The world of Mad Max keeps ending and its characters keep driving towards salvation

With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.

Twice now, George Miller has made the car-chase movie to end all car-chase movies. He’s also made the car-chase scene to end all car-chase scenes at least four or five times, depending on how many scenes from the aforementioned movies can be separated out and clearly delineated. Car-chase movies and car-chase scenes nonetheless refuse to actually end, of course. Even Miller can’t let them go; his new movie Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth film and first prequel in the Mad Max series, as well as the first one not to actually include Max Rockatansky in a leading role, has an all-timer vehicular set piece dropped into the middle of it, long after the movie has established that it will not function as a non-stop chase and battle royale like its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road. In fact, much of Furiosa is slower, plottier, and more deliberate than Fury Road. Yet as easy as it would be to make a whole movie in Miller’s wild world that doesn’t revolve around revving engines—countless characters, environments, and situations from these movies feel like prompts for the imagination—the characters are drawn back into their vehicles anyway. It’s a series hallmark that also feels like an organic compulsion. The future simply can’t help itself.

If the Planet Of The Apes series, past and present, continuously circles an apocalypse, only occasionally resorting to setting it off, the Mad Max series blurs and extends the line between apocalypse and post-apocalypse, where the victims of social collapse never really have the chance to reset and rebuild a new status quo. Whenever characters make it out to a better corner of the world, as implied by the endings of the second and third movies in particular, we get only a glimpse or a few lines of narration before the next movie goes back to the wasteland—because even in a hellscape, there’s still space for the world to get incrementally worse. When I first saw the original Mad Max (1979), especially having already seen its sequel, I would have pegged it as a mid-apocalypse movie, capturing the details of society on the brink of crumbling. Now, with the fullness of five movies (and another decade of real-world events), I’m not so sure.

No, things in Mad Max aren’t quite as disorderly as they’ve fallen by the time of Mad Max 2 (1981), released in the United States as The Road Warrior the following year. The clothes are somewhat less outlandish, and the roving criminal gangs seem, if not more reasonable, slightly more restrained in their goals and ambitions, in life and in attire. But society as depicted here (after American audiences play a brief game of “apocalyptic madness or Australian quirk?”) truly feels unmoored from the jump, with little semblance of genuine, recognizable authority even if everyone hasn’t yet been reduced to wasteland-dwelling desperation. Has the apocalypse really not happened, or has it just not yet reached everyone equally?

These conditions even weirdly justify some of the first movie’s bagginess, where in between breakneck opening and closing sequences, Max kind of dithers around about whether or not he’s too burned out to stay with the Main Force Patrol (who are also outfitted in leather gear, as if pre-capitulating to the coming apocalypse, or rebooting their own costumes like a superhero trying to stay relevant). It’s as if he’s killing time until the tragic deaths of his wife and infant child that will push him over the edge, a catalyzing force for him getting with the apocalyptic program, without him realizing how inevitable that all is. (Who among us, etc.) It’s in The Road Warrior that another character disdainfully describes Max as “living off the corpse of the old world,” but that seems truer, and more tragic, in the first film, before it’s occurred to anyone.

From The Road Warrior on, the series becomes more iterative. Chronologically speaking, each entry shows the future getting progressively worse; narratively, none of the movies particularly require each other to make sense. The Road Warrior opens with the most explicit of the series’ periodic state-of-the-world sum-ups—war led to a fuel shortage which has led to collapse—and from there, little more detail about the before times emerges throughout subsequent movies. Instead, we learn more about the apocalyptic now, or, in Furiosa, some recent history that may be world-altering or intensely local, depending on how much of the rest of the world remains. In any event, it all blends together; who can say when the later movies are set in relation to the first three? It would be easy enough to say that Furiosa (which takes place over many years) bridges the gap between Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) but based on Max’s apparent age in Fury Road, Thunderdome probably isn’t set a full 15 years earlier than the fourth film.

