Mad Max, Fury Road Warrior beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max is great, although the middle is kind of boring.
Road Warrior is perfect.
If Thunderdome was R rated, scored by Brian May and the kids weren't so goddamn precious, (or were just aborigines), it would have been way better.

Prefer MAD MAX to THE ROAD WARRIOR. Probably puts me in the back of the bus but it's true. There's something kind of creepy about civilization in MAD MAX. It hasn't completely gone to hell but it still ain't right. Plus, the stunts are just nuts.

THUNDERDOME is okay until he's banished from Bartertown. After that it's rubbish.

I must admit I've never been able to get into the original. It has its moments but I've only ever seen it on tv and I always get distracted and wander away at some point. Saw Road Warrior in those perfect teen years and will always love every scrap of it. But I can't say that I feel you on Thunderdome, which for the most part I think is a nice, logical extension of the 2nd. I like the kids' society because (a) it is something we haven't seen in that world before and (b) it feels like a lot of thought went into it - what children raising children in this world would be like. Bartertown itself is a pretty impressive social construct for a pulpy post-apocalyptic movie.

The final chase is a bit of a re-hash but the ending is great - Max has moved from wandering loner to messiah and legend. He has protected and even helped to birth this new "society" that will hopefully outlast the likes of Bartertown and the last of the old world.

After having read some interviews with Walker and seeing Running Scared, I'm not really opposed to this bit of casting. At all.

Oddly enough I've seen Mad Max and Beyond Thunderdome, but I haven't seen The Road Warrior. Need to get on that.

Otherwise, I love Mad Max. Moltisanti's comment about civilization being in transition are dead on, as the brutality present in the film contradicts all of the pretty shots of the Australian countryside. And the scene where Max's wife and son are run down by the bikers is memorable (not to mention perfectly filmed).

Still I can't say I'd be excited for a fourth film. Gibson's ingrained in mind as Max, and I don't think Walker would be a suitable replacement. If Miller was ever up to it, I think Fury Road would work better as a 'spiritual' successor to Mad Max rather than a direct sequel.

Liked the ending of THUNDERDOME. Liked the way Tina Turner let Max go after all that he did. Nice closing scene as well.

The best part of Beyond Thunderdome was the wailing sax.

I thought Tina Turner's hair was the best part of Thunderdome.

Mad Max 2 as it's known in its home country is hands-dwon my favourite aussie film of all time. I really enjoy the first and I'll be honest, really love the third.

I guess Im a pretty big fan of the trilogy really.

Never understood the hate dumped on Thunderdome, I too saw it as a nice logical extension of the second and am consistently suprised at how watchable Turner is in it.

...and the Thunderdome itself is the shit.

Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves...

In fact thinking about this has made me a bit sad - remember when Mel Gibson was super uber-fucking coolness incarnate?

I miss those days.

I've always argued that the Mad Max trilogy basically strips society down to its barest motivations and then rebuilds it for the better. Society is barely holding on in Mad Max, but the only way to fight the chaos is to embrace it, to become the anarchy that is consuming society. Road Warrior shows that while that may work in the short term, in the long run, people will gather together, for whatever reasons -- power, safety, stability, whatever -- and Max's slow drift back towards caring about humanity begins in earnest. By Thunderdome, society is rebuilding itself, but along the very same lines that lead to destruction in the first place, and Max once again rejects it, but instead of becoming a loner, he becomes the protector of a new, better society. He stops the old ways from coming back and paves the way for a brighter future, one which calls out to him on the horizon in the final shot. Max purges his humanity and forges it anew.

Mad Max is great. Great score by Brian May, and a great set up for The Road Warrior.

Road Warrior is pure adrenaline rushing awesomeness. With another fantastic Brian May score.

Beyond Thunderdome is the one I'm indifferent to. Some aspects are cool, but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I need to see it again, but so far, after the viewings I've seen of it, I don't like it.

Bring on Fury Road. I'm ready!

The first two are awesome. I don't think Thunderdome is as bad as most say, but it's definitely the weak link. Regardless, it has a sweet fight scene.

Nothing but love for the first two, and Beyond Thunderdome is more Indiana Jones-type adventure than Mad Max at times, and I think that throws people for a loop. I used to hate it, but I've grown to dig it overall. The final chase may be a bit of a rehash, but damn if I don't love some of those vehicles.

I think I remember Corona having the plot details up at one point.

When Signs was filming here, a work friend of mine got himself hired to be Mel Gibson's assistant, and Gibson hired him on himself after they wrapped. He told me some stories about meeting in George Miller's office and seeing the walls covered with hand-scribbled storyboards for Fury Road, and said that Miller described it as an almost silent film. I wanted to see it. I wonder if he would have Mel in that crazy beard at the beginning.

