There are only a handful of actors in Australia, and some of them are off on walkabout at any given time. If they didn’t re-purpose Bruce Spence, they would have had to give Paul Hogan a call (and nobody wanted that).
Have you ever watched a Tim Burton film, especially re: Helena Bonham Carter? He’ll even not in his films she’s always a creepy lady who has never med a comb.
I would understand your confusion, though. Presumably, Miller worked with Spence before and liked his role. And wait… a guy named Bruce and he’s originally from… New Zealand? Is that name stereotype associated with NZ, too?
I think it was just a (perhaps overly) clever nod to the previous film (like the 2 actors who always ended up as half-zombies in the Return of the Living Dead films.) They even went as far as casting a Feral Kid look-alike as his partner.
Yeah, I get that but it’s just gas not a death ray weapon. After filling up, they only have a few hours of driving time until they’ve burned through it. Regardless, empty would have been the best strategy. Better for Max anyway.
It’s pretty easy to feel the difference between a full truck and an empty, even for non-expert drivers. For that matter, it’s possible to see it in a truck you’re pursuing, if there are hills and/or quick turns.
Autogyros have an unpowered rotor and a powered propeller. The prop is usually at the back (what pilots would call a “pusher” configuration). The rotor works kind of like those seed pods that drop from trees and spin as they fall. Air flowing upwards through the rotor makes it turn.
When the Gyro Captain is shot down, the rotor breaks when he lands (and I think the engine is damaged, too). But if the engine is working well enough to turn the prop, it should still roll down the road. There are still a few issues to overcome for him to catch up to the convoy, but nothing insurmountable.
Cool. My point was that he wasn’t flying, he was motoring along the ground (one way or the other). Thus, gyro flying issues don’t apply to the question of whether Max could’ve hitched a ride. He wasn’t left behind by Gyro Captain, he STAYED behind.
Was he expected to survive the decoy run in the first place? IMHO, I don’t think so.
Max is the post-apocalyptic Paul Kersey. He doesn’t want to live, he wants to kill. Now, in later movies after “Death Wish”, Kersey seems to be healing a little, but apparently, Max is more damaged and the wasteland isn’t a very good therapeutic setting.
I believe the implication is that Max’s soul is empty, he’s become a driven revenge machine. He doesn’t want companionship (except his dog). He’s the ultimate Post Traumatic Stress vigilante. He doesn’t need associates, he needs bad-guys to punish. He’ll never be able to kill enough psycho-barbarians to heal his loss. He has a death wish of his own … he’s fearless because he wants to die, but not before taking out as many murderous thugs as he can.
That doesn’t sound right to me. Didn’t he go after the bikers for revenge, then that was it, movie ends?
Then in the sequels didn’t he pretty much want to be left alone in the now post-apocalyptic wasteland (though events kept dragging him back in, of course)?
More of a reluctant hero, anyway, not a force for good looking to take on all the bad guys around.
There was at least one I think. Kind of black and white, with a woman running away, holding a child and looking back over her shoulder. Was that Max’s wife?
I think those were shots at the beginning of the film which were describing how the world was ravaged by nuclear war and they showed Max’s family murdered by the biker gang from the first movie.
Those movies were also back when Mel Gibson still had an Australian accent(still noticeable in the first* Lethal Weapon*).
I thought Max stayed after the first movie so there could be a sequel, but I was lousy at interpreting a character’s motivation when I was in literature classes.
