Maximum power
George Miller’s road to nowhere…
MAD MAX ANTHOLOGY 18
1979-2015 OUT NOW DVD, BD
Once upon a time, police officer Max Rockatansky had a wife and a son called Sprog. He didn’t live in a wasteland. And he wasn’t mad. Such is the power of George Miller’s apocalyptic vision, it’s easy to forget that the original Mad Max was set “a few years from now”, that Mel Gibson was a largely unknown 22-year-old, that it was borne out of films like Death Wish and Straw Dogs – a revenge movie on wheels, as Max hunts down the gang that mowed down his wife and child.
As low-fi as it was, Miller’s 1979 debut sowed the seeds for the series: the taciturn Max, the extreme physical stunts, the bleak nihilism – not least as Max offers one thug the chance to escape from a burning car by way of hacksawing through his own ankle. What’s fascinating about re-visiting Max Max and its two 1980s sequels – The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome – in this new four-film anthology is just how they fed into Miller’s recent return to the franchise, the intensely operatic gamechanger Mad Max: Fury Road.
Hugely influential on a generation of postapocalyptic movies, the stage was truly set with The Road Warrior – a steam-punk world where S&M fetish-wear meets biker chic amid a desert oil crisis. By now, Gibson’s leathered-up Max is the perennial loner, cruising in his V8 Interceptor in search of gasoline, like everyone else. The violence is in-your-face – sometimes quite literally given the razor-edged, forehead-lopping boomerang thrown by Emil Minty’s “feral child” – while the acrobatic stunts are utterly audacious, as if Miller was rehearsing for the much bigger scale Fury Road.
The big misstep was Beyond Thunderdome, the perfect example of what happens when Hollywood dilutes a winning formula. Largely dispensing with Max as the silent Road Warrior, Gibson is made to look faintly ridiculous in a story that sees him do bidding for Tina Turner’s ruler of Bartertown. If battling with a simpleton giant (“the blaster”) whilst attached to a giant elastic band isn’t enough, Max escapes to hook up with a band of Lost Boys only slightly less annoying than the Ewoks. Eighties hair, stadium anthems and sub-Gilliam fantasy rules the airwaves.
Given this, perhaps it was right to wait 30 years before bringing Max – albeit now looking suspiciously like Tom Hardy – back for a fourth outing. Fury Road channels all the bleakness of the first two films, seasoning its stunts with sheer outrageousness, as if Miller finally got to make the Mad Max he’d always wanted to make.
Included in the anthology is Madness Of Max, a feature-length documentary that promises “the last word on Max” and does its best to live up to that lofty promise. But somehow, with rumblings of a fifth film growing louder, you suspect George Miller may have something to say about that.
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