Ranking George Miller's Five Mad Max Films from Wonky to Genius
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) — 5th Place
The coolest world-building of any of the Mad Max films with a Star Wars-esque attention to mysticism and fantasy but the second half unfortunately veers into a Disneyfied adventure movie helmed by annoying kids and scored with kitschy 80s leitmotifs.
On one hand, I love the new fantasy direction Miller takes with this (the opening is a sequence inspired by Lawrence of Arabia with a puddle jumper attacking a line of camels set to an Arabized didgeridoo) and wanted to see more of this fascinating and bizarre world. On the other hand, I think he lost track of what makes this franchise so potent: the kinetic gas-guzzling chases punctuated by double-barrel buckshot and the B-movie (often disturbing) exploitation sensibility which has been noticeably filtered out of this installment to appeal to a wider audience. Even the final chase sequence based off Stagecoach gets hamstrung tonally by the quirky kids wielding frying pans.
Tina Turner stardom and a hokey George Lucas “let’s go on a journey, kids!” tone have taken the wheel and we lose on out on Miller being a freaky Aussie indie filmmaker crashing cars together in the desert with guys named Humungus. Lose the second act and add the exhilarating chases of Road Warrior and you’d have one of the best films in the series.
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) — 4th Place
One's opinion of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will depend on the question: do you believe the enjoyment of Max Mad movies are in their sense of grounded realism due to practical FX set pieces and weighty tangible violence from in-camera stunt work and choreography? If so, I think you'll prefer films like Fury Road and Road Warrior, as I do. If not, I think one can enjoy the more digital, uncanny valley quality of Furiosa for its own strengths. It is more abstract, at times almost verging on animation or some video game engine model. Some have said this is Miller taking his art in a new direction, with almost painterly expressionistic imagery. And I think the "imagery" of Furiosa is very strong; the "images" themselves are what I found lacking.
Much of the action — not all — can accurately be described as having a physically lighter quality and digital gloss. If the two ends of the spectrum are Road Warrior (one of the best practical FX movies of all time) where you can feel the weight and impact of every object on screen and Marvel superhero CGI sludge shot entirely on green screens in studio lots, Furiosa is decidedly further away from Road Warrior than I would have liked. Fury Road hid its use of CGI cleverly; Furiosa often draws attention to its own CGI. This was also impacted by my IMAX screening where the screen was so big that many of the images were literally distorted, appearing more pixelated. This new visual direction is not for me but that doesn't mean others won't like it. Anime fans, for example, might welcome this change to a more painterly action style.
In addition to the images, I also had some reservations about the story. George Miller once said, “Action is the purest use of the film language. All the syntax of cinema is best revealed in action sequences." There's a 12 minute action sequence where Octoboss and his raiders attack the War Wig that is stunning and extremely satisfying because it tells any entire story between two characters using only action and no dialogue. Miller once said he thought of the original Mad Max film as a silent film: "With the first Mad Max I basically wanted to make a silent movie, with sound, the kind of movie Hitchcock would say they didn't have to read the subtitles in Japan." In Furiosa, I appreciated how Miller shows the resourcefulness needed to survive in the apocalypse in small character moments like when Furiosa’s Mother changes a tire or when one of Dementus’ gang members saves moisture. But outside of the 12 minute action sequence I mentioned (and the Bullet Farm sequence), Furiosa is less rockem sockem non-stop kinetic collision and a more character-based film.
This is partly because Furiosa is the first film in the series to cover 15 years, to attempt a sweeping epic that reveals a character’s whole life and all the decisions that defined them. Past Mad Max films took place in the timetable of days, showing only slices of character’s lives, hinting at the periphery with flashbacks. We didn't have to be fully involved in Max's life in Road Warrior; we just had to get in the car, shut up, and watch him drive. Furiosa's timetable changes this as we are now required to be deeply invested in her personal story arc to stay engaged, in her emotional traumas, in her odyssey to return to a home we barely see. And this for me is a weakness in a film that has fundamentally nothing profound to say about revenge, or about post-apocalyptic life, or about a woman's trauma. Older Mad Max films weren't "profound," they were something better, visually arresting. By placing this burden of character and story on Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa, the film runs itself into a dead end.
