Mad Max: From Toecutter To Joe

George Miller’s had a weird old career. He started out in medicine, and for much of the 1970s balanced a career as a doctor (in which he found himself treating a notable number of injuries from car accidents on Australia’s highways) with participating in the indie filmmaking scene in his native Australia – eventually, he became a respected Hollywood director with major releases like Happy Feet and Babe to his name. How did he get here from there?

Well, the road to that led directly through those car crash mutilations, because between that and losing friends to traffic accidents Miller was left with a healthy appreciation of just how lethal the open road can be- and how much scope it has for drama. Frequently working without a permit, he and his crew took to the road with some seed capital, some cars, and a fascination with violent mayhem, and they turned out Mad Max. If the shoot went wrong, well, George would have had a busy day at the emergency room – but it went gloriously, spectacularly right, creating an action movie archetype that was the making of his career as well as his lead actor, infamous antisemite Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson’s gone from the franchise now, and George Miller is back – a pay dispute between him and the studio over the mega-successful Fury Road having resolved – and he’s treating us to Furiosa: A Mad Max Story later this month, a prequel further exploring the pivotal co-protagonist of Fury Road. This makes it a good time to go back over the series and see where the road’s taken us so far, wouldn’t you say?

Mad Max

In the not-too-distant future, social order is on the verge of breaking down. A losing battle to conserve what is left of it is being fought by the Main Force Patrol, an elite police division that combats road bandits with a ferocity comparable to that used by their quarry. One of the best of the bunch is Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), who proves to be the only MFP officer able to cease the rampage of escaped convict the Nightrider (Vincent Gil), in a pursuit which culminates in the Nightrider’s death. That’s a problem, because the Nightrider was a long-time member of a motorcycle gang ruled over by the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a Charles Manson-esque figure who urges his underlings into ever-greater acts of violence.

When the Toecutter’s gang arrives to collect Nightrider’s body, nobody is safe – not Max, not his best buddy on the force Goose (Steve Bisley), and not Max’s wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) or his child Sprog (Brendan Heath). As the violence escalates and the Goose gets cooked, Max contemplates quitting the force so he and his family can keep their head down and look out for each other – but when the Toecutter and his cronies ruthlessly destroy any hope of that, Max takes the souped-up Pursuit Special that the department commissioned for him specifically to keep him on the force. Justice is no longer an option – but maybe there’s a chance of revenge for Mad Max…

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Emerging in 1979, Mad Max was a triumph of grassroots filmmaking – shot for a few hundred thousand Australian dollars it raked in an astonishing return on investment, breaking global commercial records and becoming one of the biggest success stories Australian cinema has seen before or since. Indeed, when it got distributed to the United States it was a groundbreaking moment in terms of getting cultural exports out there – and it had to be dubbed because a lot of Americans weren’t familiar enough with Aussie banter to be able to parse it.

It’s also fairly unique as far as post-apocalyptic movies go. There’s several significant aesthetic and setting shifts between this and The Road Warrior, and it’s really The Road Warrior which great swathes of the post-apocalyptic bandwagon-hopping B-movies of the 1980s were ripping off. You can, in retrospect, see how the setting here evolves into the setting of that (and if you’ve played the early Fallout games, you’ll instantly recognise the police armoured leather jackets here as being lifted directly and implemented in those as one of the armour types), but that’s very much a matter of applying hindsight.

The big difference is that whilst its sequels are post-apocalyptic science fiction, Mad Max is pre-apocalyptic – very, very slightly “pre”, the apocalypse is right on the doorstep, but “pre” nonetheless. Society hasn’t collapsed yet, but it’s unravelling in all directions at once. This has obvious budgetary benefits – it means that plenty can still be done with ordinary costumes, props, vehicles, and locations and there’s no need to go out into the deep desert to get away from signs of any form of ordered society.

