A Look Back at the Original MAD MAX Trilogy

The Max Max trilogy, which began with the eponymous 1979 film (the 20-year Guinness World Record holder for the most profitable movie ever made), continued with 1982’s Mad Max 2 — aka The Road Warrior — and concluded with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, is a series of films not only about the end of civilization, but also about its rebirth. The original film finds the world torn down. Lawlessness reigns supreme and the nuclear family — specifically Max’s family — is destroyed. In Mad Max 2 it’s all been laid to waste, a post-apocalyptic landscape ruled by freaks and marauders who take what they like and steal what they don’t. And while bands of survivors have formed their own camps and taken steps towards rebuilding, it’s not until Thunderdome that a new kind of society has sprung up in place of the old. 

That new society, called Bartertown and run by Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity, is at the center of all the best stuff in Beyond Thunderdome, easily the most polarizing of the Mad Max films, as well as the most ambitious. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Six years before any of us were able to chant, “Two men enter, one man leaves!” there was a little movie made by a first-time writer/director out of Australia named George Miller. And, of course, there was Max.

Played by a young Mel Gibson in the role that essentially made him a movie star, Max Rockatansky begins the series as a good man trying to do good things. He has a family to protect and, as a member of the Main Force Patrol, he is part of the rapidly shrinking line of defense against the motorcycle gangs terrorizing Australia. In a succession of insanely dangerous practical car stunts, Miller depicts the chaos of the near future as civilization slips away — it’s the apocalypse as a thrilling action movie.

Originally seen as part of the burgeoning Australian exploitation (“Ozploitation”) movement, Mad Max has aged better than nearly all of its contemporaries; not only have the film’s speculations of a world made desperate by its dependence on fuel come to feel especially prescient, but its analog action scenes are even more impressive in our increasingly digital world. The movie, as they say, really holds up, influencing an entire generation of genre filmmakers.

If Mad Max proved to be influential, 1982’s The Road Warrior is downright revolutionary. Often imitated, never duplicated, Miller’s sequel created the template for the movie apocalypse and reshaped how the future was depicted for the rest of the decade. When filmmakers weren’t ripping off Blade Runner, they were ripping off The Road Warrior. The movie’s leather-clad punks and desert landscapes have been copied in everything from a dozen Italian knock-offs to 2008’s Doomsday. It’s what the great Roger Ebert used to call a “bruised forearm movie,” a term he coined to describe a film during which your date grabs your arm tightly and won’t let go for the entirety of the running time. Constructed as one long action set piece — a largely dialogue-free, extended chase sequence — The Road Warrior is one of the most thrilling, relentless movies ever made. What little civilization remained in Mad Max is gone, and in its place is kill-or-be-killed savagery. Even the pursuit of what we want most desperately — in this case more fuel — is fruitless. Our hands close on sand.

Which brings us back to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the final film in the trilogy and the first to not feature George Miller as the sole director (he co-directed with George Ogilvie, with whom he had worked on the 1983 Australian miniseries, The Dismissal). Still a loner wandering through the desert, Max stumbles upon Bartertown, the first real civilization to be built since Australia fell in Mad Max (a makeshift society was attempted in The Road Warrior, but was destroyed and abandoned almost as quickly as it appeared). Max is allowed in and strikes a deal with its leader, Aunty Entity, to fight the massive man, Blaster (one-half of the Master/Blaster duo, just one of this movie’s wonderful contributions to genre cinema), inside the Thunderdome. Max is eventually banished and finds a tribe of orphaned children who look to him as their savior, once again agreeing to sacrifice himself to lead others to safety.

Though Bartertown is presented as a kind of city, it is not Miller’s answer to restoring civilization in Thunderdome. It is broken, dishonest and awful, built around the spectacle of violence and literally run on pig shit. The real hope for humanity is found at the film’s end, when the children Max saves settle down and create a new society for themselves. It’s no accident that Miller fills the film’s final frames with close-ups of babies and former cities lit up at night once again by new inhabitants. It’s the promise of a good future (as good as can be in the post-apocalyptic wasteland) — one that restores real hope for the first time in the series.

If the Mad Max trilogy is about the rebirth of civilization, it’s also about the redemption of Max Rockatansky, who begins the first film as a good and honest cop and ends it as a hollowed-out shell running only on vengeance. Like the rest of the world, Max is torn down and must be rebuilt as something different. He’s a selfish man out only for himself and right at home amidst the ugliness and violence of the wasteland. He’s a hero in the tradition of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, a drifter of few words and few loyalties who is willing to take a job only if it benefits him. The difference between Max and Blondie, though, is that Max eventually redeems himself through self-sacrifice. We remember him as a husband and father from Mad Max. We know there’s a good man beneath all the stubble, leather, and open wounds. The second two films in the series are about Max once again becoming that good man.

Nearly thirty years after the release of Beyond Thunderdome, director George Miller is returning to his most famous creation for a fourth Mad Max film, Mad Max: Fury Road. Mel Gibson, now almost 60 years old, has been replaced by Tom Hardy in the role of Max, and it remains to be seen if he’s the kind of character who can be portrayed by multiple actors James Bond-style. One thing, however, is certain: the Mad Max trilogy remains one of the most original, inventive and influential series in science fiction history, comprising three uniquely brilliant films… the flaws of Thunderdome notwithstanding (that dialogue…). No, Aunty Entity, we don’t need another hero. Max will do just fine.