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Critics Consensus

Staging the improbable car stunts and crashes to perfection, director George Miller succeeds completely in bringing the violent, post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max to visceral life. Read critic reviews

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In a not-too-distant dystopian future, when man's most precious resource -- oil -- has been depleted and the world plunged into war, famine and financial chaos, the last vestiges of the law in Australia attempt to restrain a vicious biker gang. Max (Mel Gibson), an officer with the Main Force Patrol, launches a personal vendetta against the gang when his wife (Joanne Samuel) and son are hunted down and murdered, leaving him with nothing but the instincts for survival and retribution.

Genre: Action, Adventure

Original Language: English

Director: George Miller

Producer: Byron Kennedy

Writer: James McCausland , George Miller

Release Date (Theaters): Jun 13, 1980 wide

Release Date (Streaming): Aug 24, 2016

Runtime: 1h 33m

Distributor: American International Pictures

Production Co: Kennedy Miller Productions, Mad Max Films, Crossroads

Sound Mix: Mono

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

"Mad" Max Rockatansky

Joanne Samuel

Jessie Rockatansky

Hugh Keays-Byrne

Steve Bisley

Fifi Macaffee

Vincent Gil

Crawford "Nightrider" Montizano

Johnny the Boy

Geoff Parry

Bubba Zanetti

Paul Johnstone

MFP Officer Charlie

Jonathan Hardy

Police Commissioner Labatouche

Sheila Florance

May Swaisey

George Miller

James McCausland

Byron Kennedy

Bill Miller

Associate Producer

Original Music

David Eggby

Cinematographer

Cliff Hayes

Film Editing

Tony Paterson

Mitch Matthews

Jon Dowding

Production Design

Art Director

Clare Griffin

Costume Design

Vivien Mepham

Makeup Artist

Hair Stylist

Steve Connard

Second Assistant Director

Ian Goddard

First Assistant Director

Sound Effects

Gary Wilkins

Sound Recordist

News & Interviews for Mad Max

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Critic Reviews for Mad Max

Audience reviews for mad max.

I didn't enjoy this film as much as I wanted to, I found the story to be predictable and dull, The acting wasn't great, The villains were just a a typical crazy biker gang and didn't seem a threat to anyone other than women and children, It did have some good car chase scenes and some cool stunts but it felt too dull and the ending was pretty tame compared to what I thought it would be like, It's not a terrible film more of a let down.

There is a reason why Mad Max remains a cult classic, George Miller created a violent apocalyptic world where fuels are now scarce and violent gangs terrorise people. Mel Gibson was the star of this film in his very early film career, he truly did a marvellous job playing the titular character. Overall, Mad Max has enough car stunts to satisfy action buffs, even if the acting was not the greatest.

A very good debut for a great franchise. Mad Max has a great storyline, cool stunts and an amazing performance by Mel Gibson. It does get boring in some segments and isn't as action packed as later installments but this film does work great as a revenge thriller.

More grindhouse than post-Apocalypse wheelhouse, this drive-in adrenaline rush established a blockbuster brand and put Mel Gibson on the map. It was shot mostly on the cheap, but you wouldn't know it. Staging Fast & Furious-level hot-rod blockbusting on a Two-Lane Blacktop budget, this origin tale exhibits a biting - albeit offbeat - sense of humor and balletic violence that rightly earned it an instant cult status. Indeed, Mad Max isn't for everybody. It's more dialogue driven and stagy than the superior follow-up, The Road Warrior, and shares only basic DNA with Fury Road, but it sets a winning grindhouse cinema tone that carries through to this day in top shelf form. In this R-rated thriller, a vengeful Australian policeman (Gibson) sets out to stop a violent motorcycle gang in a self-destructing post-apocalyptic world. George Miller and Mel Gibson seem to be planning this road trip as it goes. Driven but cagier than in future stories, the titular anti-hero gets played more as a feral vigilante here. In the next two superior installments, Gibson's Mad Max assumes the mantle of lone wolf-turned-reluctant hero. For now, however, this less assured young actor exhibits definite chops but still exudes lethal weapons-grade charisma. You can't turn away, even if this iteration of Max lacks the steely cool machismo of Road Warrior. More of a cornered animal striking out, his magnetism keeps us vested, as does Miller's H'Wood-level stunt spectaculars. Bottom line: The Passion of the Crikey

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George Miller ’s “Mad Max” films didn’t just make Mel Gibson a star—they completely transformed post-apocalyptic entertainment with their visceral stunt work and singular vision of an increasingly desperate future. Three decades after the last film, the oft-maligned “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” Miller finally returns to this desolate landscape for the highly-anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road,” recasting the title role in the grizzled visage of Tom Hardy and upping the stakes with promises of vehicular mayhem on a level commensurate with what modern CGI audiences have come to expect.

From its very first scenes, “Fury Road” vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster. Miller hasn’t just returned with a new installment in a money-making franchise. The man who re-wrote the rules of the post-apocalyptic action genre has returned to show a generation of filmmakers how they’ve been stumbling in their attempts to follow in his footsteps.

“ Who was more crazy? Me, or everyone else? ” In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller has pushed his Gilliam-esque vision of a world gone mad to its logical extreme. No longer are the people of Max Rockatansky’s world merely scavengers for oil or power; they have been transformed into creatures of circumstance, either left with one defining need or left without any semblance of reason. “Fury Road” is a violent film, but the violent acts in this world don’t feel like arbitrary action beats—they emerge from a complete lack of other options or a firm sense of straight-up insanity. Miller’s new vision of Max isn’t a warrior. Rather, he’s a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive. He walks with the ghosts of those he couldn’t save, and his traveling companions have pushed him to the brink of sanity.

While wandering at this edge, Max is kidnapped and transformed into a literal blood bag for a feral warrior named Nux ( Nicholas Hoult ), who serves the whims of his maniacal ruler, Immortan Joe ( Hugh Keays-Byrne , who also played the villain Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”). From the start, Miller gives you no time to “ease” into this world or the story he wants to tell. The frame rate is accelerated, the editing is hyperactive, the bad guy speaks through a mask that makes half his dialogue indecipherable (shades of Hardy’s Bane from “ The Dark Knight Rises ”), and the horrific visions of Miller’s twisted future come fast and furious. Immortan Joe is a barely-alive freak of nature, kept breathing by tubes connected to his face and served by similarly disfigured half-humans with definitive names like Rictus Erectus ( Nathan Jones ) and The People Eater ( John Howard ).

One of Joe’s most notable warriors is a powerful woman known as Imperator Furiosa ( Charlize Theron ), who, as the film opens, is leading a convoy from Immortan Joe’s citadel to the oil refinery Gastown when she deviates off course. It turns out that Furiosa has kidnapped Joe’s “breeders,” the women he keeps prisoner in an effort to create a male heir. She’s taking them to “the green place,” to safety . Of course, Joe sends his men after Furiosa—including Nux, to whom Max is still attached—and the rest of “Mad Max: Fury Road” consists of one long sustained chase across the unforgiving desert. With the exception of one centerpiece of dialogue, the film takes place almost entirely on the move, speeding, chasing, bouncing, and exploding across Miller’s scorched landscape.

As a reflection of more desperate times, Miller has updated the needs of his future world from commodities like oil to pure survival. Max has been reimagined as a fighting, driving machine, a man who “finds his own way,” moving forward in an attempt to outrun his ghosts. Nux is a brainwashed goon, a man-creature who believes that he will die and be reborn after sacrificing himself for a trip to Valhalla. Max eventually steps into the role of the action hero, but, in one of his most daring moves, Miller gives the weight of the narrative to Furiosa, a woman who holds on to the only thing that could possibly give her hope in this violent world—the next generation. Theron does arguably the best work of her career here, artfully conveying the drive in Furiosa’s soul in a way that fuels the entire film. She does more with a searing stare or clenched jaw than most actresses could with a page of dialogue. And one shouldn’t undervalue the empowerment message at the heart of this film—Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” consulted with Miller on the script—which suggests that women, as the creators of new life, will, inherently, always be the gender that holds hardest onto hope for the future. Furiosa looks at the insanity of the male leadership around her and decides enough is enough. When one of Furiosa’s wards goes into labor and still defends herself and her yet-to-be-born child (after being shot no less), it’s hard not to see “Fury Road” as an answer to the macho nonsense that so often defines the action genre.

