Director: George Miller
Cast: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley
Have I Seen It Before: Never.
Did I Like It: Is the question whether or not one recommends this movie, or if one would recommend this movie to audiences who have enjoyed the rest of the series, and especially Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)?
This first adventure into the bleak and desperate with Rockatansky (Gibson, improbably baby-faced here) has a lot of what one might ask from a film like this. Yes, there’s testosterone and petrol-drenched action for long stretches. The future is bleak. Everyone has an Australian accent. You are unlikely to ask for your money back.
If we’re going by the second question, I’m not sure I would recommend it. Everything is incredibly detached from what follows. We’re told society is breaking down, but society is everywhere, or at least it seems like a vaguely recognizable version of the austere level of society we all claim to enjoy today. This would be pretty easily forgiven. Miller and company were working with a shoe-string budget and still figuring out what they could or wanted to do in the movies. The problem becomes that offering this much back story into Max and offering us a glimpse of the world before everything went wrong, I’m stuck watching the movies to follow and can’t help but wonder how things went from some sub-Robocop level of lawlessness to the highly stylized anarchy—let’s call it Planet of the Aussies—of the later films. I think if you’re going to watch Fury Road wondering how things could get this theatrically bad in the hypothetical lifespan of one man, then you’re probably going to have a bad time. This is not the film series for those kinds of questions.