Direct Beam Comms #49

Mad Max

I’ve been thinking about the chronology of the Mad Max movies for a while now. At first I couldn’t make sense how they all fit together, it seems like while the fist three movies do fit together nicely the fourth Mad Max Fury Road does not. But I think it’s possible to figure a way for the all four Mad Max movies to fit together chronologically.

Mel Gibson as MAx
Mel Gibson as MAx

Let’s say that the first Mad Max movie takes place in year one of this timeline. In that movie let’s assume Max is aged 23 — or how old Mel Gibson was when he played that part. The next movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was released two years after Mad Max and I think this still fits well with a logical chronology. Here, we’re less than five years after the world’s fallen apart leaving some of the last remnants of humanity to fight over an oil refinery. The only question is if people would really start dressing the way they do in just a few years — the good group in mostly white and the bad in black leather. But stranger things have happened.

One question comes with the third Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. While this movie was released four years after the second film I feel that it takes place much further in the future than that. Here, gasoline has all been used up and people are forced to get around via animal power — be it via camel trains or powered by methane harvested from pigs. In the movie Max finds a group of lost children living in a desert oasis who are so far removed from civilization that they’ve forgotten what civilization even really is. They get their history via a View-Master with the last adult of the group having left/died years prior.

The thing is — to get to this point I feel that decades would have had to have passed between the time civilization crumbled, sometime between the first and second movie, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. These kids would have had to have been alone for quite some time to have been young enough to have never been taught it. And since some of them now are supposed to be late teens early 20s it would mean decades at the oasis.

Which still fits with the overall timeline. This version of Max is a lot older and more grayer who could conceivably be a guy in his 40s even if Gibson in this movie still has a babyface and good looks.

Tom Hardy as Max
Tom Hardy as Max

So, if the first three films do fit together, where does Mad Max: Fury Road fit?

Actually, I think it actually fits quite well with the overall timeline. In this movie there are characters called the “War Boys” who have created their own language and worships autos as deities. And there are other characters who don’t know what TV was or what channels were. The main commonality in the movie is that both of these groups have people no older than 20-somethings in it. And if we assume that they were all born shortly after civilization fell, or sometime just before Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, we can assume that this movie takes place around 20 years after that or in the same general vicinity of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

If that’s true, Max in this movie would be a guy in his early to mid 40s which closely fits with Tom Hardy the actor playing him in Mad Max: Fury Road. Though Hardy wasn’t in his 40s then, he was in his late 30s, which still fits really closely to this fictional timeline.

So, I don’t think that this is a different version of the Max Max character than what’s come before or that this isn’t Max but the “Feral Kid” from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior now standing in for his hero. To me, in all the movies Max is Max is Max and is all supposed to be the same guy and this all fits with the overall timeline of the Max Max universe.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1953: Robert Beltran, Chakotay of Star Trek: Voyager and Night of the Comet is born
  • 1963: Terry Farrell, Jadzia Dax of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiers in theaters
  • 1990: The mini-series IT premiers on TV
  • 1994: Star Trek: Generations opens in theaters

Mad Max: What a lovely day

It took me a lot of years to fully appreciate the movie Mad Max (1979). I saw that film many times on TV during the 1980s but if you would have asked me back then if I’d preferred Mad Max or its sequel The Road Warrior (1981) I would have gone with The Road Warrior every time.

BKBKRH Film Mad MaxIt wasn’t until Mad Max was finally released on DVD in its unedited and undubbed form that I began to see the strengths that movie had and slowly began to consider it the best Max movie of the bunch.

Since the fourth Max Max movie Mad Max: Fury Road is out May 15 I decided to watch the original Mad Max again. This time through I noticed something interesting that I hadn’t taken note of before. In Mad Max there’s a long stretch of film that has almost no dialog for more than 10 minutes. Which might not sound like much but in Mad Max which on its surface seems to be nothing more than a b-grade Western with cars instead of horses it’s something special.

In Mad Max, it’s the near-future and Max (Mel Gibson) is a police officer who gets on the bad side of a gang of bikers who murders his wife and child in retribution. Max, who goes “mad” as the Australians say “crazy” as Americans do, heads off on the hunt for the gang to kill each and every one of them.

Max is run down
Max is run down

Which by all accounts is b-grade material that’s been used in loads of revenge movies/stories for years and years and years. But where Mad Max is different from what’s come before are those 10 minutes.

Over that stretch we see the bikers go about their activities bar hopping and stealing gas all the while being stalked by Max. Who eventually catches them on the open road and runs some of them down. The surviving bikers start looking for Max, ambush him and shoot him in the knee and run over his arm.

Here’s where the only bit of dialog in those 10 minutes comes in. There’s a total of nine words spoken between the two biker leaders as Max lays helpless on the road:

Toecutter: “Quit toying, Bubba.”
Bubba: “Easy, I know what I’m doing.”

The Toecutter
The Toecutter

And that’s it. Max gets the upperhand, kills Bubba and in a spectacular real-life stunt chases the Toecutter with his car mere inches from the back wheel of the bike as the two scream down the road. Eventually the Toecutter crashes and is killed by a semi.

Then Max goes off to find the last member of the gang Johnny the Boy in a final scene that’s back to dialog.

But those 10 minutes are something to behold. It seems today that every movie, be it action or otherwise, is chock full of dialog. And it’s easy to see why. It’s simpler for a character to tell the audience what’s going on (“We need to go over there!”) rather than showing them doing it. And with movies that have a lot of story this is an easy way to save time.

A chase in Mad Max
A chase in Mad Max

Where this technique goes askew is with modern action movies that are so complex the characters need to literally tell the audience what’s going on to keep them from becoming confused as to what’s happening on-screen. Things are exploding and there’s heroes fighting here and villains fighting there. And if someone’s not telling the audience what’s occurring it all becomes a mess and the viewers can become lost.

When I wanted to become a comic book artist I once read an article that recommended watching movies with the sound off. It said that if you can understand what’s going on with without dialog then the writer/director’s done their job well.

Which is what I thought about the last time I watched Mad Max. This whole 10 minute chunk of the movie plays out perfectly well with perfect visual clarity. There’s not a question as to what’s going on or why Max is going after these guys on screen. I was never confused as to what was going on and any extraneous dialog would have added nothing to the scene.