But none of that should remotely imply that the action here is lost in the message. The pacing, the sound design, the editing, the music (courtesy of Junkie XL and some of Joe’s freaks who play drums and electric guitars during the action), and even the emotional stakes are all so far above average that they make just about any other car-chase movie look like a quaint Sunday drive by comparison. The first chase in “Fury Road,” as Joe’s men catch up to Furiosa and her precious cargo, is one of the most remarkable action sequences in film history. And that’s really just a warm-up. It’s no exaggeration to say that, if you think something in “Fury Road” is the most breathtaking action stunt you’ve seen in years, you really need only wait a few minutes to see something better. This is a movie where you keep thinking that its reached its apex and then, inexplicably, that moment is left behind in the dust.

From the very beginning, Miller and his team do something that so many other filmmakers fail to do—they define the geography of their action. Rather than merely tossing the camera around in the vain hopes of creating tension, they constantly give the viewer overhead shots and clear physical dimensions of what’s happening and where we’re going. And then they blow it all up. There are dozens of crashes, explosions, and flying bodies in “Fury Road,” and yet the piece never gets repetitive, especially as the emotional stakes increase with each sequence. Miller knows when to let the pace coast when it needs to, which is rarely, and then he pushes the pedal down and plasters you to your seat.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” is an action film about redemption and revolution. Never content to merely repeat what he’s done before (even the first three “Mad Max” have very distinct personalities), Miller has redefined his vision of the future yet again, vibrantly imagining a world in which men have become the pawns of insane leaders and women hold fiercely onto the last vestiges of hope. “Fury Road” would be remarkable enough as a pure technical accomplishment—a film that laughs in the face of blockbuster CGI orgies with some of the best editing and sound design the genre has ever seen—and yet Miller reaches for something greater than technical prowess. He holds aloft the action template that he created with “The Road Warrior” and argues that Hollywood shouldn’t have been copying it for the past three decades, they should have been building on it. “Fury Road” is a challenge to a whole generation of action filmmakers, urging them to follow its audacious path into the genre’s future and, like Miller, try their hardest to create something new.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

120 minutes

Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky

Charlize Theron as Furiosa

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Splendid

Nicholas Hoult as Nux

Zoë Kravitz as Toast

Riley Keough as Capable

Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus

George Miller
Nick Lathouris

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This Is Why the Original <i>Mad Max</i> Was Awesome

This Is Why the Original Mad Max Was Awesome

T he new Mad Max movie, Mad Max: Fury Road , in theaters this Friday, will be the first one in the franchise without the familiar face of Mel Gibson. (Tom Hardy plays Max this time around.)

But that might not really matter. As Richard Corliss wrote in his review of the original 1979 thriller, the title character wasn’t the real reason Mad Max worked:

As a story, the film makes for overwrought, even repellent melodrama. The movie has little feeling for, or interest in, the human idiosyncrasies of its characters; they are glorified stunt men, stock figures in stock cars. But Mad Max is not a “people picture.” It is an action movie whose subject is machines, and the sophisticated killing machine man could become. The hardware is the star here: the souped-up Chevies and demon motorcycles, captured by Miller’s supple, fender-level camera–one machine in sync with another. With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

In fact, Corliss wrote, Miller’s skill with the language of violence amounted to an example of true directorial integrity — and that its “tough-gutted intelligence” would be studied in film schools in years to come.

Read the full review, here in the TIME Vault: Poetic Car-Nage

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Common sense media reviewers.

Outlandish post-apocalyptic action is brutal; has sexism.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Evil threatens to overwhelm good, and justice feel

Max is a decent role model, if you can overlook th

All characters are White, as are the director, wri

Extreme, over-the-top violence is slightly tempere

Two instances of nude male butts. Nude female brea

Language includes one "f--k" and two instances of

Max enjoys a small glass of beer at home. Characte

Positive Messages

Evil threatens to overwhelm good, and justice feels like a pipe dream in a future where resources are scarce and law enforcement has lost funding. Standing up to crime and injustice is dangerous, sometimes fatal, but necessary to protect strangers and loved ones alike.

Positive Role Models

Max is a decent role model, if you can overlook the fact that his job requires high-speed chases, guns, and a great deal of violence. At home, he's very loving with his wife and child, and when things get tough, his first thought is to protect them. Unfortunately, without his family, he becomes just as sadistic and violent as the criminals he was pursuing. Other members of law enforcement are less admirable: For every cop who puts himself in harm's way to help someone, there's an on-duty cop spying on two people having sex. It's a bleak world, and they're portrayed as doing what they can, while they can.

Diverse Representations

All characters are White, as are the director, writers, and producer. Young female characters are portrayed as sex objects with few (if any) lines. The hero's wife has a reasonable amount of screen time and is smart at identifying and escaping from threats, but she's also sexualized when she's doing this (wearing a bikini, beach cover-up, oversized men's shirt with no pants, etc.). A woman's death is used as motivation for the hero.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extreme, over-the-top violence is slightly tempered by several scenes of Max's blissful home life. But the violent sequences include many explosive crashes, chases, guns, severed limbs, bloody wounds, and mangled corpses. A toddler is nearly run over by speeding cars. A man is tied to a motorcycle and dragged through town. A couple is attacked and pulled from their vehicle; rape is implied, though not shown. The woman is found by police alive but chained up and traumatized. A supporting character is burned alive inside a car -- viewers see his distress beforehand and his severely burnt hand after. A woman is stalked, threatened, and run over by motorcycles (no gore or close-up shots of body). Pet dog is killed off-screen; his mangled body is shown. In what looks like a failed attempt at a stunt, a moving motorcycle actually smacks a man in the head. Hero's violent revenge spree is portrayed as morally justified.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two instances of nude male butts. Nude female breast and butt in profile. A naked couple has sex, watched from a distance through the filter of a rifle scope. A married couple kisses and cuddles while the husband is either shirtless or draped with a towel. A young couple wakes up in the backseat of a car, half-dressed (sensitive parts covered). They're attacked, and rape is implied (see "Violence & Scariness" section). Villains undress a store mannequin then pretend to make love to it.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes one "f--k" and two instances of "s--t." Also, "a--hole," "bitch," "bastard," "hell," and derogatory Australian slang "scag." "God," "Christ," and "Jesus Christ" are used as exclamations. The hero doesn't swear.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Max enjoys a small glass of beer at home. Characters are briefly seen smoking and drinking in a cabaret.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Mad Max, the first movie in the Mad Max franchise , stars a then-unknown ( Mel Gibson ) as a leather-clad police officer who takes down a violent motorcycle gang in a dystopian Australia. It's a celebration and an onslaught of intense violence, including car chases, guns, and dismemberment, though not a huge amount of blood and gore. The hero, Mad Max (Gibson) is a loving husband and father, but he's outnumbered by evil, sadistic people in this more or less hopeless vision of the future. Characters are raped or burned alive, and there's a strong theme of revenge. There's brief nudity, and sexual content is implied or shown from afar. Language includes at least one use each of "f--k" and "s--t," plus "a--hole," "bitch," and more. Some characters drink briefly and smoke in a bar. The film falls very short on diversity and has subpar, sexualized portrayals of women. It was followed by two sequels, The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and rebooted in 2015 with Mad Max: Fury Road . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Kids say (28)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Mad Max is a lot of violence and crashes

What's the story.

In MAD MAX, a deranged criminal called "Nightrider" (Vincent Gil) steals a cop car and leads several futuristic law enforcement agents on a high-speed chase through rural Australia. He's finally brought down by top cop Max ( Mel Gibson ). Nightrider's death enrages his gang of sadistic motorcycle riders, led by Toecutter ( Hugh Keays-Byrne ), who vow revenge against Max. Max takes his wife ( Joanne Samuel ) and young son (Brendan Heath) to hide on the coast, but the villainous gang pursues them. Max will have to face them if he wants peace for his family.

Is It Any Good?

This memorable, groundbreaking low-budget exploitation hit established a certain set of rules for action movies and inspired many sequels and knock-offs. But today, Mad Max is perhaps more interesting historically than it is aesthetically. Certain sequences still dazzle, and director George Miller 's close-to-the-street cinematography captures the thrill of speed in a highly effective way. But the film doesn't really establish the rules of its post-apocalyptic future, and it's too uneven in tone; the scenes of cartoonish violence are a lot more interesting than the idyllic home life images of Max and his family.

It's the least of the original trilogy; the sequel, The Road Warrior , is darker and more streamlined, with a more sustained atmosphere, and the third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome , is more imaginative and fantasy-based.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the over-the-top violence in Mad Max . How does the movie try to justify the violence used by Max and the other members of Main Force Patrol? How did the use of violence affect Max?