Or maybe time passes differently in the wasteland, allowing characters and actors from the series to disappear and reappear at will. Even aside from Mel Gibson being understandably recast (for reasons both timeline-logistical and real-world practical) in Fury Road, the series has its odd echoes and recurrences that aren’t strict sequel stuff.

In The Road Warrior, Bruce Spence plays a gyroscope pilot who becomes the leader of a post-apocalyptic tribe; in Thunderdome, he returns as a similar-but-different pilot who steals Max’s car before eventually flying a group of adorable moppets to freedom. On its own, maybe this could be chalked up to Thunderdome rehashing some material from Road Warrior, but for the most part, it goes off in a number of new directions—and moreover, the dreamlike recasting becomes more of a motif with Fury Road, which introduces a decidedly different Max while repurposing Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the villainous Toecutter in Mad Max, to embody the more outsized water-and-gas-dealing despot Immortan Joe. Tom Hardy’s Max seems more haunted than the Gibson version from the end of the previous film, and his low, grumbling voice (possibly dubbed over?) feels, at times, disembodied from his scrambling physicality. Several major figures from Fury Road are then recast in Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy playing a younger version of the title character and Lachy Hulme as Immortan Joe. (Keays-Byrne died before Furiosa was made, but the recasting fits Miller’s aesthetic regardless.)

In this context, all those ostentatious character names—Toecutter, Furiosa, The Doof Warrior, Aunty Entity, Lord Humungus, Piss Boy, Dementus, and so on —don’t feel like mere flights of dark whimsy. Everyone in the wasteland is a metaphorical self-made man by necessity, and sometimes that involves strategic rebranding, even if it also means embracing something grotesque about yourself. Just look at the man literally branded Pig Killer (Robert Grubb) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: It’s supposed to be a brand of shame, explaining why he’s been confined to a lifetime of shoveling shit after killing a pig whose, ah, output fuels the overcrowded, dusty, but (by Mad Max standards) relatively stable Bartertown. But by the time Max meets him, Pig Killer takes his new moniker as a point of pride: He killed the pig to feed his family, so fuck it, he’s Pig Killer.

Thunderdome is particularly attentive and sympathetic to this method of post-apocalyptic survival. Master Blaster (Angelo Rossitto and Paul Larsson, respectively) sounds like a Lord Humungus or Immortan Joe type, but the truth is, they’re two people combining their respective brawn and brains to protect themselves. (Max appears to understand this too, refusing to kill Blaster in the Thunderdome.) It makes sense, then, that characters would change appearance or reappear in different guises throughout the series, a combination of adaptation and stasis. Thunderdome probably doesn’t get enough credit for accelerating this practice and bringing it into the narrative (which, as with the sometimes-dawdling first movie, perhaps excuses the softened, kid-friendlier tone that nags at some fans).

Of course, it’s not unheard-of for a long-running series to switch out various actors as needed, but Miller has absorbed what might have read as necessary concessions into the series’ whole aesthetic, which expands and contracts with graceful elasticity. Mad Max begins and ends with two banger action sequences, and you can see the expanded scope (and budget) when Miller gets back on the road for the stunning 30-minute climax of The Road Warrior. Beyond Thunderdome explores the specific location of Bartertown in more detail, and at the outset of Fury Road, it briefly looks like it will do the same for the Citadel location, until it becomes clear that most of the first hour will actually be an ongoing, supersized chase sequence—before the movie takes a break at the halfway point, then knowingly doubles back for another climactic blowout in the vein of Road Warrior.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) represents perhaps the most dramatic tempo shift in the series so far, and as such will probably be received with more Thunderdome divisiveness than Fury Road rapture. Rather than focusing so much of its world-building, characterization, and thematic concerns into the framework of a chase, it sprawls outward, strategically deploying a couple of killer action sequences amidst a more novelistic story of how young Furiosa (Taylor-Joy and, in her youngest years, Alyla Browne) became Fury Road-era Furiosa (Charlize Theron), and eschewing Max almost entirely. Furiosa and Theron’s portrayal of her are a large part of what takes Fury Road over the top as the best Max picture, so it’s both logical and potentially foolhardy to give the character a movie of her own—and, as mentioned, without Theron’s steely presence. But just as Fury Road feels like a riff on familiar Mad Max material in a new key, Furiosa elaborates on the previous movie without trying to replicate the full range of its circus-like showmanship, instead applying that range to wasteland life in between the car chases (at least some of the time, anyway).

