Film #048 - Mad Max (1979)
Viewed February 17, 2006
Digging through my laserdisc collection, I came upon a disc of the cult hit Mad Max, much to my surprise. I had forgotten I had bought it. I was also struck by the fact that although I had seen both of its sequels, The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)*, I had never actually seen the original. Since watching films like Mad Max was exactly what the 365 Films project is all about, I settled in to finally see how the franchise began.
Well, quite honestly, it doesn’t stack up that well. Most observers consider The Road Warrior to be the best of the series and it’s easy to see why. From the sets to the costumes to the world view, The Road Warrior (and to a lesser extent Beyond Thunderdome) is just more consistant.
And that’s the biggest problem with Mad Max from the perspective of nigh-on thirty years later. At the time, audiences would have been taken with the “post-apocalyptic” world view and forgiven the half-hearted way it is portrayed. There are too many mundane everyday aspects to the world of Mad Max to make the vision of the future truly come to life. In The Road Warrior, on the other hand, civilization seems to truly have collapsed, with none of the trappings of modern society (like ice cream shops) still prevalent in the earlier film.
That’s not to say Mad Max fails completely on this issue. It is mostly in the characters that we must find the effects of the world’s situation and, for the most part, it works. The villain Toecutter and his gang pave the way for many more portrayals of futuristic gangs, but still come off strong in their own right. Max’s police department conveys the cops-under-siege mentality that would appear in countless other film, such as Robocop (1987). If other films later conveyed these themes more effectively, that doesn’t detract from Mad Max’s success.
What fascinated me the most was how relatively tame the film was. In its day it was groundbreaking, but apart from a severed hand, there’s little in the way of shocking imagry. It’s in the power of the personal side of things that Mad Max really hits you. Perhaps this is the one place where Mad Max being so tied to the late 70s/early 80s helped the film at the time. It probably made the events of the film seem even more real, since the world was so close to the one people were living at the time.
The performances are pretty good, although I will admit that I was hampered by the fact that my laserdisc came with the American dubbed voices and not the original Australian. I prefer dubbing in foreign films, but Australian English is still English. On top of that, the dubbing isn’t that good, so even Mel Gibson, who dubbed his own voice, is out of synch. Still, the strength of the characters carried through thanks to the skill of the actors and the fact that so much of the film is visual and not dialogue driven.
The direction is good, but not terribly memorable. It’s quite obvious that it marks director George Miller’s debut (he would go on to direct diverse fare like The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and Babe: Pig In The City (1998)). There are several jump cuts and poorly matched shots, but nothing that ruins the experience, overall. Most of them aren’t even noticable if you aren’t looking for them. Miller comes off best in the action sequences, where quick editing helps cover the footage’s deficiencies.
In the end, I liked Mad Max, but I can’t say it interested me as much as The Road Warrior. I’ve never been as interested in the story of a man’s descent into vengeance as I have been with the story of his regaining of his humanity (the theme of the later film). But they certainly stand well together. Even Beyond Thunderdome comes off better when viewed as part of an extended storyline and not on its own. But if I look at all three films and think of which one stands out as a true classic for all time, unburdened by baggage from the era in which it was produced, it is The Road Warrior that comes out on top, not Mad Max.
* Can’t we just get beyond Thunderdome?