If you've seen any of the other Mad Max movies, how do they compare to this original? What elements of the original Mad Max do you see in Mad Max: Fury Road ? How has the franchise evolved over time?

Are there any acts of kindness in the film? How are they received?

How do the car chases in this movie compare to car chases in more modern movies, like in the Fast & Furious franchise ? Do you prefer realistic car chases, like in Mad Max, using real cars with professional stunt drivers, or more fantastical car chases enhanced with computer-generated effects?

Why do you think the filmmakers chose to include sexual content? Did it serve a narrative purpose?

Movie Details

In theaters : May 9, 1979
On DVD or streaming : December 4, 2007
Cast : Hugh Keays-Byrne , Joanne Samuel , Mel Gibson
Director : George Miller
Studio : MGM/UA
Genre : Action/Adventure
Run time : 93 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : violence, language, and brief nudity
Last updated : March 31, 2024

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Mad Max Review: The Single Best Thing About the Movie Is...

By Zach Baron

This image may contain Human Person Weapon Weaponry Military Military Uniform Armored Army and Gun

In Mad Max: Fury Road , Charlize Theron plays Imperator Furiosa, a desert angel of death with a shaved head and a gift for operating big trucks and a prosthetic left arm, and in a way, everything you need to know about George Miller’s long-delayed Mad Max sequel can be gleaned from this arm. It is gorgeous, in its grand metallic ugliness—a claw, really, but delightful to look at, and to watch in action. How did Furiosa lose her arm? Who knows! In a more traditional modern summer blockbuster, or something by Marvel, where every character’s every impulse is carefully explained and duly mythologized, the arm would probably have an origin story; there might be an entire scene where Furiosa regards it sadly while relating how every motivation for every action she’s undertaken since relates to this missing arm. I lost it in a blimp accident that also took my mother, and that’s why I’ve hated blimps ever since...

But nah—no arm, no explanation, no problem. And this is the glory of the newest Mad Max : it just...is. Technicolor orange, like rancid macaroni and cheese, full of delightfully detailed war rigs and war boys, explosions splashing ecstatically over sand, each frame incredible to stare at. And it has a plot, of sorts: one gang of vehicles chases our heroes, Furiosa and Tom Hardy’s Max in first one direction and then another direction. But no origin stories, unless you count Max’s first couple of lines about the end of the world and the death of his loved ones, no elaborate fan service, no complicated mythologies to keep track of. Just a bunch of beautifully designed cars against a beautifully designed backdrop and a bunch of beautifully designed bad guys doing beautifully designed bad things to each other. It’s not complicated; you just sit in the theater and stare and listen to the engines rev.

Director George Miller was a 34-year-old emergency room doctor in Sydney, Australia when he made 1979’s original _Mad Max, _inspired by the bloody tableaux he saw daily at his hospital; cars wreaked a havoc he understood, having seen it up close. To make things even bleaker and more believable, he set the film in the future, around an oil crisis not unlike the one Australia had just suffered through. He cast an unknown Mel Gibson and made the movie with his doctor money and found that audiences responded to the mute savagery of the thing. So he made two increasingly loud and spectacular sequels, watched Gibson become whatever he became, and grew up into one of those avuncular Hollywood presences, turning his gifts for radical simplicity toward actual radically simple children’s movies: Babe: Pig in the City , Happy Feet , Happy Feet Two .

Miller is now 70 years old and 30 years removed from the last Mad Max movie. And yet somehow, Mad Max: Fury Road is the most progressive, smart, and radical blockbuster to come out in what feels like forever. How?! Well, for one thing, it’s not really about Max at all—though let us pause here to appreciate Tom Hardy once more, stoic, menacing, with a face whose mere expressions can carry a movie ( and did, in Locke ) and a manic, dangerous energy that is perfect for the screen (and off it too; fucking alley, right? ), no matter what screen he may be on. But this is Charlize’s movie, both plot-wise—it is Furiosa’s flight from the lair of future-warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), with his stolen slave harem/model gang (Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) in the back of her war rig, that gives the movie its forward motion—and charisma-wise, as Theron turns her character’s grim and implacable resolution into an awe-inspiring, galvanizing, MRA-angering force . By about halfway through, even the pregnant women riding in the back of the truck are dealing death; Max is just along for the ride, mostly. Us too.

Like the original _Mad Max_es, Fury Road is violent, brutal, wryly funny, and maybe more prescient than we’d like—a world bereft of water and dominated by warlords seems more likely by the day, especially if you are where Hollywood is, in drought-stricken Los Angeles. It’s not a vision of tomorrow that’s all that appetizing, as a possible destination for mankind. But Miller also gives us the rare film that depicts killer ladies doing killer things in a killer-looking place. We’ll take that future any day.

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Review: You Don’t Just Watch Mad Max: Fury Road , You Rock Out to It

If you’ve relished the Mad Max series, your heart will leap in Mad Max: Fury Road the first time a “War Rig” made of leftover car and truck frames (human skulls affixed to the grille) or a turbo-charged, weaponized jeep swerves into the foreground and then suddenly roars off into the distance at a 45-degree angle while the camera continues on its scorching horizontal track. It’s a signature move by director George Miller, who gets scary-close (he’s fucking with us) and then says, “Eat my dust.”

That dust tastes damn good. The majority of sequels have no reason for being apart from sequel money , but watching this fourth Mad Max , I could sense after roughly .0001 seconds that the 70-year-old Aussie director has been revving his engines for a long, long time, itching to get back to the blacktop and deliver even wilder automotive mayhem. After all, his last two films, Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2 , centered on animated dancing penguins. He has some serious punk cred to restore.

As you no doubt know from all the buzz, most critics think Miller has his cred back and then some, and they’ve given him a hero’s welcome. That gives me happy feet. The man made Max Max , The Road Warrior , Lorenzo’s Oil , and especially Babe: Pig in the City , which is like Charlotte’s Web retold by Dickens. (As a sequel, a box-office megabomb, and a film starring a pig, it has never gotten its due.) And Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it. How satisfied you’ll be after all the “wow!”s and “whew!”s will depend on how fine you are with a film that starts in the middle of the story and is basically a long chase. I saw it twice and liked it vastly more the second time around, when I’d adjusted my expectations and had my bearings from the get-go. Then it became about digging the spectacle — not to mention the hilarious sexual politics.

This is not, it should be said, a “reboot.” It’s the same Mad Max, post-Thunderdome, though now played by Tom Hardy, Mel Gibson having been judged too old and, more important, too genuinely mad to continue in the series that launched him to stardom 36 years ago. “My world is fire and blood,” says Max in voice-over, standing on a cliff, at one with the poisoned, postapocalyptic wasteland, his face hidden by a swarm of filthy hair. He stomps a big boot down on a scurrying lizard, snatches it up, and shoves it in his mouth: crunch .

A blizzard of images evokes his inner life: bombs, bodies, the killing of his wife and child. The little girl calls to him in visions, which is strange because I remember his child being (a) a toddler and (b) a boy — but it was a long time and many bodies ago, and I might be wrong. Or maybe she’s not his child but a sort of emissary from the world of child spirits. Miller does a cool, stroboscopic fun-house effect with the little girl’s face — now flesh, now bone, now flesh again. Max wants like mad to be emotionally dead, numb to the carnage, but this moppet keeps jolting him back to life.

The prologue in which Max is chased, captured, tattooed, branded, and put in a cage by raiders from a towering citadel is stunningly well done — particularly if you see the film in 3-D, which Miller uses like a macabre ringmaster, chucking arrows, bones, and parts of cars and bodies at you. This citadel — known far and wide as “the Citadel” — is presided over by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a sickeningly disfigured tyrant who stands high above his sheeple, promising them immortal life in the corridors of Valhalla while taunting them for their dependence. (He makes them beg for water.) Actually, everyone in the Citadel is sickeningly disfigured, emaciated, or studded with tumors from living in a radioactive landscape. But Immortan Joe takes the uranium cake. His flesh is mottled and covered with … yecchy stuff. In a steel mask notable for its Neanderthal set of choppers, he looks like a walking shrunken head topped with a white fright wig.

