1979 Directed by George Miller
Taking place in a dystopian Australia in the near future, Mad Max tells the story of a highway patrolman cruising the squalid back roads that have become the breeding ground of criminals foraging for gasoline and scraps. After some grisly events at the hands of a motorcycle gang, Max sets out across the barren wastelands in search of revenge.
Mel Gibson Joanne Samuel Hugh Keays-Byrne Steve Bisley Tim Burns Roger Ward Lisa Aldenhoven David Bracks Bertrand Cadart David Cameron Robina Chaffey Stephen Clark Mathew Constantine Jerry Day Reg Evans Howard Eynon Max Fairchild John Farndale Peter Felmingham Sheila Florance Nic Gazzana Hunter Gibb Vincent Gil Andrew Gilmore Jonathan Hardy Brendan Heath Paul Johnstone Nick Lathouris John Ley Show All…
Безумный Макс
Not sure how I'd missed this for so long. It's a fun little B-movie that sort of drags but has a few pretty special things going for it:
1- It's only set a few years in the future. So it's sort of post-apocalyptic but they still have the news and shit. More post-apocalyptic media should take a page out of this book and calm down.
2- The budget is clearly so low that all of the car crashes are exciting to watch because you can tell they only had the one take to nail it.
3- I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure this is the movie that invented the 80s action movie trope of "all bad guys are…
What amazed me the most about the film was the fact that all of the car crashes had to be taken in one shot! I'm assuming this was due to the limited funds! I've seen films with considerably larger budgets that were unable to produce the spectacular vehicular carnage we witnessed in this film!
It was clear right off the bat that we were dealing with a low budget film, but we soon discovered what it lacked in frills it more than made up for it with fuel injected thrills!
A visceral assault on our senses!
Presenting a fascinating vision of a world on verge of apocalypse, introducing Mel Gibson in what is his breakthrough role & having garnered a strong cult following over the years, George Miller's feature film debut may not look as impressive today as it did back in its days but it still packs in many interesting moments that'll manage to hold the attention of newcomers.
Set in the wastelands of Australia in a dystopian future, the story of Mad Max concerns Max Rockatansky; a policeman who tries to keep law n order intact in a society that's already on the verge of an imminent collapse. The plot chronicles his vengeful journey as Max attempts to find & execute all the members of an…
A riveting and minimalist action film of bare-bone badassery and primal rage; George Miller's Mad Max is the one that started it all, and after all these years, It still remains one of the best low-fi experiences that you can have. Miller's directing, Cliff Hayes and Tony Paterson's editing, David Eggby's cinematography, and Brian May's score all comes together into a type of visual shock treatment. You can smell the gasoline radiating off of the screen, and in spite of some rough patches with the pacing and some budget constraints, Mad Max continues to be a dazzling ride.
Oh, and Mel Gibson is a badass.
"I am the Nightrider! I'm a fuel injected suicide machine! I am the rocker! I am the roller! I am the out-of-controller!" - The Nightrider
Thing is, there isn't enough madness to get Mad Max into the echelons of cultdom that it supposedly deserves to be in. It begins with a phenomenal car chase that uses its meagre budget extremely effectively, and ends with an equally as thrilling crescendo of bikes and one seriously bad-ass muscle car. But in between, the only mad thing is the incoherent ramblings of the villains that threaten to derail the entire film.
Neither intimidating nor scary, they are a bunch of loons that don't provide the viewer with any visceral reaction. Then again, neither…
52/100
What a strange film this is. Structurally, it makes little sense: The opening sequence (which is far and away the zenith) introduces Max as an iconic badass, defined by his shades, clothes, and silence; then he's immediately revealed as a perfectly ordinary family man, sensitive and conscientious (wait what?); then the movie proceeds to methodically turn him back into the iconic badass it had already established in the first few minutes. Even ignoring that circular arc, though, this feels like a very bloated origin story—an entire movie fashioned from what ought to have been the first 35 minutes or so of a much better movie. Gee, I wonder what the much better movie in question might look like? (Gonna revisit that very shortly.) A promising dry run, but I'm baffled by folks like Dan Sallitt who find actual greatness in its roughly 1:5 ratio of formally impressive mayhem to deeply awkward melodrama.