At the same time, it also means that the story can thematically tie the unravelling of social bonds to the fraying of Max’s mental health. “Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them” says Max – after Goose buys it but well before anything happens to his family – which suggests that Max sees this sort of future beckoning him well before what is often assumed to be the catalysing incident plunges him into it. In effect, Max’s grasp on things is slipping in parallel with society’s, which is in keeping with the way he starts out The Road Warrior as an embittered loner and ends it somewhat more softened even as the process of rebuilding takes another small step – a formula the other sequels would reiterate. Here, whilst the apocalypse in the wider society isn’t broadly elaborated on here (and its exact reasons will shift about a little in later movies), the personal apocalypse in Max’s life is the murder of his family, the end of a private world that’s just as devastating to Max as the wider disaster is to society at large.

One thing which the movie establishes early on is that the police are basically dressing and acting motorcycle gang members in their own right, leering through their sniper scopes at couples having sex and bickering over who gets to drive their souped-up Pursuit Specials. It’s an instant detail which immediately conveys a lot of worldbuilding – as society unravels the lines are becoming blurry and the police have given up on any pretence of being clean-cut public servants. It’s good that Miller is adept at this rapid-fire worldbuilding through small details, because it means he can kick off the movie focusing on what would become the franchise’s best selling point: absolutely absurd fast-paced vehicle chase sequences. (Other subtle worldbuilding concealed within the garish, attention-grabbing action includes the phi tattoos that the Toecutter gang members wear, and which seems to be indicative of a particular level of initiation – Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns) doesn’t have one early on, but does later after he participates in the immolation of Goose.)

The opening pursuit here as the MFP try to stop the Nightrider seems tame only by comparison to the outrageous excess the sequels would resort to in order to top it; by any objective standard, it’s one of the best car chases in cinematic history, stuffed to the brim with gratifyingly over the top stunt work, Miller and his cast and crew taking some astonishing onscreen risks for the sake of getting this action. Just occasionally, you can spot where they’ve sped the film up to give the impression everything’s going faster than it actually is, but it’s rare.

Perhaps the major problem with the movie is that it’s kind of structured in reverse when it comes to the deployment of action scenes – the Nightrider chase is really the best action scene, and Max’s later hunt of the Toecutter and the rest feels a bit slow by comparison. This is an issue which The Road Warrior well and truly corrected, George Miller correctly realising that putting the biggest and most absurdly dangerous vehicle chase sequence at the climax was the right call; as it is, the initial car chase upstages the rest of the movie a little.

The Toecutter’s gang is basically an update of the sort of outlaw motorcycle gang American exploitation movies had been featuring ever since the Hell’s Angels started making waves. The evident gay lust between gang members and their raping of men over the course of the movie lends itself unfortunately to a homophobic reading, especially given the lack of benign LGBT+ relationships in the wider story (though you could read something into the Main Force Patrol’s camaraderie if you wanted), though equally one of the things that has frequently been skeevy about the use of rape as subject matter in B-movies is the way it’s near-exclusively used to threaten women, so at least in this respect the Toecutter’s gang are basically a danger to anyone not a gang member in good standing.

There’s also women in the gang – at least one of whom seems to be present not as a girlfriend of one of the gang members (as would be the default in many prior biker movies) but a rider in her own right; she’s not a prominent featured lead member and isn’t always present, but you can see her in at least one shot. It’s perhaps a shame she’s not more prominent, but at the same time if you have diversity in lead characters but don’t include it in the people who are there to make up the numbers you’re also only doing half the job. As it stands, the presence of a woman among the gang members in the shot I am thinking of may well have been an accident – for many of the gang extras who are there to fill out the numbers were recruited from an actual local biker gang, since they’d work for beer and it was cheaper than getting actors to just stand around in the background – but it still happens and so is still part of the text.