This is all awesome, but I actually had a hard time getting past my awe and into the movie. Max isn’t just emotionally remote. He’s matted with dirt and kept in shadow. He’s chained to the front of a truck, everything below his eyes concealed by a steel face-cage. It’s mighty peculiar that here, as in The Dark Knight Rises , an actor with maybe the most fascinating visage in movies spends so much time behind a mask. You do get a lot from those eyes, which signal sadness and desperation. But the lips are where it’s at. They’re not just fashionably pillowy. They’re neo-Brando blubbery. They signal a swelling, an excess of emotion. They make you understand why the sounds that come out of his mouth are not always recognizable as English: What words could do justice to that much feeling? Casting Hardy as a man who shrouds his emotions and then covering his face is just … mad. Half an hour into Mad Max: Fury Road , I felt as if the nominal hero and I hadn’t been properly introduced.

There is, of course, another hero. Heroine. The story proper kicks off when Immortan Joe’s top raider — Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron with a shaved head and one steel arm — sets off on a mission in a ramshackle War Rig before suddenly changing course. Joe checks on his breeders, but they’re gone. He screams to Heaven and orders up his army. The chase is on!

Wait. Who is Furiosa? (She has barely said a word.) Who — or what — are the breeders? Who is the old woman shrieking at Immortan Joe? By now it’s clear that Miller’s strategy is to throw you into the tumultuous action and only later show you what’s at stake and why you should care. He thinks he’s cunningly withholding major details to keep you guessing, but there isn’t enough information to guess from before he, well, cuts to the chase. It’s backwards storytelling.

Call me bourgeois, but I like a little more context for my mayhem, which is why I was more involved the second time, when I knew Furiosa, knew the breeders, and knew a bit more about why Max was on the front of a truck connected by an IV line to a skinny, bald guy with a white face and blackened eye sockets — who looks on first (and second) glance exactly like the hundred other skinny bald guys with white faces and blackened eye sockets but turns out to be a major character called Nux (Nicholas Hoult).

Mad Max: Fury Road wakes up, dramatically speaking, when Max and Furiosa meet, with (rousingly staged) fisticuffs at first but soon with more affection. Slightly more, anyway. Both their hearts having been tanned into leather by tragedy, they’re wary of connection, and Furiosa isn’t too trusting of men to begin with. It’s an extraordinary performance by Theron, who barely emotes but whose hardness is broken by glints of guilt and grief. It’s a mighty moment when, given terrible news, she staggers towards a titanic sand dune — it rises from nowhere, but nothing less would be worthy of her — and sinks to her knees in despair. At time like that, you might wish the film had been called Mad Maxine and had followed her from the start.

It’s a woman-centric movie. Furiosa is fleeing across the vast wasteland in search of a matriarchal oasis she calls the “green place of many mothers.” And those breeders turn out to be a pampered harem of willowy model types (one brown-haired, one white-blonde, one redhead, one tall and black-haired, one smaller and more racially exotic) tasked with bearing Immortan Joe healthy children. Why a group of women so skinny they look as if they’d pitch off the side of a runway from lack of food should be so evolutionarily desirable in a time of sickness and starvation is a mystery — but not really much of one given the high level of wowza on display. Maybe the best visual joke in the movie is when Max staggers out of the desert and beholds them for the first time, shimmering in the heat, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, and Riley Keough in skimpy, shorty, filmy dresses, hosing one another off in lyrical semi-slow motion.

Mad Max: Fury Road is actually full of brilliant visual jokes, its desert a mythic stage for a punk-rococo circus of freaks. Behold the great pile of steering wheels on which the bald warriors descend, each man bearing his own away with reverence, as if it’s Excalibur. There’s a little tree in the middle of the desert that looks like it’s waiting for Vladimir and Estragon. The sight of a half dozen or so bongo drummers on the back of a War Rig is a marvelous setup for the revelation of the masked, heavy-metal rocker guitarist tied to the front, his instrument belching flames at moments of peak bloodlust. (The authors of Dogme 95 would be pleased: Miller has incorporated his musicians into the action.) In the climactic, high-speed road battle, warriors on long poles bend in and out of the frame throwing bombs and snatching up women: It’s as if you’d smoked weed and started watching an old Western and suddenly the stagecoach turned into a truck full of supermodels and the charging Injuns vampire acrobats. The knowledge that the vampire acrobats are mostly real stuntmen moving really, really fast instead of 1s and 0s in a computer adds exponentially to the WTF quotient.

Miller clearly felt he needed to raise the stakes — to top himself — in Mad Max: Fury Road , and the road fury is, indeed, packed with multiple, crazy-funny variables. But at the end of the road I have to admit that I prefer the cleaner, sharper climax of The Road Warrior , which has no CGI whatsoever. You lose things in the clutter.

That said, Miller has a trick up his sleeve that he didn’t three decades ago: grannies on motorcycles. It turns out that what compelled him to make this fourth Mad Max was the notion of a nurturing, matriarchal society far removed from the grotesque sadism of male-warrior culture. The gorgeously weatherbeaten old women who roar out of the wasteland to greet Furiosa and Company tolerate Max and show some affection for Nux — the bald, mortally ill, white-painted War Boy who longed to die in battle but was so lovably clumsy that he wound up on the side of the girls. But these tough old birds don’t want or need men, those disease-carrying homicidal brats who turned a world that was once a garden into a nuclear wasteland. Also, the old ladies gaze on those cute little models as if it would be really nice to curl up with them under the stars.

It’s a wonderful joke that so-called men’s-rights groups have expressed outrage over Mad Max: Fury Road — so wonderful that I’d suspect the studio of cooking up the controversy by itself if I didn’t know that such morons actually exist. In their eyes, Miller has committed an unforgivable sin by appropriating their cultural space to promote femi-Nazism. He has made a movie with more amazing motorcycles than a biker’s rally and more high-decibel mash-ups than a monster truck event: FUCKIN’ A, AWWRIGHT! He has stuffed it with every shape and size of gun imaginable: BOO-YAH! Then he made a bald chick and a bunch of grannies more potent than an armada of male giants with mighty pecs — who turn out under all the war paint to be squalling babies with disease-ridden pencil dicks. The final battle takes place in a narrow passage through a canyon that looks suspiciously like a stand-in for the gates of Thermopylae. That’s when it really hits you: The Lesbos have taken Sparta!

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Mad Max: Fury Road Review

14 May 2015

120 minutes

Mad Max: Fury Road

Before venturing down Fury Road, George Miller’s wildly entertaining reincarnation of his post-apocalyptic Oz, it’s worth reacquainting yourself with his previous Mad Max films. Not necessarily because they are landmarks in the art of slamming vehicle into vehicle at extreme velocities, automotive carnage that has inspired everyone from James Cameron to Edgar Wright. Even the Mel Gibson-on-wires capers of the under-appreciated Beyond Thunderdome possess a giddy, violent power.

No, it’s worthwhile returning to Mad Max’s high-octane futurology to remind yourself that this is one bat-shit crazy franchise. All these goofy, psychotic tribes outfitted like thrash-metal gladiators battling over the last dregs of petrol in jerry-built hot-rods. The brand name refers not only to its tortured hero — it is a statement of intent. And now, with $150 million-plus change at his disposal and the devil’s gleam in his eye, Miller has surely achieved maximum madness.

Over the three decades since Beyond Thunderdome, the versatile Aussie hasn’t written a script so much as drawn-up battle plans. Like Mad Max 2, Fury Road is structured as one brilliantly sustained chase sequence in warped homage to Stagecoach. Over the varying terrain of this post-nuke Monument Valley, a heavily armoured tanker dubbed the War Rig, piloted by the unfortunate Max (Tom Hardy) and turncoat imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), staves off wave upon wave of hair-brained attacks from the War Boys, a local chapter of mutant wackos giving chase in a swarm of beefed-up chariots. It is not petrol that’s at stake, but a harem of five gorgeous if gobby brides stolen from beneath the nose of premier deviant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in Mad Max) — a bleach-skinned grotesque doing the majority of his raging via his eyeballs, given the oxygen mask clamped to his jaw like Bane’s maniac progeny.

Miller really gets into his tribal culture. The War Boys have concocted a proto-civilisation-cum-cult inside towering rock formations called the Citadel. Radiation has taken its toll: the speed freaks are as pale as zombies, hairless and slack-brained enough to buy Joe’s Viking-styled baloney about a Valhalla to come. There is a lot of chanting.

Again names double as character traits: Rictus Erectus, People Eater, Organic Mechanic, The Dag. Such a shame that Vin Diesel was already been taken. The baldies subdivide into Drivers, Spikers (spearmen) and the Polecats, who swing heart-stoppingly between muscle cars at the end of elongated poles (for real). Miller likes it gross: obese women are farmed for breast milk, and Max serves as a mobile blood bank for Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, a winningly hell-bent driver suffering from radioactive debilitation. In a fetching detail, the twin tumours bulging from his clavicle have been tattooed with smiley faces.