The Mad Max franchise was brought back to life by the 2015 film but I never had a single doubt once that I’ll never see the most recent one like I used to perhaps because even without prior knowledge of what to anticipate in the first three movies, the characterization of Max wasn’t made to be all that engrossing at least for me when there are stronger feministic themes surrounding it and a newly introduced lead dominates the screen. And partly because the movie embraces the fact that it is an ‘action movie’ and one that leaves no breathing area, the narrative’s completely gone south. This is the reason why I prefer the original Mad Max than the consensus ‘best'…
fuel-injected suicide machine. the new 4K blu-ray from kino makes that biker truck hit at the very end pop off the screen the same way that man's eyes pop out of his skull. one of the greatest dummy hits of all time, RIP hugh keays-byrne.
Pantomime kinetic physical camp a.k.a. Miller Time.
This rewatch with a gap of some 20 odd years has benefited from a good dose of movie watching experience from my side, making me appreciate better just what Miller achieves here.
As bonkers as its protagonist and villains, it does a lot with a little finding action in the physicality of the vehicle driven future. It is superbly edited and paced, with an in your face score that leaves nothing to the imagination. I love how bombastic it tries to be with such a tiny budget, sometimes even pulling it off.
Miller's creativity in his shots and the way he choreographs action is fantastic and he even manages to chuck in a character moment or two to make Max more than just a hollow vessel of revenge.
This film is a brush stroke of creative adrenaline to pave a way for the further exploration of Miller's universe.
I’m in an action mood at the moment so decided to give a rewatch to one of my favourite features.
The original Mad Max is a real action packed joy. It’s an incredible feature in that it balances the fine line between being very high concept but also not overly bogged down by plot really well which is fantastic and obviously incredibly tough. Mad Max presents to us a bleak and lawless society where only a few individuals are willing to attempt to keep order and this and the multitude of vehicle based action we are witness to makes it an extraordinarily original and inventive action spectacle that is always entirely bizarre and shot thorough with Director George Miller’s strange…
It may lack the refined breathlessness of 2015's Fury Road but the original Mad Max is still a terrific ride. You can see the first parts of George Miller's insane, lawless, apocalyptic vision start to take shape.
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I don’t think anyone in this universe can understand the anxiety nine year old wade was going though as he continuously cheered his little heart out for Max to get up after getting his knee blown out and arm ran over haha. It was the first time I saw a hero go down that raw and to watch him staggeringly get back on his feet snarling at toecutter. Like omg it was the most inspirational triumph thing I ever saw and I remember the days after in the sunset evenings of that scene burned into my eyeballs haha. I remember thinking every second: fuck man that’s who I want to be. i want to be that hero. i want to be that brave.
Toecutter is an amazing character but it wasn't enough to carry this overrated movie.
I’ll eventually get to watching Mad Max: Fury Road, and I’m absolutely shocked that this movie from 35 years ago spurred a sequel. It’s disjointed and I didn’t care for it. Mel Gibson wasn’t really anything special and the tone seemed to be dark for no reason.
Happy Feet’s fingerprints are all over this movie. Pretty easy to see how George Miller got there from here.
George Miller's first entry in this iconic franchise may have been a humble beginning. But it's still good storytelling with some exciting action. It also features a young handsome Mel Gibson, who had his big break here with a great perfomance.
"The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It'd take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. Now, if you're lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go."
Toe cutter was a great villain. Extra points to Mad Max for originality and helping to create the go to apocalyptic vibe. A little too low budget for my liking, and things seemed to happen just a tad too fast. Liked it didn’t love it.
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