One of the things that Fury Road does in particular is put a microscope on the gendered violence in Max’s world, which in some respects makes the gender breakdown of the earlier movies a touch more justified in retrospect – it at least means the subject is consciously addressed later on rather than being treated thoughtlessly throughout the saga. A more reactionary angle here is the use of the well-worn “pencil-necked lawyer getting a crook off on a technicality” trope – though this is taken to such astonishing success that you could viably read it as spoofing that, particularly if you read Mad Max as riffing on Dirty Harry and imagining just how far you could take the “renegade cop” archetype, and what sort of context you’d need to make that still seem halfway sympathetic.

Through this, a more cunning social message can be read into the movie: a society that’s breaking apart creates cops like Max, and cops like Max don’t hold that society together – they just accelerate the process of it breaking apart. The next movie would see the old world gone altogether…

The Road Warrior

After an opening voiceover which catches us up on the previous movie, we join Max much as we left him, on a highway to nowhere in his Pursuit Special. The car’s filthy, he’s nearly out of fuel, there’s a lick of premature grey in his hair, and there’s bad dudes chasing him, but at least he has a doggo. After a run-in with the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence), a wily lone rogue who makes his way across the wasteland in a ramshackle gyrocopter, he learns of a nearby fuel refinery which a rag-tag group of survivors have managed to keep running – a point of light in the darkness. In need of fuel, Max decides to check it out.

There’s a problem, though – the refinery is under siege from a terrifying wasteland gang, a vicious pack of curs whose dedication to ostentatious cruelty makes Toecutter’s crew look like a bunch of softies, led by the Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rolla himself – no, not Chris Jericho, Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson). That’s all very well, but Max just wants some petrol. Helping out the refinery crew seems a better way to get it, especially since Max has already had a nasty scrape with Wez (Vernon Wells), one of Humungus’ most violent lackeys – but once Max gets his gas, will he do the right thing and help the refinery crew’s ambitious plan to escape the refinery and make a break for the coast? It might cost his life if he does – but if he pulls it off, it will cement his legend as The Road Warrior…

This is the archetypal one – releasing in 1981, it proved another hit for the series, but able to play with a bigger budget Miller was able to put together a bigger spectacle and push the saga into the post-apocalyptic milieu that could be seen on the horizon in the original but hadn’t yet manifested. This time around the opening voiceover more directly enunciates the nature of the social breakdown – the world powers went to war over access to dwindling oil supplies, the war actually stopped, but it was too late for the governments to stop the spiral into chaos or pivot to renewable energy sources and everything collapsed.

As well as Max himself being a more ragged and mercenary presence, his emotional trauma and the ordeal of survival having left him cold and unfeeling, the world around him is harsher. The gangs have gone several notches more extreme this time, with the motorcycle gang and Manson Family aesthetic of Toecutter’s crew going a bit more punk, more pro wrestling, and several notches more overtly kinky in its aesthetic. (On the wrestling side of things, the Road Warriors basically took their entire look and gimmick from this.)

And then there’s the Gyro Captain – whose wiry build, offbeat outfit, and eccentric persona are quite reminiscent of Robert Calvert’s stage gimmick for much of his time in Hawkwind. Bruce Spence’s performance helps add some liveliness to the early reaches of the film, and he has a pretty decent character arc – starting out as an antagonist, becoming Max’s weaselly unwilling sidekick, and eventually putting down roots with the refinery crew. He also ends up being kind of the conscience of the movie – whilst Max initially just wants to barter a small good deed for some gasoline during a lull in the fighting and is comparatively cold when observing the raiders’ atrocities, the Gyro Captain has a bigger emotional reaction to observing some of their worst acts, establishing as someone who’s fine with a bit of a scam for the sake of grabbing resources but for whom some things are beyond the pale and still shocking. Max, of, course, is jaded – but the fact that there’s things even rogues like the Gyro Captain draw the line at is useful for suggesting that even in a collapsed world there’s a sense of decent behaviour which some people still adhere to whilst others don’t.