There may not be a Bruce Spence or Angry Anderson cameo, but Miller’s desert nightmare is unmistakable. Joe’s lair resembles a former thunderdome and he has Tina Turner’s hair. Less haunted than bombarded by prescribed visions of a dead daughter, Hardy’s Max cuts an even more enigmatic figure than Gibson’s muttering Robin Hood. On the rare occasion Hardy gets a line, he speaks in a weird, sub-woofer-deep monotone as if from beyond the grave.

Once Furiosa’s War Rig begins guzzling down the desert highway into the Wasteland, there is barely time to contemplate logic or motivation, or frankly the inclination. The film exists in a permanent state of crisis. Why has Furiosa rescued the brides? How has she smuggled them out? It doesn't matter: the wide shot of girls clad in bridal togs clinging to the underside of a tanker tells you they are illicit cargo. Why does Max get enlisted? He can’t help himself — he’s Max. The mutual reliance of Furiosa and Max is never declared: it’s that or they succumb to the meatheads.

The excellent Theron’s highly capable and aptly named heroine is the more engaging of the two leads. She’s more human, more desperate. The brides too make for a gaggle of amusingly grouchy individuals, determined not to be breeding stock. You could say there is a crackers feminist subtext at work — it's the women who are trying to set mankind back on track, the men who have mutant blood.

Inevitably the leanness of the early films has been lost, but without question Fury Road remains the work of a visionary. Miller has put all the money, all the perverse and poetic flights of his imagination, on the screen. The scope is more operatic, the attitude still punk rock. It’s almost as if a petrol-head David Lynch has been given license to despoil the homogenised blueprint of the modern blockbuster. Racing into a gigantic, surreal sandstorm, the pursuit is assaulted by forks of lightning, tornadoes and scarlet fireballs, an echo of the nuclear holocaust that has left the world mad.

Fury Road is a defiantly, at times deliriously, cinematic experience. Utilising 3,500 storyboards, 480 hours of raw footage, multiple frame rates, handhelds, swooping cranes, crash zooms, a blithe disregard for the personal safety of a garrison of stuntmen and the tangible bulk of real metal being hurled about at ridiculous speeds, he has created a symphony of destruction. I-Max will melt your brain.

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Mad Max: Fury Road Review

What a lovely day.

9 Insane Mad Max Characters That We Love

The over-the-top stunts and eccentric characters and designs are all hugely important to Fury Road, as are the troubled figures like Max himself and Furiosa, but it’s the overriding sense of the film’s uniqueness, its striving to be something more than just another action movie, that is most impressive. Mad Max: Fury Road is a one of a kind. Like the world it creates, it is a thing of beautiful brutality. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN , on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook .

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Film Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

Even the 'Fast and Furious' movies look like Autopia test drives next to George Miller's powerhouse reimagining of his iconic 'Mad Max' franchise.

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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Thirty years have passed since our last visit to George Miller ’s sun-scorched post-apocalyptic wasteland, and yet “worth the wait” still seems a puny response to the two hours of ferocious, unfettered B-movie bliss offered by “ Mad Max: Fury Road .” The sort of exhilarating gonzo entertainment that makes even the nuttier “Fast and Furious” movies look like Autopia test drives, this expertly souped-up return to Max Rockatansky’s world of “fire and blood” finds Tom Hardy confidently donning Mel Gibson’s well-worn leather chaps. Still, the tersely magnetic British star turns out to be less of a revelation than his glowering co-lead, Charlize Theron , decisively claiming her place (with apologies to Tina Turner) as the most indelible female presence in this gas-guzzling, testosterone-fueled universe. It remains to be seen whether Theron will boost distaff turnout for Warner Bros.’ heavily marketed May 15 release, but either way, word-of-mouth excitement over the film’s beautifully brutal action sequences should lend it tremendous commercial velocity through the summer and beyond.

Miller may be better known of late for directing the (ostensibly) younger-skewing likes of “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and the two “Happy Feet” musicals, but for the many who have longed for him to return to his down-and-dirty Ozploitation roots, “Fury Road” will seem nothing less than the fulfillment of a dream — not least the writer-director’s own. To describe the production as long-gestating doesn’t do justice to the sheer litany of setbacks, delays, overhauls, recastings and budget inflations that have plagued the picture since Miller first envisioned it years ago, when it might still have been plausible for Gibson to reprise the role that made him a star. Suffice to say that for all the obstacles the writer-director and his collaborators endured in the interim, the finished film feels entirely of a piece with its three predecessors, never mind that the combined costs of the latter are dwarfed by “Fury Road’s” budget (reportedly well over $150 million).

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We are, admittedly, a long way from the lean, unnerving outback fable of “Mad Max” (1979), and an even longer way from the weirdly arresting, kid-friendly detours of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985). Vastly more complex on a technical scale but simpler on a conceptual one, “Fury Road” is, for all intents and purposes, a two-hour car chase interrupted by a brief stretch of anxious downtime, and realized with the sort of deranged grandiosity that confirms Miller’s franchise has entered its decadent phase. All the more remarkable, then, that the movie still manages to retain its focus, achieving at once a shrewd distillation and a ferocious acceleration of its predecessors’ sensibility. There is gargantuan excess here, to be sure — and no shortage of madness — but there is also an astonishing level of discipline.

Wisely, Miller and his co-writers (the comicbook artist Brendan McCarthy and original “Mad Max” actor Nico Lathouris) seem to have taken their cues from the spare yet sturdy narrative architecture of the series’ acknowledged high point, “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” (1981), whose influence can be felt even in the new film’s bare-bones prologue. Years after some unexplained cataclysm, the world has fallen into lawless disarray, as Hardy’s Max briefly explains while being pursued across a landscape of hot orange dunes and endless horizons (the Namibian desert stood in for Australia this time around). The chase soon ends with our hero captured, imprisoned and tortured in the Citadel, a desert stronghold ruled by a despotic warlord known as the Immortan (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who has enslaved what remains of the local populace by exercising miserly control over the water supply (inadvertently bearing out Keegan-Michael Key’s California-drought joke at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner).

Fans will remember (if not necessarily recognize) the Australian character actor Keays-Byrne as having played the Toecutter in the original “Mad Max,” and his appearance here suggests a hideous, heavy-set reincarnation of that earlier villain, complete with snaggle-toothed face mask and kinky breathing apparatus. His male soldiers, or “war boys,” show their respect for their leader by sharing his gloriously awful fashion sense — their torsos branded and bared, covered in white body paint, and blinged out with shrunken-head necklaces and other demonic accouterments. The film’s first half-hour alone is a marvel of freakshow aesthetics: Blood banks and breast pumps are among the Immortan’s more imaginative means of controlling and sustaining his people, while skulls figure prominently in Colin Gibson’s elaborately grotesque production design and Jenny Beavan’s richly imagined costumes, which are at once outlandish and pinpoint-precise.

Setting the plot in motion — and lending the film the swift, steady undercurrent of rage suggested by its title — are the five beautiful young women the Immortan has taken as his “wives” (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton), whom he keeps locked away and forces to bear his children. Their defender and rescuer is Imperator Furiosa (Theron), a formidable warrior with a mechanical left arm, who is tasked with replenishing the Citadel’s fuel reserves at nearby Gastown; she seizes the opportunity to smuggle the women out of the stronghold in a massive armored truck. When the Immortan sends his war boys after them, with Max himself lashed (temporarily, at least) to the front of a minion’s car, the proceedings kick into high gear.

As evidenced by everything from the original “Mad Max” trilogy to “Babe: Pig in the City,” Miller is a wizardly orchestrator of onscreen mayhem, and in the two lengthy chase sequences that bookend “Fury Road,” he ascends to that rare level of action-movie nirvana where a filmmaker’s sheer exuberance in every detail becomes one with the audience’s pleasure. Everything we see here seems to have sprung fully formed from the same cheerfully demented imagination — whether it’s the cars that look like overgrown porcupines on wheels, the poles that catapult the war boys from one vehicle to the next, or the fiery windstorm that sets in mid-chase, making short work of some of the less well-armored participants. Adding yet another frisson of excitement (as well as a hint of anti-terrorist subtext) is the fact that the war boys aren’t just killers but fanatics, brainwashed into believing eternal paradise awaits them if they die in battle. This may explain their devil-may-care habit of crawling over and under their vehicles while they’re in motion, like kids navigating a jungle gym at 150 miles per hour.