MAD MAX 1 was just fucking weird. I went in expecting a smaller-scale MAD MAX 2, but it's just some bizarre drama set in rural Australia. Wasn't there supposed to have been an apocalypse or something? Bored out of my skull by that one. I really couldn't even see what the "hook" of that movie was.

The only part I liked was that cop at the beginning.

*crashes his motorbike horribly*

Civilian: "What's going on?"

Cop: (cheerfully) "Don't know mate, just arrived myself!"

I read the FURY ROAD script a while back. It was so off-the-rails nuts I can barely remember the story. Something about Max protecting a group of pregnant girls. He spent the whole first act as a prisoner, used as a "blood bag" for a battle group from a citadel that was carved into the side of a mountain, or something. I remembered it being very THUNDERDOME-y plotwise but with tons more road warring going on. It seemed like half the script was car chases/battles. And there might have been kind of a CHILDREN OF MEN-ish post-apocalyptic fertility subplot as well, I think. Very imaginative but undisciplined. Kind of a glorious mess.

Sorry I'm so hazy on the story. It lives now, only in my memories.

Well, it is set in Australia. Would they even notice?

In seriousness, though, one thing I love about the first one as a major fan of all things post-Apocalyptic is that it's apocalypse was kind of realistic (ie, survivable) - which is to say it happened somewhere else. This is something that I think was a matter of budget as much as conscious choice, especially as it doesn't really follow through into the subsequent movies, but it's an apocalypse of decay rather than destruction; I imagine Mad Max as being set some time after On The Beach, when Australia wasn't nuked directly. It is, more than either of the other two, about the human apocalypse rather than awesome looking destroyed cities and wasteland mutants. It's the beginning of our backslide into the total barbarism of Road Warrior.

The first is my favourite, though it only pretty narrowly edges out the second. Thunderdome is more a film of moments, great bits in a kind of ridiculous broth. The Indiana Jones comparison somewhere above gives me a different perspective on it, I'd rewatch it with that in mind and maybe I'll appreciate it more, but for now I just like what everyone likes - the Dome and Masterblaster.

Love this series, and the only reason I don't own them on DVD is because there haven't (in my opinion) been any good releases. Am I correct in thinking that it's because the films were released through different studios that there hasn't been a good box set? If so, that's a damn shame.

I will simply say that Mad Max is my favorite film ever.

I used to watch it every week when I was in college. There's tons of depth to the film. On the surface it does look like a story of society falling apart, but it's much much more than that.


Mad Max 2 is good, but the story is pretty much about survival, and partially about Max, but his story was pretty much told to completion in the first movie.

Mad Max 3, was an apocalyptic opera, and not much else. It seems that they spent too much time on set pieces and hair to work on the story. Arguably the story shifted too much from Max to this strange society run by bad hair and wailing sax.


For Fury Road to ever succeed in my eyes it would have to be a heavy character piece, much like the first film, and rely less on WOW special effects and stunts. I feel there is a good story to tell before the first film and also the time between the first two films.

Edit: Pardon my grammar...

Mad Max got about as good a release as you can hope for. But I've held off on Road Warrior for that reason.

I'll have to check out that Mad Max disc. I wasn't aware that a good release ever came out. It's definitely the neglect of Road Warrior that stings the most.

About the only thing missing from the Mad Max disc is George Miller and Mel Gibson.

Miller did record a new commentary for the Road Warrior HD release that came out some time ago, if I'm not mistaken...

The big change is the un-dubbed soundtrack, and the transfer is pretty good, but I suppose since it's more than three years old, it will have its detractors.

Yeah, and I'm afraid I have to say I'm one of them. The only reason to get the existing MAD MAX Special Edition is for the original Australian soundtrack. The extras are pretty shitty...the low point being a featurette actually called Mel Gibson: The High Octane Birth of a Superstar. With the exception of the okay crew commentary track, the extras feel like they were made by people who don't even know (let alone love) the film.

Don't act like that's not an awesome title.

And the news of Miller doing a commentary combined with the bundling of RW and Thunderdome on one flipper disc points to a decent edition coming. (Unless the Blu-Ray disc IS the decent edition.)

Mad Max is a great film. It does drag a bit in the middle, but it isn't bad and does set up the tragedy of what happens to Max's family nicely.

It's got a lot of nice touches (Nightrider's eyeball just before he goes bye bye is one of my favorites) and a great primal feel to it that I never get tired of.

Road Warrior is great also. I always preferred the first to it, but I love em both.