The gyrocopter also provides a diegetic excuse for some aerial shots of the action scenes, which again emphasise the sheer scale of the mayhem Miller unleashed in the desert for this. The fortified refinery built and then detonated in the desert for the purposes of the movie is incredible, with long shots early on depicting the siege conveying the sheer scale of it – and thus of the siege too. With an actual budget to hand, Miller could go hog wild with the vehicular action, and he doesn’t waste the opportunity; he also gets the vehicle chases the right way around this time, starting with a pretty badass one then escalating until the much-imitated convoy sequence at the end. (The best time anyone’s riffed on the convoy scene is probably in the opening scenes of the otherwise laughably bad Conan ripoff The Barbarians, which does a fantasy version of it with horsedrawn vehicles.)

Once again, Miller shows rather than telling with the worldbuilding, and there’s some signs that he’d been thinking further about the feminist aspects of the franchise. Women are found in all manner of roles from medics to warriors within the refinery team, whilst Humungus’s forces have only a few women and those tend to be in secondary positions; this is a feature which simultaneously slips some diversity into each force whilst at the same time suggesting different ideologies and structures. Likewise, the fact that the refinery folk debate what to do whilst Humungus enforces his will through violence speaks volumes as to their respective natures. That said, it’s interesting how Humungus keeps getting interrupted in his first big villain monologue, and the attention of the camera keeps cutting away from him to other characters – he’s clearly important, but by himself he’d just be a blowhard in a hockey mask and a leather harness. He’s dangerous because of the people who enable and support him, and Wez (who’s the one with the long-running beef with Max) is given similar prominence to him.

Max teasing abandoning the refinery clan but coming back to help during the final fight anyway is a pretty blatant lift from Han Solo’s arc in the first Star Wars movie, but I think George Miller knew this full well and was happy to lean into it – after all, the refinery crew are all dressed a bit like Light Side-inclined Star Wars extras, with one of their lead citizens, Pappagallo (Mike Preston), outright looking like a Luke Skywalker knockoff. At the same time, Miller also seems to be wryly commenting on that sort of story arc through the fact that when Max makes his bid to get away he ends up coming a cropper in a way that Han Solo didn’t – which pivots it away from a story about someone who decides to leave but then comes back on a whim (or, if you’re being kinder to Han, after wrestling with his conscience a bit) and more about someone who learns the hard lesson that lone self-sufficiency only carries you so far, since he only survives because the Gyro Captain heads out to fetch him.

That’s just one dimension in which, despite being outwardly an outrageous action spectacle, The Road Warrior shows signs of significant thought having been put into each and every aspect of it. (Another example is some neat foreshadowing – the first gambit Max observes the refinery crew trying involves the group sending out a decoy vehicle whilst another vehicle makes a break for it, and that’s how the last twist unfolds.) The end result is one of those movies which everyone tried to imitate, but the bandwagon-hoppers frequently failed to show the same level of care, imitating the flash and aesthetic without exhibiting a comparable level of thoughtfulness or craft. After four years of rehashes by lesser hands, Miller would make a return for the third entry in the series…

Beyond Thunderdome

It is some time after The Road Warrior, and whilst the process of rebuilding is a little further along, so too is the decay of other aspects of the old world, with resources and infrastructure which needed a complex society to maintain fading further away. Fuel seems scarcer now, with the result that everything’s a few notches lower tech and more Conan-like than previously. Max no longer has his Pursuit Special, and the doggo died last time – instead we meet him driving a camel-drawn circus caravan with a monkey friend. All of these are stolen from him early on by Jedediah the Pilot (Bruce Spence); to track down his stuff, Max heads to the nearest place Jedediah would have gone to sell it – Bartertown.