Miller conjures a vibe somewhere between monster truck rally in hell and Burning Man death-metal concert — as signaled by the very funny inclusion of a rocker whose fire-breathing electric guitar seems to be at least one source of the pummeling, wall-to-wall score (by the Dutch musician Junkie XL, who recently scored “Run All Night” and “Divergent”). The magnificence of the below-the-line contributions can hardly be overstated, particularly the outrageously acrobatic fight choreography and the seamless visual-effects work, all lensed by d.p. John Seale in dynamic, enveloping widescreen images. If it sounds interminable — and for viewers not on the film’s specific wavelength, even a minute of this stuff will be hard to take — rest assured that Miller proves himself a maestro not only when he’s slamming huge metal objects together, but also when attending to such subtler matters as pacing and modulation (with the invaluable assistance of his editor and wife, Margaret Sixel).

Notably, our engagement doesn’t wane even when “Fury Road” downshifts into an interlude of tense, close-quarters intimacy, as Max, lone road warrior that he is, must reluctantly endure the company of Furiosa and her five comely refugees. The feminist undercurrents rippling through this movie are by turns sincere, calculated and teasingly tongue-in-cheek: Our first good glimpse of the wives, clad in skimpy white rags and gathered around a water spout, plays like a vision out of “Girls Gone Wild: Coed Car Wash.” Even when they join in the fight, it can be hard to tell where erotic fantasy ends and empowerment fantasy begins, which is very much in keeping with the film’s unapologetically grindhouse attitude. Yet if “Fury Road” doesn’t deliver as pure a hit of girl-power retribution as say, Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” it’s hard not to respect the dramatic stature with which Miller elevates his female characters; Huntington-Whiteley and Kravitz, in particular, embody the sort of quiet defiance that ensures these women, though victimized, are never reduced to mere victims.

“You know hope is a mistake,” Max warns Furiosa late in the game. But even as it plunges us back into a vividly familiar realm of nihilism and despair, “Mad Max: Fury Road” never feels even remotely cynical — or exploitative. There’s nothing but tenderness in the fiercely protective manner with which Furiosa and the five wives regard one another, or in the key supporting role of Nux (a wonderful Nicholas Hoult), an eagerly aggressive young war boy whose dramatic shift in perspective takes the story in an unexpectedly poignant, and romantic, direction. As for Max himself, he remains a thin, tenuous figure at best — less a fleshed-out character than an avatar of revenge and survival — which is precisely what has made him such a durably iconic creation over the years.

Mad Max 2.0 comes saddled with a slightly different tragic origin story, referenced in quick, hallucinatory memory blips involving a young girl (Coco Jack Gillies), but we accept Hardy in the role instinctively — aided by the cruel iron mask that obscures much of his face until the movie’s midpoint, but also by the actor’s taciturn charisma. Still, there’s no denying that Miller and his collaborators have subtly conspired to put our hero in the passenger seat of his own reboot, while deftly ceding the wheel to Theron’s Furiosa, and the characters’ rapport is as physically electrifying as it is emotionally charged. Tellingly, plans are reportedly in the works for a “Fury Road” sequel called “Mad Max: Furiosa,” raising the expectation — perhaps unreasonable, on the strength of Miller’s powerhouse movie — that this duo’s finest hour may yet be ahead of them.

Reviewed at Dolby Laboratories, Burbank, Calif., May 7, 2015. (In Cannes Film Festival — noncompeting.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 120 MIN.

Production: A Warner Bros. release, presented in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, of a Kennedy Miller Mitchell production. Produced by Doug Mitchell, George Miller, P.J. Voeten. Executive producers, Iain Smith, Chris DeFaria, Courtenay Valenti, Graham Burke, Bruce Berman, Steve Mnuchin.
Crew: Directed by George Miller. Screenplay, Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris. Camera (color, Arri Alexa HD, Panavision widescreen), John Seale; editor, Margaret Sixel; music, Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL; production designer, Colin Gibson; supervising art director, Richard Hobbs; art directors, Shira Hockman, Janni Van Staden, Marko Anttonen; set decorator, Lisa Thompson; costume designer, Jenny Beavan; sound (Dolby Atmos), Ben Osmo; supervising sound editors, Mark Mangini, Scott Hecker; sound designer, David White; re-recording mixers, Chris Jenkins, Gregg Rudloff; visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson; visual effects producer, Holly Radcliffe; visual effects, Iloura; supervising stunt coordinator, Guy Norris; stunt coordinators, Glenn Suter, Lawrence Woodward, Steve Griffin, Tyrone Stevenson; fight coordinator, Richard Norton; 3D conversion, Stereo D; second unit director, Norris; second unit camera, David Burr; casting, Ronna Kress, Nikki Barrett.
With: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman, Nathan Jones, Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, John Howard, Richard Carter, Iota, Angus Sampson, Jennifer Hagan, Coco Jack Gillies.

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‘mad max: fury road’: film review.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron headline George Miller's reboot of his cult postapocalyptic franchise.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Thirty years after surviving Thunderdome, the reluctant warrior of modern movies’ first and most memorable postapocalyptic action-fantasy series is finally back and ready for more in Mad Max: Fury Road . George Miller has directed only five films in that time — three of which starred pigs and penguins — but it can safely be said that this madly entertaining new action extravaganza energetically kicks more ass, as well as all other parts of the anatomy, than any film ever made by a 70-year-old — and does so far more skillfully than those turned out by most young turks half his age.

Although the earlier entries were made before the target audience for this one was even born (its new leading man was just a baby when the first one was released), Mad Max has lingered in the zeitgeist through the years, and a fair portion of the international public that has just wound down from Furious 7 will be happy to suck in the fumes from this equally action-packed and infinitely superior film.

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Mad Max rewatched – gas-fuelled action pic or just plain weird?

It made George Miller and Mel Gibson but Mad Max has always radiated an otherworldly vibe, a sickly sensation that something at its core is wrong

The release of Mad Max: Fury Road trailers have routinely imploded the internet, each new vision of director George Miller’s re-jigged hell-for-leather franchise leaving fanboys salivating and work productivity levels in states of smouldering ruin.

Set in a future dystopian universe partial to leather-heavy wardrobes and spontaneous explosions, Mad Max has always blown some fresh air on large-scale action movies by dirtying up their traditionally glossy aesthetic.

Hollywood in particular has a long history of producing clean-looking world-gone-wrong movies; even dark classics like The Omega Man and Soylent Green beam with shiny colours and glossy production values. The grubby but beautiful design and infectious on-the-ground carnage present in Fury Road footage has been around from day one, since the cantankerous titular character first hooned down Anarchie Roach in 1979.

The original movie wasn’t just a gasoline-dowsed action pic that rocketed the careers of Miller and star Mel Gibson . For several decades it was also an unprecedented success: squeezed from a budget of around $350,000, some of the crew literally paid in slabs of beer, Mad Max gobbled up around $100m at the international box office.

It took faux-DIY scary movie The Blair Witch Project to take away its mantle as the most profitable feature film in history (and that was intentionally crafted to look cheap while Miller and his crew worked slavishly hard for their sensational look and feel). The second instalment, 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, was in technical and aesthetic terms a superior beast to its predecessor – but it also cost 10 times the original’s budget and benefited from storytelling groundwork laid down by it.

Just as the sombre ending of the sixth James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, established 007’s emotionally recalcitrant attitude towards women, the first Mad Max movie makes a similar case for why its iconic boot-clad bad-arse got so cranky in the first place.

Away from the explosions and torn up bitumen is a tender romance between Max (Gibson) and his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel). Surprisingly tender, perhaps, given the extent to which the franchise has become synonymous with hardboiled action.

Hardboiled is certainly how it begins, with one of many chaotic chase scenes that fly across the screen with bat-out-of-hell momentum. The story takes place in a future world where an energy crisis has led to the disintegration of society and proliferation of freaky-looking motorcycle gangs that terrorise and pillage outback communities.

Members of the Main Force Patrol attempt to uphold whatever crumbs of law and order remain. A screaming psycho named Nightrider (Vincent Gil) has escaped police custody and is throttling down the highway, providing his very own colourful commentary: his vehicle is a “fuel-injected suicide machine” and it’s “cruising at the speed of fright”.

