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Reflections on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga 

By Simon McCarthy       7/10 Stars

I saw the original Mad Max 44 years ago in a fleapit in Morocco, It was dubbed in Arabic with French subtitles. The audience enjoyed participating in the screening in a more vocal way than I was used to at my local Odeon, and it was also surprising how excited they got during the action scenes and also how funny they thought the bloody bits were.

 You’re never watching just the current Mad Max; it’s always very much an amalgam of the present and the past, more so than most other titles. It has become a great roiling, bristling, orange procession, putting on weight and picking up momentum as it careens down the years. It revisits our solar system periodically like a wayward comet whose eccentric path has yet to be determined, and as it does so it regurgitates the old themes, tropes and characters into its latest incarnation, as a vulture might do while feeding carrion to its fledgeling chick.

But I think it has now reached its zenith in Furiosa and I can’t see where it would want to go from here. So let this stellar latest version now go supernova; let it explode down to its fundamental particles to be absorbed into something completely and utterly different in another place and at another time.

I know a lot of people won’t like this idea, so what about, and by way of compensation, there is a release of an official Mad Max board game? Can’t you see it? The fight over who gets which token: the V8 Interceptor, the Blue Heeler, the War Rig. The kingdoms set out around the board; think of the cards you might turn up. “You have sustained a major cranial fracture from a Bommy Knocker miss-a-turn”……

There are 4 Mad Max films that lead up to Furiosa

Mad Max.  1979. Mel Gibson plays Max. The original story.

The first Mad Max cost next to nothing to make in 1979. The reckless filming often took place on unclosed public roads in Victoria. I heard a cameraman recalling how, while shooting a chase scene from the back of a bike, he happened to glance at the speedo and saw they were doing 200 km/h. And of course, you can't operate a camera with a helmet on. The bikie gang featured in the film was an actual bikie gang. The vehicle crashing and smashing all had to be got in one take. The people who did the catering on set would serve up the leftovers from the weddings they did at the weekends, and the film crew had only ever shot for TV and struggled with cinematic lenses. It was also Mel Gibson’s first job. And Max’s original wife broke her leg in a motorcycle accident on the way to the set. It was raw and rough and it was something new, and it was something original.

Mad Max 2. The Road Warrior.  1981. Mel Gibson plays Max.

Similar to the original but with a bigger budget. It cast in stone the action scene choreography for all future Mad Max films. Supposedly, Gibson had just 16 lines of dialogue, and 2 of them were “I’m just here for the gasoline.” I saw Mad Max 2 when it came out in a packed cinema in the East End of London. My friend thought the sound was way too loud and decided to go and ask the projectionist to turn it down. Strangely enough, he complied. It did take some of the energy out of the whole thing, and left the packed theatre leaning forward in their seats, but she could be quite persuasive.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  1985. Stars Tina Turner and Mel Gibson as Max.

The weakest of the Mad Maxes. Like you would expect when you attempt to get the third cup of tea out of the one tea bag. The director George Miller left the film half way through after the death in a helicopter crash of Byron Kennedy, his producer and longtime collaborator.

Mad Max Fury Road.  2015. (30 years later) Stars Charlize Theron (The Italian Job, Bombshell) and Tom Hardy as Max (The Revenant, Locke).

It took many years to make and suffered some truly biblical production setbacks. Max had upped his line count now to a still tight-lipped 52 lines. It was high in energy and spectacle, and although it had stepped out from the shadow of the earlier films, it was still wearing the same clothes.

Furiosa. 2024. stars Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma) and Chris Hemsworth (Home and Away, Thor).

The story in a few words. Furiosa gets kidnapped by a warlord, then sold to another warlord. She understandably gets pissed with warlords and decides to escape back home. This all supposedly occurs before the events in the proceeding film, Mad Max Fury Road  take place, and as such is called a prequel.