Who runs Bartertown? Good question! The flashy Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), who holds sway above ground through a command of showbiz flare and razzle-dazzle, and the bizarre double act Master Blaster (Angelo Rossitto and Paul Larsson), whose subterranean pigshit harvesting operation provides the town with methane-based power, each have their opinions – and Aunty intends to use Max to answer the question definitively. Her gambit is to engineer a duel between Max and Blaster in the Thunderdome – Bartertown’s acknowledged venue for the lethal resolution of disputes – but when Max has moral qualms at the end of the duel, he is sent into exile in the desert. And then he meets the kids…

If The Road Warrior is Conan the Barbarian – a classic early 1980s movie which crystallised a particular cinematic aesthetic and spawned a swathe of low-rent imitators – then Thunderdome is Conan the Destroyer – a more commercial, more family-friendly, toned-down version of the previous movie, adding a layer of polish at the cost of sanding away a bit of the flavour and spice. Tina Turner’s music for it is lovely, but it also emphasises that this is a slicker, smoother product this time around, and the social commentary this time around is somewhat dialled back and softened, presumably not to scare away a Reagan-voting American cinema-going public.

For instance, Aunty Entity’s talk of “the day after” and a few other details suggest a shift in the nature of the apocalypse – sudden nuclear armageddon instead of the slow rolling collapse we saw in the first two movies, and one has to suspect that this in part arises from the fact that nuclear war is generally accepted as being bad for business whilst significant American corporate interests would prefer not to think too hard about peak oil. Master Blaster’s use of methane embargos to keep Bartertown humble and subservient is about as direct a stab at fossil fuel companies as the movie allows itself, just as Aunty is probably a satire of bread-and-circuses media.

Still, the first half hour or so of the movie is pretty good. Both in concept and in execution, Bartertown is really rad – both its Conan-esque upper reaches and the dark underbelly where Master Blaster farms pigshit, especially for the way it gives a sense of the trappings of the old world having been near-totally dismantled and a new, more Boris Vallejo-y culture emerging in its place. The Thunderdome concept is basically a bizarre version of a pro wrestling cage deathmatch with additional bungee cords, a really fun idea that’s executed neatly. The spectacle around the ritual is clearly derived from the world of wrestling, but since pro wrestling borrowed the Road Warrior aesthetic wholesale fair’s fair.

However, some script problems become evident towards the end of the Thunderdome sequence. For instance, Max’s punishment for breaking the rules of Thunderdome is determined with a spin of the Punishment Wheel. Max’s spin gets the “gulag” result, so… he’s sent into unsupervised exile? Shouldn’t that mean he gets sent to do slave labour in the pig poop prison camp? This stinks of a script rewrite coming down after they made the prop without an “exile” space, and for whatever reason there wasn’t budget or time to make a prop which said “exile” instead of “gulag”. For that matter, the means of sending Max into exile involves basically throwing away a perfectly good horse – why would they go to that expense, that horse is valuable in this society!

That’s not the biggest problem, though – the big problem is that the Thunderdome duel wraps with over an hour of movie left to go, with Miller already having played the main trump card he had to hand. (It’s the Thunderdome which is named in the title, after all, so presumably there was an understanding that it’s the best bit.) It feels like the movie could have added on more before the Thunderdome duel (perhaps Max would need to hit certain prerequisites to be able to challenge Master Blaster to the Thunderdome) so that Aunty’s betrayal and Max turning the tables on her could take up a final half hour to wrap things up.

As it stands, the much-maligned subplot with the clan of lost kids is roped in to fill time. Some people object to this because they simply don’t like child actors, but even if you really, seriously enjoy child actors (and I have to say that the crop here aren’t exactly uniformly compelling), there’s still a basic problem here, which is that the story we’ve been sold on the for the first chunk of the movie has been essentially abandoned in favour of an entirely new plot which is much more simplistic and less interesting.

That would be a problem even if the whole thing were brilliantly executed, and it just isn’t. If you were able to fill the entire clan with capable child actors with the precocious skills necessary to pull off the roles, you’d be able to write your own cheque as a casting agent; that doesn’t happen this time, which somewhat hampers things. In addition, the “tribe of kids” plot takes up way, way too much time in the movie – we’ve got a whole complex town of feuding factions we could have spent more time on here, but instead we spin our wheels with filler in an oasis which it makes absolutely no sense for the kids to leave or move on from. The whole thing resolves with them heading out to find civilisation somewhere in the sand-choked remains of Sydney, but this is nonsense – they should just stay in the oasis and let civilisation come to them. There’s only one conflict in the tribe, and the movie goes out of its way to try and get us to support the side of that conflict which is all about dispensing with the very important advantages the oasis gives in favour of, well, not very much.

