Hadn’t seen the movie in about 15 years or so, but I remembered it fondly. So, a couple of friends and I watched it last night.
Most Americans seem to be very familiar with The Road Warrior (also known as Mad Max II), but few people I know are very familiar with the one that started it all, Mad Max. I believe RW was actually released before MM in most of the USA.
Beyond Thunderdome was never made, as far as I’m concerned.
Now, MM had some iffy production values, being filmed on the cheap and all, but had a good basic story. Except…
Except for the holes.
Exactly what is the future setup? All it says is “A few years from now.” Are we to assume that it’s a post atomic horror from some clues? (Like how much it looks like A Boy and His Dog)
MFP is the cops, but… military? Federal? Evolved from some current agency?
Why was NightRider suddenly so scared when Bronze (Max) was chasing him? He was the picture of reckless defiance til then.
What made Goose wreck his bike? Booby trap? Carelessness?
Why was The Kid released? “You didnt show! Nobody showed!?” was thrown around but not very well explained. No one showed up for traffic court?
Was that Fifi’s house or office? Also, I don’t remember Max quitting before that time, yet Fifi says something about it. Did I miss some earlier dialogue?
Why would Jessie just drive off like that? The movie made a point of showing how dangerously hostile “the road” is in general, yet she goes off by herself in unknown territory. And Max doesnt stop her!
Was ToeCutter and gang stalking them, or was it a chance encounter? Remember The Kid saying, “We know who you are!” over and over in an earlier scene. The implication could go either way, it seems.
Did he wipe out the gang? Was The Kid (“here’s a hacksaw”) the last one?
To me, RW only really makes sense if you’ve seen MM, but now that I’ve seen MM all over again… Well. They are a lot of fun to watch!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Mad Max, but I’ll have a go at some of these.
IIRC, NightRider doesn’t start falling apart until Max is actually catching up to him and bumps the back of his car. In other words, NightRider loses it when it becomes clear that at least one of the cops actually can keep pace with him, which would be unsettling from his point of view.
Goose’s motorcycle was sabotaged.
IIRC, in that conversation Max tells Fifi he wants to quit and Fifi persuades him to take some time off and think it over instead.
Part dramatic license for purposes of advancing the plot, part a desperate mother doing anything she can to protect her child, I’d argue.
I thought it was the sleazy auto-repair guy who told the gang where to find them.
I thought Toecutter getting up close and personal with the truck came after the demise of Johnny the Boy (I think that was his name), but as I said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.
Yeah, on watching it again, by myself, I heard a voice over announcement in the MFP garage saying that MFP shouldn’t use the slang term ‘Bronze’ as it was dsirespectful.
Poor doggie!
Dax, I meant the first time, when she drove off to get icecream. I agree the second time was pretty cut and dried neccessary.
And yeah, Johnny the Boy bought it after ToeRag. I mean, ToeCutter. Shows how far gone Max was.
Best line: “Ah-ah! I HATE guns!”
No need for spoiler boxes, btw, it’s in the title.
What’s the deal with the birds? Some sort of metaphorical imagery?
What relation was Ziggy to Max?
I see they got the spare back! Whoo hoo, continuity!
Sabatage of the bike makes sense. They showed some real quick close up of the wheel. And the van had a tool through the radiator in the Jessie scene.
I’m guessing Jessie’s salvagability was organ donation? Cause she was dead by RW, that’s for sure. Except, “tell him she’s going to be alright.” (?)
Let’s see if I can answer these without totally screwing up the html tags…
I’ve read “official” timelines in which the idea is that the world is sliding into anarchy, but hasn’t yet obliterated itself. There’s widespread crime and unemployment, and a worldwide depression, as well as/caused by a massive fuel shortage. World War III breaks out and the nukes fly shortly after the events in “Mad Max” - and Max survives because he’s divorced himself from civilization and is far away from the destruction, paving the way for “The Road Warrior.”
Though the narration in TRW indicates that the war happens before Mad Max… But it’s a story recalled by the Feral Kid who couldn’t even actually talk when he knew Max, so it’s not unlikely he filled in a few blanks by himself.
They’re a fictional State Police, but they’re badly underfunded and undermanned. I got the impression that a lot of localities can’t afford their own law enforcement, so it’s like the MFP try to cover pretty much the entire territory.
None of the other cops had come close to stopping him and he was feeling invulnerable. Then he tried to play chicken with Max, and Max didn’t swerve – that shook Nightrider up. Then Max whips around and starts riding his back bumper and he freaks out. IIRC (and I’m not sure) the radio dispatch about the Nightrider says he’s wired on drugs, which would also contribute to his little mood swing.
I don’t know if this is a factor at all, but Max’s car was marked as “Interceptor” as opposed to “Pursuit.” It’s like the pursuit guys are regular cops who can use lethal force if necessary, but once the pursuit passes a certain level they call in an interceptor whose job it is to take the bad guy out. Nightrider may have realized that it was an interceptor after him and that things were not going to go his way.
Johnny “The Boy” sabotaged Goose’s bike when he was at the night club. The Toecutter wanted him to do it to prove he could kill them. When that failed, Johnny had to wreck the truck Goose was driving. When THAT didn’t kill him, he was coerced into burning him alive by another member of the gang.
