Mad Max 7 Things That Still Hold Up Today
Mad Max: 7 Things That Still Hold Up Today
While George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise is now most famous for the Tom Hardy-starring Fury Road, the brutal 1979 original still holds up.
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Now that George Miller has continued the franchise with such gonzo post-apocalyptic actioners as The Road Warrior and Fury Road, revisiting the relatively grounded original could be seen as a step backward. 1979’s Mad Max is a dystopian police thriller set in a more or less familiar reality, but its brutal violence and bleak storytelling still make the film compelling and relevant in today’s era of mindless blockbusters.
Due to its low budget and runaway success as a sleeper hit at the box office, Mad Max held the Guinness record for the most profitable movie ever made. It takes a special kind of movie to break that record. From Mel Gibson’s nuanced lead performance to the mind-blowing practical stunt work, there are plenty of things in the first Mad Max movie that holds up to this day.
7 George Miller’s Dystopian Vision
The vision of a dystopian future that George Miller realizes in the first Mad Max movie is not quite the crime-ridden post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Road Warrior and all the subsequent sequels. Instead, the first Mad Max movie offers a stepping stone between the somewhat civilized society that exists today and the post-apocalyptic hellscape presented in the sequels.
It’s set in a more grounded, familiar near-future where natural resources are drying up and people are becoming desperate. This more recognizable world makes the gritty on-screen action more engaging. Because this world seems believable, the events that occur seem more plausible and thus, more horrific. If Max can senselessly lose his family to a wandering band of motorcycle driving murderers, it stood to reason that anyone could suffer the same fate. No was safe in Miller’s dystopian fantasia and that’s why audiences around the world responded to it so enthusiastically.
6 The Breathtaking Car Stunts
Mind-blowing practical car stunts have been one of the main selling points of the Mad Max franchise from the beginning. The first movie may not have a flamethrowing guitarist strapped to a giant rig like in Fury Road, but it is filled with breathtaking vehicular carnage as the titular cop takes the law into his own hands and vows revenge against a ruthless biker gang.
Throughout the movie, Max drives a supercharged V8-powered black Pursuit Special, which was given to him as a bribe to keep him on the force. This is one of the most iconic cars in movie history and one that brings a souped-up boost to each chase sequence. Unlike the implausible car stunts in the later Fast and the Furious movies, these automobile action scenes are relatively realistic and brutal to watch. Miller doesn’t hesitate to place his camera right in the middle of the action, placing the viewer firmly in the passenger seat next to Max as he races down the desolate road.
5 Mel Gibson’s Understated Lead Performance
Mel Gibson has played a ton of iconic roles over the years – Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, William Wallace in Braveheart, Hamlet in Hamlet – but the one that predates them all is Max Rockatansky, the cop-turned-vigilante from Mad Max. It’s one of the actor’s most nuanced and understated performances, which contrasts nicely with the excessiveness of the movie’s violence. Max is characterized like a spaghetti western antihero, so he’s sort of a lone wolf and doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, which forced Gibson to convey his emotions through body language and stern facial expressions.
4 The Bleak Tone
Mad Max is the polar opposite of a sentimental, life-affirming movie. It’s a story about how terrible human beings are and how miserable the future of our planet is. Miller gave the movie a relentlessly bleak tone, horrifically killing off all the likable heroes that get introduced and allowing the sadistic villains to roam free.
The movie culminates in satisfying vigilante justice, but it’s not a happy ending. Instead, it’s a sad conclusion where the people responsible for the tragedy are all mercilessly killed and nobody is left satisfied with all the bloodshed that has occurred. George Miller’s depiction of a lawless near-future and the deplorable criminals that inhabit it is still shocking today because of how grim it is. There’s no sentimentality or glorification of violence here, only tragedy and the spiritual emptiness that now consumes Max.
3 Brian May’s Soundscape
When George Miller first hired Brian May – an Australian film composer, not to be confused with the Queen guitarist of the same name – to write the music for Mad Max, he wanted a Bernard Herrmann-esque score to elevate his dystopian actioner with some Hitchcockian edge. Bernard Herrmann had created some of the best scores in Hollywood history for such films as Citizen Kane, Psycho, and The Devil and Daniel Webster, which won him his only Oscar in 1942.
May took this prompt and ran with it, combining classical orchestrations with mechanical sounds to evoke the film’s sci-fi setting and create a futuristic soundscape that ended up winning the Australian Film Award for Best Original Score. May’s score is spare and tense, instantly setting the viewers on edge and bracing them for the onslaught of onscreen violence that will soon come.
2 The Shock Factor Of Max’s Wife And Son’s Murders
Max’s defining characteristic in the Mad Max sequels is that he leads a solitary existence in the memory of his wife and son. But at the beginning of the first movie, he still has that wife and son. In the second act of the movie, they’re brutalized by a biker gang. The boy is killed instantly and Max’s wife later passes away from her injuries in hospital.
Miller establishes this as a dark movie from the beginning, but few movies – especially action movies – are daring enough to kill off a young child. As modern movies play it increasingly safe to attract as wide an audience as possible, the boldness and brutality of Max’s family’s murders in Mad Max still has the ability to shock today.
1 The Thrill Of Max’s Final Vengeful Rampage
In the final act of Mad Max, Max goes on a blood-soaked rampage to avenge his wife and young son. Following the brutality of his wife and son’s murders, it’s easy for the audience to get behind Max in the climactic sequence. For the most part, Mad Max is a meditation on humanity’s consumption of natural resources and the bleak inevitable future that awaits humanity. But after Max’s family are killed and his worldview is significantly narrowed, it becomes a straightforward revenge thriller.
Revenge movies can be wildly satisfying if the bad guys’ retribution fits the crime – and Max doesn’t pull any punches when he goes after the bikers. He rams a few guys off a bridge, forces another guy to jump in front of a moving semi-trailer truck, and handcuffs their leader Johnny to a car wreck leaking gasoline. He then offers Johnny a hacksaw to try to cut through his ankle before the vehicle explodes. After what the gang did to Max’s family, this is exactly what audiences wanted to see, but Miller takes the violence even further than the audience expects.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/mad-max-things-that-still-hold-up-today/
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