And it takes so, so long! The first of the kids – their teen leader, Savannah Nix (Helen Buday) – turns up when there’s still over an hour to go, and before this rewatch I remembered almost nothing that happens between them rescuing Max and the end of the movie. I guess I blocked it out because it involved a lot of feral kids yelling and calling Max “Captain Walker” because they believe he’s this mythic figure. Anyway, I was not up for sitting through a long sequence of white actors riffing on old-time cinematic depictions of “primitive” tribal cultures, so I fast forwarded until they and Max finally get back to Bartertown; this takes nearly half a sodding hour from where Savannah shows up, and that’s entirely too long. By the time it happens, the movie has lost all momentum; we finally get a vehicle chase with some 20-odd minutes to go – Miller belatedly remembering that this is what the series is good at – but it pales in comparison to anything that the other movies have to offer on that front.

The kids, in short, are basically the Ewoks of this movie except less endearing. But the problems with their plot aren’t the kids’ fault; the fact that there’s so much padding suggests that George Miller was critically low on ideas this time around, and there’s other pointers to this fact like the recycling of the Gyro Captain archetype as Jedediah. The original Gyro Captain became the leader of the refinery crew after the events of The Road Warrior, but apparently the character of Jedediah evolved in a similar enough direction that it was decided to just call up Bruce Spence and lean into the parallel. The distinction this time is that Jedediah used a light aeroplane instead of a gyrocopter, and has a kid sidekick who’s a more talkative and better dressed version of the Feral Kid from the previous movie – more recycling!

Miller dropped the ball on this one, but there were extenuating circumstances. Byron Kennedy, who had produced the first two Mad Max movies, had died in a helicopter crash in 1983, and a grieving Miller seriously didn’t know if he even wanted to do the movie. He went ahead with it, but George Ogilvie ended up drafted in to co-direct, perhaps contributing to the dilution of the creative vision here. On the whole, Thunderdome is a mishandled sequel which becomes an obstacle to the franchise’s continuation, one whose legacy would have to be overcome if there would be a hope of righting the ship. In the end, it took 30 years and a recast main character to do the job…

Fury Road

For this movie we step back to a time when there was still sufficient gasoline to salvage to make large-scale vehicle chases viable, and Max still had his Pursuit Special. (Over the course of this movie, in fact, we see its destruction, placing it squarely between The Road Warrior and Thunderdome in the timeline.) Max is presumably mourning his dog, and he doesn’t have his monkey yet – but he is looking a bit different from how we last saw him, because he’s played by Tom Hardy now. He also gets captured really quickly, and is dragged to a bizarre enclave ruled over by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was also the Toecutter in the first movie), a depraved dictator whose troops consist of War Boys plucked from the masses and told they will go to Valhalla if they distinguish themselves dying in Joe’s name, and who are sustained by blood transfusions from captured slaves, with Max being assigned as the “blood bag” to a sickly War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult).

Joe has some manner of relationship to two other settlements – Gas Town, ruled over by the People Eater (John Howard), and the Bullet Farm, controlled by the Bullet Farmer (Richard Carter); perhaps they are allies, perhaps they are vassals, but either way these aging relics of the time before exert monopolistic control over key resources – in Joe’s case, water and produce. Soon after Max is captured, Joe sends forth one of his generals, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), on a trading mission to obtain ammunition and fuel from the other two communities.

