Okay, so I could've gone with a more linkbait-y title, like "10 Reasons Why
Mad Max Is The Greatest Film Series Of All Time" or something, but this essay is meant to be more of an expository piece, rather than a persuasive one. It's also a bit different from what I normally post on here, since it's not about some weekend trip I took.
Backstory
I remember the first time I saw a
Mad Max movie. I must've been about 7 or 8 years old at the time, and my family and I had gone over to a friend's house for a barbecue. The kids were watching this weird movie with a lot of strangely-dressed people chasing after each other through the desert in dune buggies. And one of the bad guys had a doll head sticking out the back of his shirt. And they had strange accents (except for Tina Turner, of course). I asked the kids what they were watching and one of them said, "It's
Mad Max".
It was, of course, the third film in the franchise, which carried the title
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in the United States. It seems as though, through the mid-90s and 2000s, this particular film aired on TV about once every six months or so. To me, it was one of those movies you always seem to catch about halfway through as you're flipping the channels.
I must've seen that car chase scene a dozen times, over the years, but it wasn't until I was in high school (or maybe college) that I caught it from the beginning and learned what the "Thunderdome" actually was. I remember speculating on the topic while I was driving down the highway, so it must have been some time after I got my license but before Wikipedia. My guess had been something more akin to a mashup of
The Hunger Games,
Death Race, and
The Truman Show. None of these films had been made yet, of course, but you get the idea. My guess was way off.
I admit, I've only seen the second film in the franchise a couple times. That's why, in the middle of writing this piece, I went down to the local video store and rented a copy. I wanted to make sure my assessment of the character held up. It did, and I picked up on a lot of stuff that I'd overlooked before. But the bottom line here is, prior to my arrival in Australia, I just thought of the Mad Max series as some campy, cheesy post-apocalyptic movies with weirdly-dressed people doing cool car chase scenes in the middle of the desert.
My interest in the series was somewhat renewed during my travels in Australia. I took a guided tour of Coober Pedy and learned that it was used as one of the filming locations for
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. That scene towards the end, when Max kidnaps the pilot and his son at their underground dwelling? I have
totally been there. In real life, it's not much different than what you see in the film, except there's women's underwear hanging from the ceiling (
I'm not kidding).
When I was in Brisbane, I saw the original
Mad Max for the second time in my life. I was pretty drunk at the time, because that's what you do when your two-week campervan trip ends, and your German friends fly home, and your money's almost run out, and your dog's been run over, and you're feeling down and out. You get drunk. On cheap boxed wine. And then you wander down to the TV room and watch whatever happens to be on. And if that movie happens to be
Mad Max, then so be it. And you resign yourself to the consolation that, all in all, it's a pretty darn good movie, even if you're too drunk to really follow it. And hey, at least it's an
Australian movie. You know, since you're a tourist
in Australia, and all.
The third time I watched the original
Mad Max was after I'd moved into my current place of residence. This time around, I was sober, and I picked up on a lot of stuff that I'd missed out on before. For one, I recognized the West Gate Bridge in the background of some of the shots at Max's police station. I'd been making daily commutes between Melbourne and Geelong for my job, and I noticed that the landscape looked pretty familiar, so I Googled it and found out that most of the road scenes in the first one were filmed in and around the town of Lara, which is only about 10 minutes from Geelong.
The realization that I'd been to two of the three major filming locations of the
Mad Max series served to revitalize my interest. And it didn't hurt that, during the great four-wheel-drive hunt of 2012-2013, I ran across an eBay listing for the XB Falcon that had been sitting parked in front of the Silverton Hotel near Broken Hill for the last umpteen years (I forget what it eventually sold for, but it was sitting around AUD $25,000 when I first saw it). I've added Broken Hill to my list of places to visit while I'm here, which will mean I've been to all three of the major Australian filming locations for the series. Perhaps I'll make it to Namibia, one of these days.
My Thoughts On The Series
As cool as
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was when I was a kid, I have to admit that, as an adult I have a hard time watching it. The whole "community of plane crash survivors who develop a cult religion and believe Max is their pilot-messiah returned" looks good on paper, but I don't particularly care for how it was executed on screen.
A lot of my criticism around that stems from the language that the kids used. Although it's probably more closely aligned with what would actually happen if a group of children found themselves the only survivors of a crashed airliner and developed a community in isolation, the act of substituting strange words for common familiar ones creates a disconnect between viewers and the characters on screen, making it harder to empathize with them. This was a pretty common practice in science fiction, for a long time. I suppose it was done with the intention of making the fantasy more fantastic, but I've never been a fan of it.