Nightrider successfully evades the force until Max takes on the job of pursuing him and the joyride ends in a fiery crash. Max’s involvement in fighting the Acolytes, the gang to which Nightrider belongs, has elements of American cop and superhero movies. Colleague Fifi (Roger Ward, infamous for portraying a hulking villain in 1982 Ozploitation classic Turkey Shoot) implores Max not to quit the force.

“They say people don’t believe in heroes any more,” he says. “You and me Max, we’re gonna give them back their heroes.”

In a Hollywood movie, a scene like that would be delivered straight. Here Max laughs it off and says he doesn’t buy that crap (Fifi replies: “You gotta admit, I sounded good there for a minute”). The over-arching spirit of the film is anarchic, if not downright nihilistic: just as the world Miller depicts has become increasingly ravaged, the core of Mad Max itself feels like it’s been perverted past the point of return. A grisly anti-Hollywood ending sees Max’s wife and son pay a horrible price, cementing the protagonist’s lone wolf philosophy and unrelenting crabbiness.

Through the haze of nostalgia, it’s easy to forget how plain weird the film is; how many moments challenge any kind of logic definition. The scene in which gang members string up and dry-hump a mannequin, told by their leader that the lifeless statuette is “not what she seems” and “full of treachery”, feels like just one of many remnants from an awful dream.

Mad Max has always radiated an otherworldly vibe, a slightly sickly sensation that something at its core is fundamentally wrong. James Wan and Leigh Whannel, co-writers of 2004’s grisly horror flick Saw , have acknowledged their film couldn’t have existed without it. If you need to ask why, you’ve either never seen the finale to the original Mad Max or it’s become lost in a blurry memory of spinning wheels and BDSM outfits.

Freed from the shackles of conventional action move storytelling – goodies defeating baddies and all the tropes we’ve come to expect – brings a weird kind of liberation: we are there ultimately for the thrill and rush of the ride. On this front, Miller and his crew have never let us down.

Action and adventure films
Rewatching classic Australian films
Mad Max: Fury Road

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Trivia Most of the extras used in the film were paid in beer.
Goofs When Jessie walks to the car Max is repairing she is wearing sneakers. When she walks around to the passenger side of the car she has on boots with sheepskin trim. When she walks off to the beach she is wearing the deck shoes again.

[the Kid is handcuffed to a car that's about to explode]

Max : The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It'd take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. Now, if you're lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go.

[the hacksaw is dropped next to The Kid, and Max limps off]

Alternate versions The original UK cinema and certified video releases (American dub) were cut by 48 seconds by the BBFC to keep an X (18) rating and to prevent the film from being banned, as X was the highest rating. They edited the scene where the bikers tear up the hot-rod with the terrified couple inside. Instead, the scene cut to black as the bikers smashed the first window and resumed on the bird hovering overhead. Though the original uncertified 1982 video release of the American dub from Warner Home Video was released uncut, the cut was re-instated on the 1986 18-rated VHS, but was restored in 1992 when the Australian dialogue version was finally released in the UK and to all later releases with the same rating (although Warner's budget labels SCREEN CLASSICS still put out the American dub with the cut scene well into the 90s). In April 2015, the film was passed with a 15 rating uncut, because of "(the scene's) implied nature and lack of visual detail of the acts themselves". The same reason was given for passing it at 18 uncut back in 1992.
Connections Edited into Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Soundtracks Licorice Road (uncredited) Written and Produced by Nic Gazzana Performed by Robina Chaffey Sung by Creenagh St. Clair

User reviews 452

Jun 28, 1999

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March 21, 1980 (United States)
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Seaford Beach, Seaford, Victoria, Australia (Toecutter gang beach scenes)
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Runtime 1 hour 28 minutes
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Screen Rant

Why mad max movies are all set in a dystopian future explained by george miller.

Mad Max visionary George Miller explains how he settled on a dystopian setting for the movies and the practical reasons that influenced the decision.

Director George Miller explains why he ended up setting Mad Max in a dystopian world.
He admitted it was easier to film in empty streets and rundown buildings rather than a modern day city.
The decision was a smart one, as it enhanced the Mad Max franchise's themes and visuals.

Filmmaker George Miller explains why his Mad Max movies are dystopian. Miller began the franchise in 1979 with the Mel Gibson-led Mad Max , and he has since released three additional movies, the most recent being the Oscar-winning prequel Mad Max: Fury Road . In May, Miller will release another prequel, Furiosa starring Anya Taylor-Joy . In the upcoming film, Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers, falls into the hands of a biker horde led by Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, and gets caught in the crossfire between two tyrants as she tries to make her way back home.

Screen Rant was in attendance when, at CinemaCon to receive a career achievement award and participate in a short Q&A session, Miller explained how the Mad Max movies ' dystopian setting came about because of practical reasons instead of creative ones. It involved what it would take to film on location. In the end, the filmmaker has grown to appreciate Mad Max ’s dystopian setting, as the final result was more allegorical. Read his full quote below:

The idea was to make a film where, as Hitchcock says, 'They don't have to read the subtitles in Japan.' A film that relies entirely on visual. Nobody would finance the film, but we put together and attempted it. But it was almost impossible to do action sequences in the city in the modern day, on local streets with all those cars, and so on. The idea was to set it in a dystopian future simply because we could film it in empty streets and rundown buildings and so on . That was a really funny thing because, accidentally, the film which otherwise would have been present-day turned out to be more allegoric.

Why Mad Max Is Near-Perfect As A Dystopia

The dystopian setting helps enhance mad max's themes & makes it stand out.

While the decision to set Mad Max in a dystopian world may not have been the initial idea, the franchise benefited greatly from the move; one could even argue it is how Mad Max continued on beyond its initial movie. As Miller explains, shooting on local streets would have been logistically harder than shooting in empty spaces, as it would've required extensive planning and additional editing. The franchise then became iconic for its dystopian visuals and hard-hitting themes , many of which were heightened by the franchise's post-apocalyptic world.

Where Was The Original Mad Max Filmed? All Filming Locations Explained

The franchise’s 2015 critical and commercial hit, Mad Max: Fury Road, is the grand result of these benefits. Featuring well-choreographed and practically done action sequences, the film was filled with high-octane chases that seemingly could only have been achieved in the empty space Miller championed . Additionally, its themes of a world gone dry due to greed and corruption were elevated by its dystopian setting, as they almost serve as a warning for today's society.

The trailers for Miller’s upcoming Furiosa suggest that the filmmaker is continuing to benefit from its dystopian setting . The action sequences teased so far hint at stunts more easily achieved in a wasteland setting that promises an open space found easily in the desert. That same Mad Max element seems to have, again, created hardened characters fighting to survive in a hardened world, setting the stage for another satisfying adventure within the world Miller created.

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Mad Max is a 1979 sci-fi action film from director and writer George Miller. Mel Gibson stars as Max a police officer in the future who goes after a gang of vicious motorcycle thugs. The film led to a long-running franchise including The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road, and Furiosa.

Mad Max Timeline Explained: Where Does Furiosa Fit?

The Mad Max franchise has produced four films so far. But where does the new movie, Furiosa, fit in the timeline?

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set to be released on May 24, 2024, and serves as a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road .
The timeline for the Mad Max franchise is complicated; Fury Road takes place around 2050, while Furiosa is set 15 years prior.
Despite the confusion, George Miller confirms that Furiosa occurs 15 years before Fury Road , focusing on Furiosa's backstory.

Mad Max is an electrifying saga that has spawned four feature films thus far, three of which were released in the 1980s, and the most recent one, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) , is considered a soft reboot. Because of this sudden development in the franchise, many fans are unsure where Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will fit into the story's overall structure.

Furiosa , starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, is set to be released on May 24, 2024, which is just on the horizon. With the release date nearing, many Mad Max saga fans are keen on revisiting the franchise, but Furiosa is far from a proper sequel. As a result, fans are bombarding the internet with questions about the film's timeline and whether it serves as a sequel or prequel to the previous installments.

Fear not—despite a 30-year reboot, Furiosa still has its own designated place in the franchise. While it may not have an obvious connection to the original trilogy, it nevertheless fits effectively within Mad Max: Fury Road 's timeline. So, without further ado, here's a detailed breakdown of the Mad Max timeline and Furiosa 's place amid its convoluted narrative.

Mad Max Timeline Explained: How Each Film Established Connections to Sequels

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a tough nut to crack when it comes to determining its timeframe within the franchise, but Mad Max: Fury Road makes it plausible. As we know, the original Mad Max film, released in 1979, is set in the mid-1980s . It was deciphered from the fact that a piece of graffiti in the movie shows the date December 1984, leading fans to reach the said conclusion. Following Max's vengeance for hunting down the gang members who brutally murdered his wife and child, we've seen what remains of civilization crumble as oil production declines substantially.

