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George Miller’s first feature length film, Mad Max (1979), became his career defining achievement. That is, like two other Georges (Romero and Lucas with Night of the Living Dead and Star Wars, respectively), it became the movie that ended up occupying most of his career in multiple forms and retellings. And like those two other Georges, it was largely a result of creating something unlike anything else that had come before. Apocalyptic movies had existed, yes, but the crazy mix of cops, outlaws, revenge, and speeding cars on the dusty roads of Australia took the story out of the realm of The Twilight Zone and put it into the realm of pure Adrenalin. And even taking into account the varying levels of quality of the three movies that followed (Mad Max 2 [1981], aka The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome [1985], and Mad Max: Fury Road [2015]) it’s still my favorite.
Let’s cut to the chase (bad pun intended). George Miller himself has remarked on how he wanted Mad Max to be a sound filled silent film and he succeeded beyond all expectations. Just two days ago, I wrote up another movie I consider to be a superb “sound filled silent movie” – Walkabout (1971) – and I think it’s a legitimate distinction for several movies, including the works of Jacques Tati, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Beau Travail, to name but a few. Movies in which there is sound and dialogue, yes, but almost no important information is given via dialogue that hasn’t already been beautifully communicated visually. Mad Max does more than just show chases and violent action. It relays to the viewer, without providing any real exposition, that the movie takes place just slightly in the future. Not at the apocalypse but closing in. Society is breaking down but there are still governments, hospitals and commerce. Soon, though, we should all start heading for the hills or, as in this case, the outback.
Visually, Miller uses vanishing point perspective throughout the movie which gives the effect of everything diminishing. The entire universe is getting smaller and smaller, everywhere you look. Here’s a good representation of that to see what I mean. Importantly, near the beginning of the movie, road signs are seen as well as signs of civilization all around. Near the end, the vanishing points lead from nowhere to nowhere. The end is nigh.
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That coming doomsday is paralleled by Max, who loses friends and, ultimately, family to a gang of bikers so without basic human empathy and feeling that Max resigns his position and steps away from the world he knows to pursue vengeance. He does not become a vigilante like Charles Bronson in Death Wish, he becomes a bellwether of the apocalypse. He’s not taking the law into his own hands, as he already was the law, he’s letting his societal obligations collapse because, for him, society no longer exists.
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Mad Max is a bleak and violent film but filled with a visual fury for telling its story and that makes all the difference because story-wise, it’s not much. Story-wise it’s a simple good guy takes revenge on bad guy story complete with clever quip as the hero kills the last bad guy. But using the visuals to tell the story completely changes it up, makes into more of a fable than a realistic story, something Miller was going for and in fact felt was necessary for audiences to accept the movie.
After Mad Max, Miller did three more and two were immediate. Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) was generally the most praised and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the most lambasted. The reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road was excellent and possibly the best designed of them all but I still think the vision of the first one is unmatched. I also think it’s one of the best silent sound movies ever made. For years though, even after the success of its 1982 sequel, the original was barely seen. That’s because the studios felt that dubbing the actors with American sounding accents would improve its status in the states. As a result, the only version most people saw was this dubbed version in which the dialogue, as little as there was, sounded stiff and stilted. As a further result, it didn’t get shown much. Then Mel Gibson became a bona fide star and people started to notice he didn’t sound quite like himself in that first one. Finally, the original got released with the Australian actors’ voices restored and the movie sold well on DVD. Now it’s available on Filmstruck and I highly recommend it. If you’ve only seen the latest incarnation, check it out to see where it all started, at the beginning of the end.
Greg Ferrara