I am not a fan of prequels or this type of plot time travel; maybe I am too easily confused. It feels contrived and awkward, and it is like hearing the punch line before you’ve heard the rest of the joke. If you are into the detail of Mad Max world and would like to explore its warp and weft, or if you just want to get a better handle on the plot, there is a great fan site to be found at Madmax.fandom.com

But listen, thankfully, and I know this is disrespectful to all the effort of the writers and the director, etc., and it must be very hard work creating universes, but you don't have to worry about the plot, take it as read; it works, and just enjoy the film for the spectacle. All you need to know is that there are some bad guys, some good guys, and a couple of in between guys (but mostly bad guys). All the people and all the stuff look familiar, and here we are all again, meeting up in the orange dust once more. So take off your safety belt, stand up in the seat of the funfair ride, keep your jaw dropped and eyebrows high, its Mad Max time again.  

And also, as the ancient Romans may well have said,. “Si ad circum ibis, sanguine et currus videre exspectas.”  If you go to the Circus expect to see chariots and expect to see blood.

The very basics for a Mad Max film (after 44 years, this could be from your grandmother's old handwritten recipe book)

1.   An apocalypse, to come after.

2.   An injustice, to be undone.

3.   A motorcycle, for the bad guy to sit on. 

1.  An apocalypse, to come after.

Believe it or not, apocalyptic stories actually predate Mad Max. Before cinema existed, there was Mary Shelley’s book The Last Man, 1826. Then, in the cinema, there is The End of the World, 1916. War of the Worlds, 1953. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956. On the Beach, 1959. Dr. Strangelove, 1964.  Night of the Living Dead, 1968. And many later films, including the marvellous Melancholia 2011.

Outside of the cinema and works of modern fiction the Old Testament was replete with such events: floods, famines, marauding hordes and bubonic plagues were nothing new for an ancient world. In the 20th century, we got, world wars, atomic weapons going off, viruses, and now our climate change potential extinction event where even the fucking sunshine is turning on us like Mum gone psycho.

In Furiosa the calamity is alluded to, but no specific details are given. We know there are high levels of radiation and that congenital defects are common. But mostly, it appears stuff has just run out. Well, most stuff: pumpkins (regrettably) still seem readily available, as do light arms ammunition, human milk, and Guzzolene, a type of fuel. These items are produced in the various kingdoms and bartered. But there would be no: antibiotics, welding gases, or cellular phone networks. Plagues and viruses would make a big comeback, and no new vaccines would magically appear. The things that had been mostly hived off to the virtual online world would again only be available in their tangible hands on original form. If you had an overwhelming desire to see a naked person, you would have to convince somebody to remove their clothing or content yourself with gazing at a mural or mosaic, like they used to do in Pompeii before the volcano erupted. But being able to maintain such a strong lascivious interest over the extended time required for a custom mosaic, the cutting of the individual tessera, the grouting, etc. would seem very unlikely. If you wanted to bully someone, you have to get up off your lazy arse and start yelling out the window. But more generally, and on the plus side, CO2 emissions would do a handbrake turn.  The release of the original 1979 Mad Max, where it was fuel that had become extremely scarce, coincided with the World oil crisis. I remember the very long lines at the bowsers and how this gave an unsettling glimpse of what a tenuous a thing an ordered society actually was.  

Post Apoco life would be extremely demanding. In the Wasteland maintaining a desirable work life balance would be more than challenging. The services we mostly take for granted would be absent, like health care or basic housing. Few people, (except perhaps capital city renters) would imagine the need for having a roof over their heads could end up being met by the sedimentary rock of a cave. Being obliged to commit ritual suicide at the whim of some self proclaimed dictator would obviously be problematic. Having your life interfered with by some despot with fly away hair, bellowing from the top of a cliff, who was only interested in his own self-aggrandisement, would also be irksome to the majority. The dawning of this unthinkable dystopian era would be akin to a reverse Enlightenment where traditional dogmas resurface and logic and science are forced to bow to prejudice and superstition….

2: An injustice, to be undone.