Furiosa is ostensibly a revenge movie—calling back to the final section of Mad Max, with Furiosa seeking to avenge her family—while successfully provoking thoughts that so many similarly themed genre films would like to inspire, but don’t. Without indulging in major spoilers, the final conflict between Furiosa and her nemesis Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), sort of a wannabe upstart Immortan Joe, comes to a head in a much smaller, more dialogue-driven scene than might be expected from a series that often keeps its major characters conspicuously silent throughout the action. (Taylor-Joy is said to have about 30 lines throughout the film, making the most of her expressive eyes, paired with Furiosa’s established iconography.) The scene is still contentious and violent, yet it exposes the unresolved pain of these characters in a way that feels applicable to their world—and maybe also ours. This decrease in volume shouldn’t be shocking, considering that Miller has the movie state its thesis question upfront: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” It’s a well-timed question, dovetailing with the feminist turn the series has taken in the Furiosa-driven installments, as well as how its environmental messaging only feels more urgent today.

Which brings us back to the exhaust-belching car chases, the ones that figuratively end all other car chases, but more literally keep going indefinitely. Fury Road in particular feels like an experiment in topping the astonishing 30-minute closer of Road Warrior with a feature-length remix. Whether or not Road Warrior directly inspired the nonstop-action rollercoaster climaxes of movies like Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom or Attack Of The Clones, it certainly set the bar for a certain level of adrenaline-fueled, well-crafted relentlessness, so it’s astonishing to see Miller spend so much of Fury Road above that bar. For that matter, it feels like Thunderdome’s final train-car-plane climax—not much discussed in the context of the series, and another major point in the third movie’s favor—nonetheless probably helped inspire some of those beloved Fast & Furious sequences.

There are other good action scenes in the series—the Thunderdome fight; the Max/Furiosa fight in Fury Road—but the cars maintain an inexorable pull, even as the movies enter their fifth decade. Furiosa, for example, could easily have avoided mounting a 15-minute sequence where a whole chase and battle unfolds while Furiosa attempts to stow away on the underside of a war rig, but whether Miller felt an obligation to his Fury Road audience or a pull toward the perpetual thematic fit, it’s there. Though the movies are all set in Australia, it’s difficult, as an American viewer, not to think of them as set in a future where American car culture has managed to eat away the world. Maybe it’s because Miller combines a George Lucas-like love of revved-up spectacle with a more jaundiced, satirical eye, or maybe because the happier-faced Cars series (and all the endless jokes about the apocalypse that must have given rise to it) has become such a Disney staple. Regardless, there’s something meta about many of the best roaring-engine scenes of vehicular mayhem ever created, essentially revolving around the pursuit of the valuable gasoline (or “guzzolene”) needed to enable those roaring engines to begin with. It’s like staging a massive pie fight to determine who gets that last slice of banana cream.

In a strange way, it’s the cyclical, borderline hopeless nature of the Mad Max movies that keeps them from growing stale over the decades. (That, and the dawning realization that the outlandishly inventive names of the characters may be the only truly far-fetched thing about them.) Any other series that ends at least three times with at least some of the heroes bidding the main guy farewell in order to build a newer, more hopeful enclave of society might well earn some ire for cheap sentiment, or at very least repetition. But that question from the opening of Furiosa manages to encapsulate Miller’s genius for delivering wildly entertaining bummers that neither sidestep nor overindulge their sense of doom. His characters are braving their world’s cruelties by clinging to their car culture, not out of love but out of necessity. It’s the perfect perpetual-motion blockbuster series, where ill-gotten, destructive sensation can still deliver some form of salvation.

Final ranking:

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

2. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

4. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

5. Mad Max (1979)