Furiosa, however, has other plans – for she’s stowed Joe’s five enslaved wives in her tanker and intends to escape with them to the Green Place of Many Mothers, a utopian community that Furiosa was abducted from. When Joe and his army ride forth to intercept Furiosa’s tanker, Nux is there – and Max, as Nux’s blood bag, is strapped to the front of Nux’s car. It’ll take all Nux’s absurd fanaticism and grim determination to catch up with Furiosa – and all of Max’s resourcefulness to get free of Nux. And it’ll take Max and Furiosa working together to take down the People Eater, the Bullet Farmer, and Immortan Joe…

It took some 30-odd years to make this one; George Miller describes how as early as 1987 he was batting about ideas for a Mad Max movie structured as one long chase sequence, which this recognisably is; it’s a good concept which leans into the franchise’s strengths, but it took a long time for the basic plot ideas (and the concept of a society which used people – not gasoline or pigshit – as a resource to be farmed) to coalesce, and then a series of hiccups (9/11, Mel Gibson being outed as a massive antisemite) and other projects (Babe, Happy Feet, and so on) got in the way.

As it stands, though, the long gestation period may have been to the project’s advantage. For one thing, Mel Gibson being some 30 years older gives Miller a dignified way to simply write him out – by setting it in a point in the timeline he couldn’t possibly pull off – avoiding any of the embarrassment arising from Mel Gibson’s more Mel Gibson-y moments in the intervening years. For another thing, George Miller has said he’s become increasingly feminist over the years, having spent earlier phases of his life in more male-dominated surroundings, and whilst flashes of that sort of consciousness are apparent in earlier movies (The Road Warrior in particular) Fury Road is unapologetically feminist in its approach, making this a deft riposte to all the bandwagon-hoppers who resorted to cheap titillation and random rape to pad out their running times.

And on top of all that, new special effects technologies have not only had time to emerge and mature, but also best practices around their use have become better-understood. It’s all too easy to imagine a mid-2000s version of Fury Road which massively overused CGI, with the result that it ended up looking dated and horrid by now. Here, it’s clear that an awful lot of the shots have been processed – vivid, funky lighting abounds – but it’s equally evident, right from the opening shot of Max stood next to his rusting Pursuit Special, that we’re going to get real vehicles and real vehicle stunts this time, rather than resorting to excess CGI.

That isn’t to say CGI isn’t used, mind – there’s some clever shots thrown in during Max’s frantic scramble through the tunnels of Joe’s complex early on, where he hallucinates the ghosts of people he’s failed to save in the past, and it’s clearly been used to implement the vast machinery of Joe’s stronghold – but if a vehicle can be represented by an actual vehicle, it has been, and the CGI in vehicle sequences is largely used to make them even more wild than you can really shoot them with live actors. Perhaps the most significant use of CGI, however, is in the rendering of a massive desert storm that Furiosa drives her rig into during the initial chase scene, since it implies a degree of climate breakdown that adds a new note to the “apocalypse” part of the franchise’s post-apocalypse, just as social disorder, peak oil, and nuclear war informed it in prior movies.

This is not the only way in which it feels like the timeline has, once again, shifted about on us a little. It seems like Joe must have been running his operation for generations at this point – at least long enough that there’s plenty in his crew who have known no other way of life. Furiosa was abducted from the Green Place of Many Mothers around 20 years ago, give or take, and was old enough at the time that she remembers a lot of cultural particulars like her clan and specifics of her initiation into the group’s cultural mysteries, which implies she wasn’t an outright child – the upcoming Furiosa will clarify that point a bit soon – and it seems the Many Mothers were a post-apocalyptic community of women who’d banded together to survive in the Green Place.

That’s all well and good – but Max looks like in he’s in his mid-40s at the oldest, and given the hard wear the wasteland puts on you he’s probably about the age Tom Hardy was when this came out (late 30s). For a lot of the timeline stuff in this movie to work out, we’d need Max to be a late teenager in Mad Max at the oldest, perhaps even younger. Are we dealing with the same Max here? Or is it, as I prefer to think (and the use of narrators in several of the movies seems to suggest), a case that we’re not meant to think of the series as a future history, but a future folklore, a series of different folk tales people tell about the man called Max where the facts don’t necessarily align smoothly but the broad brushstrokes of the myth remain?