It wasn’t just traffic court – it was for all of the things that happened in the town. The rape of the girl (and her boyfriend, which was implied) as well as the destruction of property and assault on the townspeople. The police showed up to the court, but no one from the town showed up to file a complaint. The girl didn’t show, and the bike gang didn’t show, so they couldn’t hold the trial. The lawyers showed up and demanded that Johnny be released, which is when Jim Goose lost it and beat the crap out of Johnny.
I figure it was his home since he was walking around half naked, watering the plants and feeding the birds. But Max had been planning on quitting. The MFP had put together the custom black Interceptor just for him, and a bean counter sounded disgusted that their “top pursuit man wants to quit the road, and we have to seduce him with candy.”
The world of Mad Max is divided into two types of areas. There are normal places, and there are “restricted areas” with signs posted that you are leaving a “controlled area.” (The chase at the beginning shows the pursuit guys hanging out at the border of the restricted area when they are pulled off to chase the Nightrider. )When Max went on vacation with his family, he was in what he thought was a safe area. He thought he’d left all of the gangs behind.
“We know who you are” was Johnny the Boy threatening Goose. I don’t think they intended to stalk Max, because he hadn’t done anything to them. I think it was coincidence that they ran into Jesse on the beach, and they were more interested in revenge after she kicked Toecutter in the nuts and drove off with the hand of one of his boys attached to her car. Toecutter didn’t seem to realize who Max was until he saw the family pictures of them together.
Yep. He took them all out after finding out the names of Toecutter’s crew from the guy who sold him the tires, who was obviously a fence for Toecutter.
Anyway, MM does have its problems, but for such a low-budget effort it’s still prettu cool. For my money, though, the best thing about it is that it opened the door to a terrific sequel!
From my faulty memory: I do not believe there is any indication that the nukes flew until at least the third movie (where references to fallout in water are made, along with Auntie referring to the whole thing as an ‘event’ rather than a slow decay). The introductory narration to RW notes that society was falling apart, and many conventional wars were being fought, but little indication of nukes being used. Most people assume that it was a nuclear war since that was the ‘how-the-apocolypse-will-happen’ mentality of the cold war era.
I prefered to think of it as a slow-decay, followed by a collapse. Roman Empire-style with bike gangs instead of Goths.
I’d have to rewatch MM, but I thought there was a scene near the beginning where a radio is playing giving news about the aftermath of the nuclear war up north. I thought the backstory of MM and TRW was that Australia wasn’t directly targeted by nukes, but that left on its own it couldn’t sustain civilization and slowly decayed.
And I’m pretty sure the Chief was walking around half-naked in his home, which was also the police station. Being an active duty cop meant he spent a good portion of the time living his life ready for action, kind’ve like on-duty firemen who will relax and sleep at the station while waiting for duty calls, etc.
Minor hijack, Mad Max takes me back to wonderful days of childhood when I spent a lot of time camping and travelling around NSW, particularly in the bits where the film was shot. The opening chase make me particularly nostalgic for those wide, open spaces (this is where I start reciting Dorothea Mackelar grin), not for the bikie gangs, we had enough instances of that sort of thing for real shudder.
There are two DVDs for Mad Max, the original 1998 release and the 2002 Special Edition. The latter is the one with the original Australian language track, sounds like it’s there as an option with the primary track being the dubbed one.
Sheesh, the timeline is perfectly clear. We all said byd-ee-bye to what-was during the pockyclipse. Don’t make me have to get out the bamboo TV frame again…
Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but here is my interpretation of the scenario:
Jessie was badly injured, but would have recovered. Their little boy, though, was DOA. The docs are discussing how to break it to Max that the boy is dead, but that his wife will come through it all, but don’t realize that, at this point, it doesn’t matter. Max has lost it…he’s gone “mad”, and is no longer thinking of his life as something worth preserving or salvaging. Which, in my opinion, makes him wandering out into the wasteland for vengeance and self-destruction even more tragic, because Jessie made it through.
I have a feeling that her making it through is only that they can keep her alive. Much like the Goose. You can see her in the background missing quite a few limbs and hooked up to many machines. Max would likely think of the two as the same “That… That thing…that isn’t the Goose”
Also in Road Warrior during the early flash back scene you can see Max planting 2 crosses meaning both are dead. He probably asked her to be removed from life support.
This is IMHO, but I suspect that civilization is in some kind of slow (well slower than being vaporized) decline. Possibly energy reserves have begun to dry up (a reoccuring theme in the MM films) so what we are seeing is the aftereffects - small, compact, isolated communities; economic blight; collapse of social services. They reference “two mighty warrior nations went to war” in the opening narative of RW. Whether it was the cause of, or was caused by the war, it is quite clear that there is now a severe energy shortage and that society had collapsed because if it - “…For without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw …”.
I believe he was on drugs and coming down from his high.
I thought she was horribly mutilated - missing limbs, basically all fucked up.
Also, Beyond Thunderdome wasn’t all that bad. Ok, the kids living in the oasis among the wreckage of their plane sucked but Bartertown was kind of cool.