Unfairness and injustice would sadly be the norm in a post apocalyptic world. The young Furiosa is kidnapped from the fertile gardens of her homeland. Her desperate mother gives two wheeled chase and attempts to free her. As she is leaving on her mission, she is instructed by the resident’s association of Happy Town not to let any of the marauders survive, so they wouldn’t be able to return with their mates to steal more of their stuff. This, however, does not go according to plan, and the outcome leaves Furiosa with an abidingly vengeful disposition.

 The great bulk of the populations of the various kingdoms are treated as slaves. The dudes covered in white paint are the War Boys, they are the serfs of the warlord Immortan Joe. Their hobbies include tinkering with cars and plunging to their deaths in Kamikaze stunts. They are famous for making the V8 engine salute by holding their interlocked fingers in a V shape above their heads, and also  spraying chrome paint on their mouths before doing crazy shit. If they somehow should ever reach higher status, they would adorn their foreheads with black oil like Furiosa gets to do when she becomes a centurion in the army of the Citadel. A stray fact relating to head adornment, in Mad Max 2, actors who agreed to have Mohican haircuts got paid an extra $25 a day.

Inequity aversion  is about the psychology of injustice.  Humans (and monkeys, apparently ) get angry when they experience or perceive unfairness. This is because it works contrary to the practice of cooperation, which is a critical part of group cohesion and, therefore, survival. It is hardwired into a region of the brain that is also associated with disgust, and this may explain the strong reaction. The response can be aroused not only when the individual experiences unequal treatment, but also when witnessing it happen to somebody else.

Please check out the video link below titled, Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally.

3:  A motorcycle, for the bad guy to sit on. 

Early on in the film, we hear from the History Man, a courtier of Chris Hemsworth’s violent character, the warlord Dementus. He is holding forth about the ingenuity of the radial engine that powers the lead pony in the chief’s chariot.  The history man is like a rather wizened and heavily inked Siri; his role is to be the keeper of knowledge and a conduit of information from the pre to the post apocalyptic.  He looks very jaded and seems to contradict the old  assertion  that, "knowledge is no burden."  At one stage he offers the young Furiosa an internship as a history person; she rejects this out of hand, not because she is aware of the often exploitative nature of internships, but more because, in her own limited but also violent experience of the world, the pen appears to be nowhere nearly as mighty as the sword.

The go to bike for a Mad Max film for a long time was the Kawasaki Z1000. These early '70s Japanese bikes, along with the Honda CB750, gave rise to the term Superbike. They began to displace the ageing fleet of unreliable and comparatively slow British and American bikes that had served the hoodlum end of the bike market since before Marlon Brando rolled up on an old Triumph twin in The Wild One in 1953.  The Japanese manufacturers initially had trouble getting any traction in the market; I remember any early copy of a British vertical twin being received very poorly. Later, when they abandoned imitation and went where their slide rules led them they started to surpass the competition in almost every aspect of design. This left die hard British bike enthusiasts clutching at straws of superiority with claims like “British and Italians made engines while Japanese and Germans made motors," a vague philosophical notion most riders were happy to concede in exchange for increased performance and reliability. But then the Pommies awoke from their fairy tale slumber and started to fight back with the three-cylinder Triumph Trident and the BSA Rocket Three.  Agh! The banshee wail of those megaphone silencers, gunning it out of Pensacola on a frosty morning, glancing over my shoulder to unexpectedly see a pair of galloping giraffes running alongside from what must have been some sort of nature park that adjoined the highway.

In 1979, Kawasaki lent ten Z1000’s for use in the original film on the condition they were returned in good order after the filming…. that didn’t happen. As time has gone by we have seen a lot more BMWs roaming the Wasteland, I suspect for the reasons mentioned above. If you are curious as to how motorcycles have so often been synonymous with bad apples, see the footnote.

The bikes, cars and trucks, in all their aggressive steampunk bling and devilish ingenuity, are a major pillar and drawcard of any Mad Max film. The cornucopia of vehicles you see in Furiosa are actual fire breathing high speed metal sculptures put together by a very talented team of: mechanics, machinists, fabricators and artists. What an incredible buzz it must have been for the artists to draw whatever came into their heads and then give it to the fabricators to be made into reality. Not just put it on a plinth and take photos reality, or CGI the shit out of it reality, but fang it down the highway and drift it round the corner reality.