I think the reimagined
Battlestar Galactica series got it right in that respect - you forget that it's science fiction, because it's so well grounded. Laura Roslin is dying of cancer, not some weird made-up alien disease. In fact, there are no aliens, period. They have dogs, not daggits. Their guns shoot bullets, not lasers. And when Kara Thrace breaks her leg, she spends the next few episodes in a cast and doing physical therapy, because there is no magic wand for Dr. Cottle to wave and instantly heal broken bones, or cancer, or anything else. They use familiar names for familiar things, and it allows viewers to empathize with the characters and the situations they are in. Despite the fact that everyone is flying through outer space, and the primary antagonist is a race of self-aware machines, it still feels
real.
That's why I think a lot of viewers completely overlook one of the most important aspects of the
Mad Max story - they get caught up in the strangeness of it. For the American audience, it doesn't help any that the second film was released in the US before the first one. And it seems the cheesiest film of the series is the one that gets the most airplay, so it's the one most people associate the character with. It is for these reasons that I missed out on the transformation that the character takes, over the course of the series. I used to only think of him as the lone hero wandering a barren wasteland, the good guy saving the weak from their oppressors. But go back and watch the films again in their proper sequence, and focus on the journey his character takes, and I think you'll find there's something deeper going on.
Max's Journey
The original
Mad Max introduces Max Rockatansky as a pretty normal guy. He's a cop, and a good one, at that. He's into cars. His best friend is a fellow member of his police unit. He loves his wife, and his son. And over the course of the first film, all of these things are taken away from him by a vicious gang of motorcycle thugs (except for the car and his dog). After his partner, Jim Goose, is ambushed and burned alive, Max foretells his own moral downfall:
MAX: I'm scared, Fifi. One more minute out on that road and I'm one of them, ya know? Terminal crazy.
So, then what happens? The thugs run down his wife and son. Max snaps and, one by one, he takes out the motorcycle gang in a series of brutal acts of vengeance. Notice that, in the final scene, the film doesn't actually show Johnny running the pickup truck off the road. He could very well be speaking the truth when he tells Max, "... this isn't how it looks. I just came down to take a look." Which makes Max's act of handcuffing Johnny to the truck before setting it to explode even more vengeful - he doesn't know whether or not Johnny murdered the driver, nor does he care.
Bear in mind that at the end of the first film, both his partner and his wife are still alive (albeit hospitalized in critical condition). Rather than returning home to care for them, the film ends with Max driving off into the desert.
In
The Road Warrior, we see that Max has become "a shell of a man. A burnt out, desolate man, a dead man, running from the demons of his past. A man who wandered far away..." Throughout the second film, Max's only real motivation is to gas up his car so he can keep going. It's why he takes the gyro captain prisoner. It's why he brings Nathan back to the compound. It's why he risks his life to fetch the prime mover for the tanker. And it's why, having brought the rig back and filled up his fuel tanks, Max turns down Pappagallo's request to drive the tanker in exchange for membership in their community. Only after the marauders destroy his car and murder his dog does Max offer to help Pappagallo, which realistically is the only option available to him. Even after the camp people escape and the marauders are defeated, Max chooses to go his own way rather than join up with them.
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome tells the story of how Max's humanity is slowly restored. At the start of the film, Max is much the same man we saw in the previous one. He places little value on human life, agreeing to kill a man in exchange for the return of his stolen property. However, Max has a change of heart at the unmasking of Blaster, refusing to execute a man with the mind of a child. It's only after he meets the children living in the oasis that Max begins to act selflessly, braving the harsh desert wasteland to rescue the ones who split off from the main group. In the film's climactic car chase, Max sacrifices his own chance to escape by charging headfirst into almost certain death in order to clear a path for the survivors' plane to take off.
I'm excited about the upcoming release of
Mad Max: Fury Road and its two planned successors. I was a bit nervous about them until I learned that George Miller was behind them. I'd really like to see where this character goes, and if he returns full circle to the man he once was. The details are a bit sketchy at the moment, so I'm not even sure if it's supposed to be set between
Mad Max and
The Road Warrior, or after
Thunderdome. Judging by
the trailer, it'll have no shortage of action, and Tom Hardy seems like he'll play a convincing Max.
The Pilots
Were the gyro captain in
The Road Warrior and the pilot in
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome the same person? I think not. Granted, there are a lot of similarities between the two. Both characters were portrayed by Bruce Spence. Both characters start off, on their initial meetings with Max, as antagonists. And both characters are last seen leading the group of survivors that Max helps to escape in each film. But if they are to be the same person, there would be some pretty glaring continuity issues.
For one, the voice-over at the end of
The Road Warrior states that the gyro captain became the new leader of the camp people, and that they did eventually make it to their destination. It seems unlikely that he would then abandon his people to return to his life as a scavenger of the desert. Furthermore, the scene at the end of The Road Warrior where the gyro captain rides up to Max, standing at the wreck of the tanker, and they smile at one another without saying a word, implies a sense of camaraderie between the two. It seems unlikely that the same man who risked his life in helping Max rescue the camp people would then turn around and steal his camel train some years later.
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