The more digital, simulated images and this requirement to care personally for Furiosa when she's not an especially fascinating protagonist all combine to make Furiosa's 2-and-half hour runtime become noticeable. There are great action sequences in here, and Miller has never lost his touch for an almost theatrical choreography and staging, but I prefer the older more grounded installments that relied less on character and more on kinetic action with a thump.
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Mad Max (1979) - 3rd Place
It’s very messy but the brilliant seeds of the saga can be seen just below the surface; a student film version of Road Warrior with a fraction of the kinetic panache but that same Ozploitation camp sensibility of thespian hot rodders, disturbing yet electrifying violence, and the western genre ethos of a man bent on revenge, stealing out for the desert horizon.
The film is beleaguered by stop-and-go pacing and a terribly wonky scoring which ruins much of the emotion for me and took away from the more heartfelt scenes with Max and his girlfriend.
Yet I like how this film drops us in media res of societal collapse, not fully apocalyptic like Fury Road but definitely not in a functioning state, and explains nothing, leaving the viewer to infer what has gone wrong in the world to lead to this vigilante gang regime.
Gonna rewatch on mute with subtitles and i think I’ll enjoy the film much more. after all george miller’s visual language makes sense to me as a mechanized Buster Keaton in the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s words in 1948, “[we are] destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans."
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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — 2nd Place
Much has been written about the epic stunt work and action set pieces which have set new standards for the entire industry but I'm also interested in how Miller sees Fury Road as an "anthropological documentary" for its interest in understanding the cultural logic of a post-apocalyptic tribe.
How can the villain Immortan Joe wield such psychic power in a hierarchy of survival? Scarcity has turned back the clock to the Dark Ages and returned man to a cult-like obsession with God. He has shaped men into tools for destruction, erasing their individual identities. Like the kamikaze of Imperial Japan, this ability allows Joe to rule a collectivized society where any one of his subjects would sacrifice their lives in an instant.
This film really does have the best set pieces of any Mad Max film and it’s not even close. You can feel Miller kick his brilliant choreography into overdrive during the sandstorm; still one of the most visually stunning sequences I've ever seen. If there was any doubt before this movie that action can be the best use of the visual language of cinema, I think this put it to rest.
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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) — 1st Place
This movie is like getting punched in the face by pure sandy gas-powered kinetic force yet the camerawork is so elegant and resourceful it’s somehow shot like both a Sergio Leone post-apocalyptic western epic and a splattery grindhouse drive-in B movie.
While I agree Miller’s set pieces reach even more brilliant levels of choreography and in-camera affects in Fury Road, the sensibility of that film feels decidedly more polished and safe for “Hollywood” consumption. I much prefer the raw aesthetic of this exploitation chase film where many character moments feel like they’ve been borrowed from a John Waters or Roger Corman shoot and establishing wides look like some dime store fantasy novel about feudal desert lords brought to life.
This wonderful grit enlivens the world of the movie with a greater sense of authentic possibility; I never knew what I was going to see or grapple with in the next frame from disturbing acts of violence to wacky Outback vagabonds like the Gyro pilot.
This isn’t just brilliant set design; it’s Miller’s hectic and schizophrenic camerawork which whips us from flamethrower explosions to bloody punches to little feral children with machete boomerangs all while maintaining a sense of the spatial relationships between the camera’s subjects. This is Miller’s gift he brings to cinema: like De Palma, his mind’s eye knows exactly where to put the camera to maximize the kinetic impact AND to orient the subjects in the viewer’s mind with highly legible, expertly blocked and framed action.
There’s a split second shot where a car rips a tent off two bikers from Humungus’ gang who are having sex and the camera shows them both naked and confused for a second before centering back on the chase. It’s these kinds of zany visual jokes and weird character moments that give Mad Max 2 its unique flavor. As a kid who grew up loving Fallout: New Vegas, I can tell that game’s darkly comic sensibility and patchwork post-apocalypse aesthetic borrowed heavily from this film and I’m glad it did.
A double-barreled, chaotic fantasy action masterpiece with some of the strongest car chases in movie history (rivaled only by Friedkin and Frankenheimer) and a uniquely funky world dreamed up from the mind of Miller’s childhood in rural Queensland and the 1973 oil shortage that sparked the question: how long until civilization collapses when the gas runs out?