The release of Furiosa, the coming ecological apocalypse… Every opportunity is good to revisit the Mad Max saga, through a ranking.
Thanks to the critical success of Fury Road, George Miller has finally regained control of the saga that made him famous: Mad Max. The Australian filmmaker with a career as eventful as it is exciting then told the story of the youth and battles of his heroine (formerly played by Charlize Theron and now piloted by Anya Taylor-Joy ) in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. And once again, the editorial staff of Ecran Large took it full in the face.
Because the saga is not just a way for Miller and Mel Gibson to embed themselves in Hollywood or a simple studio license. It is a fairly unique testing ground in the history of cinema, from the punk auteur film to the great popular spectacle. Our ranking holds few surprises, but above all constitutes an excellent pretext to return to each part, from worst to best (from the nice to the excellent).
5. Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome
- Released: 1985
- Duration: 1h47
The infamous town of Bartertown, the charismatic Entity (played by Tina Turner), the pitiful Master Bomber, and the famous Thunderdome and its aerial battles… The third installment of the saga may be last in this ranking, but it doesn’t lack strong images and striking concepts . The idea of taking part of the plot in the dark and filthy underground was also not without interest, especially to make the exterior more viable and less hostile in comparison.
The same goes for showing the gestation of a new civilization that reconquers its abandoned megalopolises after having presented a society on the brink and exiled in the desert in the first part. As Entity says: ” There was the desert, there is a city. Trade replaces theft. There was despair, now hope and civilization .”
But this new civilization is built on blood, domination and harmful reindustrialization that would only restart the countdown to extinction.
However, while the film still has moments of welcome sadism and strangeness , it is inevitably forced into more compromise, and therefore less radicalism, with its troupe of lost and innocent children who have not known the world before, and are therefore not prisoners of an old, deadly way of life.
While it’s not bad in itself, let’s just say that hope and confidence suit Mad Max less well than cynicism and desolation .
4. MAD MAX
- Released: 1979
- Duration: 1h28
If the Mad Max saga is one of the untouchable cornerstones of the post-apocalyptic genre, we often forget that its first episode was only just dipping its little toe into it. This is ultimately what makes George Miller’s first attempt so successful . The era is not really determined, and the desert territory that the film explores still has roads, buildings and a semblance of society. Each shot has the appearance of a blank page streaked by the horizon, to better capture the intangible fear of a world on the brink of the abyss .
This bubbling, initially buried, probably explains Mad Max ‘s fascination with unbearable violence, which brings human beings back to their barbarity as soon as the wind is starting to turn. Less fanciful in its sequels, the film is above all a pure tragedy , where the scent of death ends up drawing the silhouette of its anti-hero, and of his car as a faithful, chivalrous and vengeful steed.
Of course, one can understand this first part for its nature as a rough draft of Miller’s ambitions (a dizzying rough draft, let’s be clear) or for its inaugural reception, outraged by its violence. But this approach probably forgets to what extent George Miller’s cinema was already in the process of shaking up the field of possibilities from an editing point of view .
Subliminal images, perfect connections, symbols heavy with meaning (this ball and this shoe which fall at the moment when Max’s son is crushed), everything is done to signify by the assembly of the shots the shock, the crash, and the symbiosis of man with the machine by speed.
3. MAD MAX 2: The Challenge
- Released: 1981
- Duration: 1h35
And waterfalls that are still just as impressive
Although the first part was a monumental success, it was its sequel that theorized the aesthetic of post-apocalyptic science fiction in cinema , such that it has persisted in the popular imagination.
The desert as far as the eye can see, the fights to the death for a jerrycan, the faces plowed by survival, the camps of odds and ends, the hordes of bandits in SM outfits, the motorized pursuits and the solitary, cynical road warrior… Everything is already in Mad Max 2: The Challenge , a work of demiurge pop-culture that pushes the misanthropy of the first film to its limits . Humanity is reduced to a contingent of fanatics tearing each other apart for the liquid that caused its downfall. This is really its death rattle, while it clings to the last relics of the automobile industry in a world where nature perished first.
But what makes The Challenge George Miller’s first true masterpiece is, of course, its staging . The filmmaker draws inspiration from the simple structure of the western to design a cinematic space that is both extremely open and strictly compartmentalized, where the desert expanse and the pressure of the madmen who populate it coexist.
At least until the inevitable confrontation, a continuation of nearly 15 minutes of astonishing readability, which closes subplots within the very chaos and flames. Each shot triggers the next in a mechanism set to the millimeter. In the end, all that remains is the crumpled sheet metal and the impossibility of doing better… Except for George Miller himself.
2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
- Release: 2024
- Duration: 2h28
Until now, the Mad Max films were relatively tight. Emboldened by the critical success of Fury Road , George Miller decided to break the formula a little by focusing on the genesis of the character of Furiosa. Has the saga succumbed to the orpials of the Hollywood specifications, which require revealing the slightest bit of mystery? Quite the contrary .
- Also read: our review of Furiosa
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is without a doubt one of the freest blockbusters seen since… since forever, in fact. The filmmaker takes the mythological dimension of his franchise head on, to the point of making the famous Wastelands a sort of (even more) decadent pantheon, a geographical Holy Trinity – food, bullets and oil – dominated by tyrants who have proclaimed themselves gods. The little people are reduced to the state of cannibalistic cockroaches or fanatical cannon fodder, ina true ancient fable transposed into a future, or rather a no future, post-apocalyptic.
But what really interests Miller is the figure of the hero, in this case the heroine, forced to go through the obligatory stages (explicitly explained by an apparent structure) in order not to upset the hierarchy, but to find her place within it . She will do this at the end of a duel that is, to say the least, explosive between her and Dementus, a pathetic careerist who acts as a distorted mirror.
Their confrontation therefore takes on the air of a Homeric epic, especially since each milestone in the title character’s journey (the Campbellian model is largely invoked here) is won with great explosions and murders. Furiosa is a cinematic legend boosted with nitro, traversed by truly hallucinatory sequences and closing the loop of the post-apocalyptic imagination invented by the director.
1. MAD MAX: Fury Road
- Released: 2015
- Duration: 2h00
A landmark management of practical and digital effects
After decades of false starts and struggles, Mad Max: Fury Road was born in pain. It was necessary to achieve the pinnacle of the Mad Max aesthetic program . Better: its orgasmic supercompilation.
From the description of a future suspended in industrial overtones (the portmanteau words) to the legacy of Buster Keaton, here all the more flagrant as the scenario takes the model of The Mechanic of the Genealogy , Miller’s ambitions are realized in a visual and auditory feast such as Hollywood has not known for ages, if not forever.
Against the tide of the dictatorship of the “fans” then leading Hollywood straight into the wall (it’s the same year as Star Wars 7 and Jurassic World ), the director redefines his universe without being encumbered by the slightest chronology and at the same time refines it until reaching its essential theme: movement . What interests him is not any nostalgia, but rather the kinetic power, which allows to tell a story without even making his characters speak, so much so that Max is muzzled for the entire first half hour, a wild beast (Tom Hardy at the height of his career) about to devastate everything.
And Charlize Theron, imperial empress
Outside of the action that occupies most of the feature film anyway, words are rare and simple. In the action, they are almost non-existent. However, links are woven, at the turn of a glance connection, at the whim of a fight on the hood or on a metronome pole launched at full speed in the desert.
Fury Road does not tell, it shows . It shows a triple quest for emancipation transformed in spite of itself into a triumphant revenge, a wavering humanity in the midst of chaos. It shows that mainstream American cinema can still claim supremacy in staging.