction from the film. Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy (who doesn’t appear till nearly an hour in) are both excellent in the role of a character who is hard to truly worry about. Thankfully, Miller surrounds Furiosa with both empathetic and insanely detestable characters whose fates aren’t quite as certain. There are too many to name here, many of whom make their return from Fury Road (so, fates somewhat certain) but no one seems happier to be in this movie than Chris Hemsworth in the role of Dementus, who sprouts like a seedling seeing sunlight for the first time after wallowing in shadows of the MCU for so long.

I feel like I could say so much more about Furiosa and why I enjoyed it just a bit more than Fury Road. Like its predecessor, it is a technicolor daymare, a ballet of brutality, a masterclass of mayhem. And even though it suffers from prequel-itus, it’s every bit of what Fury Road was and just a little bit more.