If that’s so, then Fury Road must also be one of the foundational myths of whatever community that Furiosa and the Many Mothers build in the wake of their coup against Joe. If part of the point of this movie was to sell us on Furiosa – at least as Theron plays her – then it absolutely does the job, emphatically enough to bring that Furiosa prequel into being before we get back to Max (Mad Max: The Wasteland is apparently in development). Reactionary fans griped about Max being a massive asshole at points and Furiosa being the real hero, but to my eyes that’s right in line with how it was in The Road Warrior, and we know from the early parts of Thunderdome that Max is still pretty mercenary and cold later in life, so why shouldn’t he still be a jackass who needs to be cajoled into doing the right thing now?

The real bee in their bonnet was pretty clearly the prominence given to Furiosa and her story, but that’s fine – more than fine. Max’s story has been told, his family are well and truly gone now and aren’t coming back, and precisely because of his drifter lifestyle he’s a rather rootless figure. That doesn’t offer much meat to hang a story on, but Furiosa’s recollections of the Green Place of Many Mothers, as teased out over the course of the movie, and the awful truth of what’s happened to the place she discovers, tells a story which enriches the thing. This movie needed a character like Furiosa with a personal story to tell, and there really isn’t much good reason to object to the execution here unless you are hostile to the idea of that story being about a woman or a community of women.

That isn’t to say that Miller’s gone heavy-handedly expositional on us; some of the best show-don’t-tell worldbuilding in the movie happens in the panicked reaction at Joe’s compound when it becomes apparent that Furiosa has gone off-mission. You see Joe running to the vault he keeps his wives in, and what you see there sums up the story more perfectly than any hacky rape scene between him and a bride could have, you’ve got the War Boys rushing to meet the call to arms introducing us to Nux and the “blood bag” concept, and so on and so forth, and all this teases out a whole bunch of the fucked up details of Joe’s little pocket empire and what Furiosa is rebelling against. We don’t know what to make of her, or her decision to go off-road, at the point she does it, but within moments of it happening we’re given this clear understanding of what she’s doing and why we should root for her. It’s another masterful example of economic storytelling, even in a movie stretching to two hours long.

As well as giving us all this new stuff to enjoy, the movie slips in just enough nods to the past to feel like it’s honouring the franchise’s history without feeling bound by it. The early section where Max has been captured and is desperately trying to escape from the dungeon compound he’s been dragged to feels like the sort of action we should have got in the underbelly of Bartertown but didn’t in Thunderdome. There’s a bit where Max does the “threatening someone with an empty shotgun” thing like in The Road Warrior, and a scavenged musical box mechanism shows up at one point, like in that movie.

But the best callback is the returning cast member. Leave Mel Gibson on himself – Hugh Keayes-Byrne getting another crack at the franchise in his role as Immortan Joe, in his final film appearance, is both a nice callback and kind of thematically appropriate, since Joe is basically doing what the Toecutter did writ large in some respects – persuading his underlings to engage in mayhem and depravity on his behalf through a cult of personality, peer pressure, and violent intimidation. Nux’s entire plot arc is basically a story of him at first buying into Joe’s worldview, then attempting to reject it, and he comes some way but eventually sacrifices himself in helping the others escape, in the process of so doing arguably embodying the ideals Joe preached better than he managed as a loyal underling, which feels like a neat nod to the way that exiting a cult is rarely a straightforward process and often has relapses and involves some lingering aspects of the cult’s worldview persisting.

At its root, though, Fury Road is still basically an epic-scale rig chase, where the rig itself is stuffed with surprises and a similar level of inventiveness applies to the pursuing vehicles. That’s fundamentally true to the seed idea Miller had in 1987, and the passage of time has only made a greater spectacle within reach. It’s exactly what the franchise needed to finally, at last, overcome the stink of its predecessor and get Beyond Thunderdome.