Mad Max at 45: The fall of a franchise?

For a franchise as inseparably associated with high-octane dystopian action as Mad Max is, its much-forgotten first instalment actually isn’t all that ‘Mad’. So, with the release of Furiosa, and the 45th anniversary of the original picture having just passed, it seems a perfectly opportune time to see how far the franchise has come, or perhaps more accurately, how far it may have fallen.

Born out of the grindhouse revenge flicks of the 1970s, Mad Max (1979) is a comparatively understated affair that has an element of the American Western about it – the taming of the old west, the lawlessness of life on the fringe etc. Yet, it’s accompanied by the balls-to-the-wall intensity of its spiritual predecessors, think Death Wish (1974) or The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).

However, to begin with there must be a disclaimer: If you’re going into Mad Max expecting it to be a 90-minute action sequence, à la Fury Road, then you’ll almost certainly be disappointed.

Whilst it does maintain some of the same wacky characters and high-energy car chases, this film has a much more contemplative mood than Fury Road’s unabated restlessness will allow, and as a consequence, gives us a much better picture of Max the man, not the legend.

In fact, this film may be regarded as a prequel of sorts, a ‘pre-apocalyptic’ movie that goes against the grain of a typical dystopian film, asking ‘What if the fall of civilization didn’t happen overnight?’ and ‘How would it look somewhere in the middle of the apocalypse?’. This context vaguely sets the film at some point “a few years from now…” where biker gangs, led by the Shakespearean-ly arch Toecutter, roam the Australian outback. Whilst the gangs sow destruction, a group of truly just the worst, most amoral cops attempt to suicidally intercept them.

It is these altercations between the renegade law and the lawless that are by far this film’s most impressive element, resulting in a spectacular opening sequence that could easily be the finale of a lesser film. But the thing that makes the deathly stunts and manoeuvres so viscerally remarkable is the genuine element of peril behind them.

The fact that despite illegally closing highways, innumerable stunts going wrong (many of which were still included in the final cut), extras being paid in beer, and the use of a literal Australian Department of Defence rocket strapped to the back of a stunt car, not one single member of the cast and crew were killed or seriously injured is a miracle of filmmaking in and of itself.

The pure spectacle of the authentic stunts and action in Mad Max (1979) couldn’t contrast more alarmingly with its upcoming spin-off Furiosa. I appreciate I am only going off a couple of trailers and some snippets released so far but frankly, judging from what I have seen, Furiosa seems a jarringly distant departure from the spirit of what made the Mad Max franchise so universally beloved.

The official trailers for this spin-off picture a frail but stoney-eyed young Furiosa, as depicted by Anya Taylor-Joy, riding the fury road in vengeance against the prominent prosthetic snout of Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who was supposedly responsible for the death of her mother. In Miller’s typical exaggerated style, this trailer is packed to the rafters with garish character designs, warped extreme close-ups, and a whole assortment of manic, mutated war boys and yet somehow it feels hollow.

Everything we have come to accept and love about the franchise is present, every ingredient to make Furiosa yet another engrossing journey into the mad mind of George Miller. But something is missing. Whether it’s the CGI presence that ever so slightly takes us out of the action, or perhaps the tad too dramatic one-liners that seem made for the trailer, or maybe just simply the issue lies in the fact that this film doesn’t need to exist.

For me, the main draw to the Max of the Mad Max series was always his ambiguity. The myth of his origins and actions seemed to follow the character around. Tom Hardy’s Max hardly delivered a single line, and yet captured attention through pure magmatism alone. In this, he appears almost as a legend, the type akin to a Japanese ronin or a Western cowboy, a dystopian ‘man with no name’.

Sure, some argue that the 1979 film is a direct forerunner to the Max of the 21st century. However, the lines that run between them are, and have always been, speculative and disordered. The origins of the action hero have always been blurry, and that’s what sets him apart.

Compared to this, the entirely expositional purpose of Furiosa, to provide background to Charlize Theron’s iconic character in Mad Max: Fury Road, seems an outlier in a series that prides itself, and in fact was made on, the bizarre ambiguity of its world and characters.

A bid to explore where “Fury was Born” and finally explain the questions no one really wanted the answers to, ‘What happened to the Green Place?’, ‘Who is Furiosa?’, and the origins of Immortan Joe, seem a misguided attempt. One certainly born out of the film industry’s oldest sin: the all-encompassing corporate desire to squeeze every last drop of profit and creative merit out of successful movies, to reduce what was once an innovative and artistically progressive bit of media to a cinematic cash cow.

Surprisingly, I’m not saying Furiosa is going to be terrible. I like most of what Anya Taylor-Joy does and I am sure that George Miller will make an enjoyable action adventure as always. Rather, I suppose that my point is that Furiosa represents the sad trajectory of Hollywood, of what the studios value, and ultimately what we watch. Where the characteristics of Mad Max (1979), its gritty authenticity and unbridled creative zeal, are replaced by the corporate safety of Furiosa, and what once made a series great is lost amidst the endless cycle of spin-offs and remakes.