Which is why Mad Max: Fury Road inspired so much curiosity and excitement before its release, as it promised an enticing update on the evolution of an eccentric talent. Taken together, these three films evoke a traditional autobiographical arc of a once angry and wily filmmaker who, perhaps inevitably, softened with age and success. One might have forgiven the cuddlier, less ambiguous Max if the staging were crisp, but the pacing is limp, and Beyond Thunderdome totally falls apart after a serviceable first act that suggests a political sci-fi allegory that never comes to fruition. There are a number of promising ideas and one terrific fight sequence set in the titular coliseum, but the film finds Miller succumbing fatally to the misguided notion of Max as a messiah. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, released in 1985, is retrospectively interesting for serving as a rough draft for the film that might be Miller’s masterpiece: Babe: Pig in the City, from 1998. Though brilliantly staged and influential to this day ( Fast & Furious 6 offers a similar climactic battle royale), the film is disappointingly structured as a conventional coming-of-age adventure in the tradition of Shane or the original Star Wars trilogy-if George Lucas had the temerity to put his Ewoks in ass-less chaps, that is. Unlike Mad Max, its kinkiness is superficial, and Miller is overly preoccupied with offering Max up as a mythic hero right out of Joseph Campbell, despite the scant evidence on display to support that assertion. But the film is disappointingly conventional. The Road Warrior, from 1981, is a poetic action sonata of cars and leather that’s rich in beautifully composed wide shots that are designed to tickle the eye, climaxing with an awesomely inventive act of demolition-derby warfare. The film is so disturbing because it implies, however fleetingly, that the annihilation of the hero’s family incidentally enables him to come to terms with his predilections (this film would pair wonderfully in a double feature with Cruising) and Miller is pointedly indifferent to the usual platitudes that filmmakers often offer in hypocritical gestures intended to render their vigilantes “likable.” There’s no emotional closure in this film, and no illusions of any selflessness, as Max kills the bad guys, in a spectacular series of road duels, for gratification and drives off to potential oblivion. Following the death of his family, a grief-stricken man straps on his leather duds (which Miller never fails to fetishize) in order to do battle with the psycho killers who appear to have risen from the ether of his subconsciousness. One doesn’t have to go looking too hard for a gay subtext in Mad Max. Mad Max also has a distinctly Australian masculine tension that’s reminiscent of other outback-set classics such as Wake in Fright, as it’s concerned with the pronounced sexual repression and frustration of a predominantly male population that’s all dressed up in tight leather with little to do apart from mounting their bikes and revving up their big noisy engines. The 1979 film most explicitly riffs on delinquent racing movies and the kinds of crudely effective 1970s horror movies that would sometimes show a family being violated in a prolonged fashion, and there are sequences in Mad Max that could be edited, probably with few seams, into, say, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Though the second film, most commonly known in America as The Road Warrior, is often cited as the masterpiece of the series, the original Mad Max is still the most ferocious and subversive. Within this consciously simple narrative framework, director George Miller created two of the greatest of all action films, fashioned one of the most influential pop-cultural visions of the post-apocalypse, and capped it all off with a spectacularly wrongheaded kid’s movie. The plots, which are nearly irrelevant, are primitive even by the standards of low-budget genre films: In a bombed-out future version of the outback, a vicious gang pisses off a brilliant highway daredevil, Max (Mel Gibson), and stunning vehicular mayhem ensues. The original Mad Max trilogy is the work of a talented virtuoso who blended seemingly every trope of every movie genre into a series of punk-rock action films.
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