Mad max original movie#

While Miller’s script occasionally sneaks some colorful turns of phrase into the dialogue, the language is so minimally important that most Americans experienced the film in a poorly dubbed version that was circulated in theaters and home video, and it’s only in the last 20 years that the original Australian track has been available on DVD and now streaming.Ĭompared with the full-bore amplification of the sequels, leading up the symphonic mayhem of Mad Max: Fury Road five years ago, Mad Max now looks like a dry run, produced before Miller secured bigger budgets and refined his technique. There are good guys and bad guys, and once it gets personal for Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) in the final act, it becomes a crude vigilante thriller about a family man mowing down the horrible brutes who destroyed his family.

Mad max original movie#

Miller has said he intended Mad Max to be like a silent movie with sound, and it does have that kind of lizard-brain simplicity, at least on the surface. There’s a pitched battle going on here between the Main Force Patrol (MFP), the police unit that watches over the highway, and the Toecutter’s deranged motorcycle gang, filled out by wild-eyed men with names like Mudguts, Clunk and Grease Rat. Miller thrives on that feeling of disorientation, and whatever we pick up about the setting is learned entirely on the fly, amid the noise of shotgun blasts and souped-up, nitro-charged muscle cars and motorcycles. To experience Mad Max is to feel like you’ve slumbered like Rip Van Winkle and woken up in a future that’s terrifying and virtually unrecognizable, and the best you can do is survive on your wits. Here and in the sequels, Miller is trading a little coherence for chaos. There are clues everywhere to suggest that society has collapsed, but no explanation of what brought it to this place, only credits that deliver the chilling news that the end of the world as we know it is just a few years away and that it’s going to feature “Hugh Keays-Byrne as the Toecutter.” But revisiting the original Mad Max now, it’s remarkable how little interest Miller has in exposition or conventional world-building.

Now that we’re 40 years and four movies into Miller’s Mad Max series, his vision of a near-future Australian no-man’s-land has been better defined and expanded, with the ravages of war and shortages in resources like fuel and food leading to mass anarchy and the emergence of various barbarians to fill the power vacuum.