Since Mad Max 2: The Road takes place about three years after the previous film, the timeline jumps to the late 1980s. As Max drives his interceptor through the Australian wasteland in search of gasoline, he eventually joins a tribe of good people, but the film emphasizes that the new world belongs to the strong and ruthless. Moving on to the third film in the series, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is set about 15 years after the second film, placing the timeline in the early 2000s. This is evident in the movie when an aircraft crashes near the tribe where Max lives, and Captain Walker leaves the place to seek help in 1999.

11 Things You Didn’t Know About the Mad Max Franchise

Given the film's events, which take place a few years after the incident, experts believe Beyond Thunderdome depicts the events of the post-apocalyptic world in the early 2000s. Thus far, the timeline has been relatively straightforward to grasp, but Mad Max: Fury Road complicates matters significantly because the film takes place around 2050, according to a few references made in the comics. Given that Max is the film's main protagonist, his existence defies logic, but fans have a few theories.

The characters of Max, portrayed by Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy, are vastly different, and the events that happened in Mad Max are regarded as myths by the people who appear in Fury Road . Ultimately, it is established that Mad Max: Fury Road takes place around 2050, but where does Furiosa fall into the timeline?

Furiosa Is Set 15 Years Before Mad Max: Fury Road

Furiosa: a mad max saga.

It has already been established that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will serve as a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road , following the story of Imperator Furiosa, who appeared alongside Max Rockantansky in the last film. According to Warner Bros, the official premise of Furiosa reads as follows:

As the world falls, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and into the hands of a Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. While the two Tyrants war for dominance over the Citadel, Furiosa survives many trials as she plots a way back home through the Wasteland.

In Mad Max: Fury Road , after arriving in Green Place, which has now become uninhabitable, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, is recognized by a woman who claims she is one of their own and was kidnapped as a child. The age difference between Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlize Theron is 20 years; hence, assuming Furiosa takes place 15-20 years before Fury Road is the most reasonable option for the timeline.

The trailer states that the events of Furiosa take place 45 years after "the Collapse," which corresponds to the original trilogy when considering Furiosa to take place around 2030. Still, given that it is a direct prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road , it's essential to consider how it ties to it. This is where the problem arises, as Mad Max: Fury Road signifies that the world's collapse occurred 33 years ago, as shown by a tattoo on Max's arm.

The 10 Best Dystopian Action Movies of All Time

According to Fury Road , society collapsed in 2013, whereas it actually happened in the mid-1980s in the original trilogy. In fact, George Miller, the creator of the Mad Max saga, has remarked that he is not overly concerned about the timeline because his vision of the new Mad Max productions goes beyond what the newly released comics are attempting to achieve. In addition, he told comicbook.com :

This story happens 15 years directly before Mad Max: Fury Road, and it runs straight into it, and Max is lurking around somewhere in this story, but it's really the story of Furiosa and how she got to be. A lot of the film will be familiar, and a lot of it's new, which we haven't seen before.

In a nutshell, when Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa are combined with the original trilogy, the timeline of the entire franchise becomes more confusing, but if we look at them separately, Furiosa should take place about 15 or so years before Mad Max: Fury Road , according to George Miller, and because Furiosa's younger version appears to be 15 years old in the new film. To make things easier, here's a table with the timelines for each movie in the Mad Max saga:

Mad Max: Fury Road is streaming on Apple TV and is available to rent on Google Play. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is heading to theaters on May 24, 2024.

IMAGES

Mad Max Movie Poster
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Mad Max Collection
Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ Still Angry After All These Years
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MAD MAX "1 Sheet" Film Poster starring Mel Gibson

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COMMENTS

Mad Max
In a not-too-distant dystopian future, when man's most precious resource -- oil -- has been depleted and the world plunged into war, famine and financial chaos, the last vestiges of the law in ...
Mad Max: Fury Road movie review (2015)
Miller's new vision of Max isn't a warrior. Rather, he's a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive. He walks with the ghosts of those he couldn't save, and his traveling companions have pushed him to the brink of sanity. While wandering at this edge, Max is kidnapped and transformed into a literal blood ...
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As Richard Corliss wrote in his review of the original 1979 thriller, the title character wasn't the real reason Mad Max worked: As a story, the film makes for overwrought, even repellent ...
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Mad Max is a film that relishes in its explosions and in both austerity/minimalism and in being over the top. The film is able to grasp all of these concepts at once. The film implies a lot of horrendous violence although does not necessarily show a lot of the violence. But the implications make a strong impression.
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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Mad Max: Fury Road: Directed by George Miller. With Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshiper and a drifter named Max.
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13 May 2015. Running Time: 120 minutes. Certificate: 15. Original Title: Mad Max: Fury Road. Before venturing down Fury Road, George Miller's wildly entertaining reincarnation of his post ...
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Mad Max currently holds a 90 percent Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 61 reviews. The audience score is slightly lower at 70 percent, based on over 140,000 ratings. Overall, critics seems to appreciate the dystopian vibe, and how the filmmaking underlines the inherent danger of this particular world.
Mad Max Timeline Explained: When Each Movie Takes Place
When the Mad Max movies happen, and how Fury Road fits into the apocalyptic series timeline, including The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. ... The original Mad Max, which was released in 1979, opens with the caption, "A few years from now." ... The film generally received positive reviews upon release and was followed up by Mad Max ...
Why The Original Mad Max Is So Much Darker Than Fury Road
1979's original Mad Max is a much darker, less far-fetched movie than its sequels, but there's a reason George Miller's sci-fi feels so brutal. Although it has plenty of the franchise's classic high-octane action, 1979's original Mad Max is much darker than its more far-fetched 2015 sequel Fury Road and there is a good reason for this.
Film Review: 'Mad Max: Fury Road'
Still, there's no denying that Miller and his collaborators have subtly conspired to put our hero in the passenger seat of his own reboot, while deftly ceding the wheel to Theron's Furiosa ...
'Mad Max: Fury Road' Review
After a long absence, Mad Max is back and in fine form. One could plausibly observe that Fury Road is basically The Road Warrior on a new generation of steroids, and no doubt some critics will ...
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Mad Max is a 1979 Australian action film directed by George Miller. Written by Miller and James McCausland from a story by Miller and producer Byron Kennedy, set "a few years from now". It tells a story of societal breakdown, murder, and revenge.The film, starring the then little-known Mel Gibson, was released internationally in 1980.It became a top-grossing Australian film, while holding the ...
Mad Max (film)
Mad Max is a 1979 Australian dystopian action film directed by George Miller and produced by Byron Kennedy. Mel Gibson stars as "Mad" Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante in a near-future Australia in the midst of societal collapse. Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns and Roger Ward also appear in supporting roles. James McCausland and Miller wrote the script ...
Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max: Directed by George Miller. With Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley. In a self-destructing world, a vengeful Australian policeman sets out to stop a violent motorcycle gang.
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The original "Mad Max" is still one of the classics about a society on the brink of collapse. It is not the best movie in the saga, but an excellent example of survival of the fittest. ... "RoboCop" Movie Review: Capitalism's Perfect Police. A Crowd(dis)pleaser Masterpiece: "Oldboy" (2003) Review "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Movie Review ...
Why Mad Max Movies Are All Set In A Dystopian Future Explained By
Filmmaker George Miller explains why his Mad Max movies are dystopian. Miller began the franchise in 1979 with the Mel Gibson-led Mad Max, and he has since released three additional movies, the most recent being the Oscar-winning prequel Mad Max: Fury Road.In May, Miller will release another prequel, Furiosa starring Anya Taylor-Joy.In the upcoming film, Furiosa is snatched from the Green ...
Mad Max (1979) Review
Mad Max was directed by George Miller (Happy Feet, Lorenzo's Oil), written by Miller and James McCausland, and stars Mel Gibson (Dangerous, Boss Level), Joanne Samuel (Alison's Birthday, My Pet Dinosaur), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Stone, The Blood of Heroes), Tim Burns (Now and Forever, Patrol Boat), Geoff Parry (Gallipoli, Sword of Honour), Roger Ward (Boar, Turkey Shoot), Steve Bisley (Water ...
The Mad Max Timeline, Explained
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a tough nut to crack when it comes to determining its timeframe within the franchise, but Mad Max: Fury Road makes it plausible. As we know, the original Mad Max film ...

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