In Furiosa what we are watching is a 50 year old dream, or is it a recurring nightmare of director creator George Miller. He gave up work as a medical doctor so he could generously share his stark vision of the future with us. And we very generously let him do so. The original Mad Max was for a long time the most profitable film ever made, it cost $350,000 and made $100 million, an unprecedented ratio. The initial reaction to the film was mixed. An ABC reporter threw up while watching it, and the movie got mostly poor press coverage. It’s hard to see now why it was considered so shocking, as in the same year, both Apocalypse Now and Alien were also released. Miller had made a notorious short film years before Mad Max called Violence in the Cinema, part 1 .This provocative and gratuitously violent film got him noticed. It was a satire of a lecture given by social commentator Phillip Adams.  Adams was so irked by this he later wrote a scathing review of Mad Max saying, “It would become a special favourite of rapists, sadists and child murderers”. I read somewhere that the young Roman Polanski filmed himself setting fire to his own film school. I guess he was working on the idea that in the movie business, notoriety was better than anonymity, (although this didn’t work so well for Polanski later). Maybe this was part of Miller’s motivation.

The movie establishment in the US was not interested in promoting Mad Max until they noticed the overseas ticket sales. In Japan these were going through the roof, and it was mostly by word of mouth.  The US release was dubbed into American, not to simplify the dialogue for American audiences, but to get around the film's original poor quality audio tracks, which made speech hard to follow on the little clip-on your car speakers you got at drive-in theatres. This was especially important as this is where most of the movie's tickets were going to be sold.

Thinking back to that original screening all those years ago, the local Arab audience seemed to have quickly gotten to the essence of what was special about a Mad Max film. And that is, as has been said before: movement.

In physics, the kinetic energy of an object is the form of energy that it possesses due to its motion, Ek=½mv2.This exhilarating formula lies at the heart of Furiosa as it has always done with any Mad Max film. It says if you double the speed of your War Rig it will hit four times harder when it collides with something. The formula was given a kick in the britches in the early 18th century by the amazing polymath Émilie du Châtelet, who corrected Newton’s earlier work. I would encourage you, as I just did, to acquaint yourself with her short but amazing life. But obviously, banging on further would be an unwelcome digression in what is meant to be an action movie review.

I liked the film a lot. The attention to detail. The sheer steampunk majesty conveyed by the cinematography was thrilling. But in a way, I felt I had already seen it before it started. Everything was on a grander scale than its predecessor, but the only thing that really stuck in my mind walking back out into the daylight was how good an actor Chris Hemsworth was. I felt the scripts fealty to the traditions and characters of the previous films somehow held it back and took it further away from what had actually made the first Mad Max so successful in the first place: its originality.

Footnote

Why are motorcycles associated with lawlessness and bad behaviour ? 

Restless returned soldiers fresh from two World Wars formed numerous motorcycle clubs across the USA in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, they did this with a view to staging races, and undertaking a good quantity of whooping and hollering, and also drinking.

All through the 1930s and 1940s, the small town of Hollister, California had hosted bike racing and get together events over the July 4th holiday period. At the 1947 event, things got out of hand and the legend of the Hollister riot was born. Some 4000 enthusiasts had arrived in town from clubs with names like, The Boozefighters and The Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington, and so unsurprisingly, they got to it. The town locals apparently put it down to high spirits, mostly. But the press however beat the story up mercilessly, and so the notion of outlaw motorcycle gangs commenced. In 1953 Marlon Brando starred in The Wild One, a story loosely based on the Hollister events. The film was considered so subversive that it was banned in England until 1968. (I just watched it again, it’s as mild as milk.) In 1966, we had Wild Angels, starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra, around the same time as Hunter S. Thompson’s  Hells' Angels was published. Then came the era defining Easy Rider in 1969, and so the die was cast.