3 has a couple of scenes that hold interest, but the movie as a whole was a big disappointment to me.

When I was younger we used to have a theater in Palo Alto (The New Varsity) that used to run double features of different movies for a few days at a time. Great memories of when 1 and 2 were run together.

Saw all three movies when I was 12-13 and for long (meaning possibly 15 years), they remained the stuff that haunted my dreams so hard as to living in fear from approaching them again. Really scary stuff for me the despair and inhumanity society had achieved with these.

...Then I grew a dick and watched them again a few years ago. The first one -while unarguably a classic in execution- left me a bit cold for how unbalanced its three acts were, I'm with AlexC on how the 2nd act drags so much in comparison to the 1st flawless one and the surprisingly shorter than I remembered 3rd. Powerful? Of course. Deep and meaningful? I don't think that much. Just a fantastically crafted B-movie/ revenge picture that hit many right notes.

Mad Max 2/ The Road Warrior, on the other hand, is perfect. Probably one of the best action movies ever made indeed and, of course, more influential than many still dare to confess (Neil Marshall, while your Doomsday is quite good, I'm looking at you!). Not a glitch, one of the bestest sequels surpassing the original ever, just by twisting its concept, and yeah, with killer stunts to boot (Waz's death still gives me the jeebies everytime I watch that frontal collision).

Beyond Thunderdome... Not much to add here either. It all looks cool until Max leaves Bartertown and aside for some interesting oniric, Peterpanesque imagery, the whole thing suddenly embraces the PG-13 pussification and becomes the all-audiences adventure movie it should've never been in the first place. Too bad really, as this trilogy is the perfect definition of a series that started as something unique & against the system, but eventually lost its essence becoming a part of the money-making machine that eluded it in the first place.

I would rate in order The Road Warrior, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome. Thunderdome just like, Live Free Or Die Hard, and Conan The Destroyer was stuck with a PG 13 which did not allow the 3 films to be as violent as they needed to be. While the excessive violence alone does not make for a better film, it is always good to stretch the R near NC 17 as opposed to PG 13 near an R for films about Post Apocalyptic earth, Barbarian films, or Die Hard.

Also, Where is the Pre Release for the Mad Maxine film...otherwise known as Doomsday?

With all of these "farewell tour" movies, why the hell not? But in that case, only with Mel. Without him, no thanks.

I also want Mad Max: Fury Road with Mel Gibson...along of course with Lethal Weapon 5.

Is Fury Road 100% dead? Surely, Miller could have clout to make it after JLA (assuming that piece of shit still gets made!)

Seriously though, I'd stomach JLA if I knew it'd lead to a Miller-directed Mad Max 4. But maybe that's just me...

Chris Myers, If Indiana Jones can fight the Russians with his son, why can't Mel Gibson's Martain Riggs stop crime with his son or daughter. Danny Glover could get a promotion to Captain as well.

This is starting to sound like an animated kids show version of LETHAL WEAPON. Hopefully Mr. Joshua knocked up some Vietnamese hooker back in the war so we can look forward to Little Joshua returning for revenge...by foiling Marty Riggs' science project. Principal Getz will step in to save the day and provide a rapid-fire moral to the story. And, of course, hilarity will be had by all.

Litmus Configuration, I meant that Riggs Jr would be a policeman like his dad, albiet a little less crazy, but gets paired with him after Danny Glover gets a promotion and teams father and son up together. I also know that wouldn't happen in real life...but Lethal Weapon is so over the top that it would work here. Of course it wouldn't be Lethal Weapon unless it had an R rating and alot of collateral damage, and many rounds of ammo used.

If there is a fourth Mad Max film, he has to die at the end of it. It's the only logical conclusion. Whether it be peacefully or torn to bits, it has to be his one...last...ride.

Chris Myers, I don't think Riggs would change. John McClaine had children and he risked his life in 4 Die Hards. Riggs Jr would most likely see his dad was a bit insane and therefore decide to emulate his Dad's partner instead.

Yeah, but Riggs became truly pussified in LW3, trading in his psychosis in for Rene Russo (not that I blame him) and a dog; whereas McClaine held out for a PG-13 rating and superhuman abilities.

But back to Max. I truly hope Mel has a fourth film in him. I really want a decent send-off for the character, as Road Warrior wasn't enough (Thunderdome doesn't really belong).

I feel weird bumping this old thread but I had to share the delight/horror of this, since I hadn't seen it elsewhere at CHUD (apologies if I missed it):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...ss-age-69.html

I guess we should just be happy that Tina is still One Of The Living.

She don't need another hero... sandwich.