The Mad Max Trilogy Blu-ray Tin Box Edition hit home video on June 4th and can be purchased right here!
My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called “Max”. To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away.
You all can have your Fast And The Furious movies. I’ve got all I need to feed my gear-headed cinema fantasies right here in the Mad Max Trilogy.
The genius of George Miller, the impossible youth of Mel Gibson, and the mind-meltingly brave crew who create and capture some of cinema’s most high speed and kinetic action all come together in an astonishingly perfect storm to craft The Road Warrior. That central film in the trilogy is not only the best film of the bunch, but almost certainly one of the top five films in action cinema history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What you need to know going in here is that I am an unapologetic lover of this trilogy and count them among some of my favorite films.
MAD MAX (1979)
George Miller makes his feature film debut here with what went on to become Australia’s highest grossing film of all time. I don’t know what Miller felt he had to prove, or what angry gods he wanted to appease, but Mad Max blasts onto the screen with some of the greatest camera work and high speed chases ever captured. The opening offers a slow reveal of our iconic, leather-clad hero of the wasteland, and that is about the only slow thing you are going to get.
Here in the not-too-distant future of Mad Max, the world seems a little off. It feels as if there are only cops and bike gangs. The normal people are nowhere to be found. And while this is a bold and explosive feature film debut, it is clear that Miller and his team didn’t really have enough of a budget to fully realize the apocalyptic world which he would bring us in the next two films. But there is something to admire about the unexplained setting here in the first film. Buildings and infrastructure seem to have crumbled. There is some kind of law, but it isn’t very stable. Max’s team of cops, including his friend Goose (Steve Bisley) and Captain Fifi (Roger Ward), work out of a dilapidated old factory and build their “interceptors” out of seemingly spare parts. They represent what is left of law and order, but their forays out onto the road are eating at them and threatening to consume them.
When a roaming pack of biker thugs led by The Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) begin chipping away at what little civilization is left in our hero cops, Max decides to leave the force before the road consumes him. But he’ll be drawn back in a quest for vengeance that is hugely satisfying, expertly executed, and ultimately representative of the loss of Max’s soul. Whatever happened to civilization prior to the events of Mad Max had left society on the precipice. And when Max let’s the road swallow his soul, it seems any final remnants of civilization becomed damned along with him.
THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)
My take on Mad Max allows for a thematic reason as to why the world in The Road Warrior seems so starkly different from the world painted in the first film. I’m quite certain that the difference in style here has more to do with a larger budget, higher exposure, and George Miller and his team having a more confident grasp on their abilities to make real their artistic visions. So yeah, a bunch more money and support is the most logical reason for why The Road Warrior takes place in a wholly bleak post-apocalypse that stemmed from a former world war.
Here in The Road Warrior, fuel has become the great currency as well as the final thread of connection to the old world. Max is a loner and a wanderer. He has turned his V-8 Interceptor into the ultimate wasteland survival machine and the loss of his soul to vengeance and anarchy has made him the perfect survivor in these desert lands.
Every single post-apocalypse movie made in the wake of The Road Warrior owes much to the costume, set design, and art direction of this film. The term “post-apocalyptic” is almost synonymous with imagery from The Road Warrior and we can’t ever escape that. George Miller and team were given all the tools they needed in 1981 to realize a wholly unique vision of the future, filled with rogues and villains and feral children and sadomasochists. His stunt team and photographers once again captured breathtaking speed and mind-blowing car chases and crashes. Only here in The Road Warrior, Miller and team transcend just about anything that had come before. The action of The Road Warrior owes much to famous car films that came before it, such as The French Connection or Bullitt. But, God help me, The Road Warrior blows those films away in its creativity, death-defying craft, and full embrace of its genre.
As Max encounters a gyro-copter pilot, teams up with a small group of civilians who have managed to refine a tanker-full of gas, and battles off the roving hordes of The Lord Humongous, he begins to find something to live for once again. And the third act of The Road Warrior is cinema perfection. On a thematic and story level, Max is risking his life for something righteous and good. He is winning back his soul. But on the execution level, Miller and team bring the grandest and possibly the most perfect action set piece ever attempted. As Max barrels down the highway behind the wheel of a tricked-out 18-wheeler, his battle with the hordes of The Humongous is unparalled action brilliance. We leave Max as a man who has found a reason to live and fight for justice once again, but as he reclaims his humanity, he remains alone and in need of a family in order to fully resurrect from the dead.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
My whole life this has been the maligned entry in the trilogy. “Lesser Mad Max.” And while I can’t deny that I have a more complete and primal love for The Road Warrior, I love Beyond Thunderdome and embrace it as a full partner of this trilogy. An even more stylized and confident outing for Miller and his team, Beyond Thunderdome boldly eschews the road… which was so central to the first two films.
We meet Max in the desert as he is robbed of his camel and covered wagon/war machine by yet another pilot who has managed to jerry-rig a functional plane in the waste. Like any good solitary survivor, Max seeks to reclaim what was stolen from him and quickly becomes inter-twined with the power struggle going on in Bartertown. Here we meet Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), a survivor who has become a kind of warrior-queen and ruler of this hardscrabble society. Bartertown runs on pig shit (aka methane gas) and only Master Blaster knows how to control the flow of the gas which holds Bartertown together by a shoestring. So when Master Blaster gets power hungry, cue Aunty’s need of an outsider to quietly remove Master Blaster from the picture. In one of the greatest and most creative one-on-one fight scenes ever conceived, Max steps into The Thunderdome, where “two men enter, one man leaves” to challenge Master Blaster. This eye-for-an-eye gladiatorial combat is actually intended as a symbol of order from chaos. War brought the world to this desolated state, and so The Thunderdome creates a place for conflict to both begin and end. Two men enter, one man leaves. But when Max defies Aunty in front of all of her followers, she calls on yet another law of their society: “Bust a deal, spin the wheel.” Max’s fate is determined by a chance spin of a wheel and he is banished into the wasteland. Here the movie takes a massive left turn from any of the other films and Max is taken in by a lost tribe of weird, prehistoric children living in a lavish oasis at the edge of the desert.
I won’t outline the entire film, but what is important to note is that here, beyond The Thunderdome, it seems that Max is able to reclaim a family once again and be a father to the children he was never able to raise. While still gruff and hardened by the road, Max will further claim his redemption and even find a bit of a family to call his own.
Oh, and there will be another absolutely massive and wonderfully executed final chase sequence. The motivations and plotting that bring this chase about are underdeveloped and not as inspired as in previous entries. But the execution, creativity, and energy of the massive sequence is spot on and a worthy closing set piece of this seminal trilogy.
This set is important for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the Mad Max Trilogy has never been packaged together as a set before. I’ve never quite known why that is, but I’m sure it had to do with distribution rights or some boring legal reason. But none of that matters now, because this set brings the trilogy together for the first time ever on home video. Secondly, this is the first time Beyond Thunderdome has seen a Blu-ray release. So for those two reasons alone, plus the nifty limited edition tin packaging it comes in, I’m thrilled to own the set personally.
The three films each get their own disc in the set and you don’t get a whole lot of features or bonus material. The disc for Mad Max appears to be the very same content from the most recent blu-ray edition of that film. There is a commentary track, trailers, and a featurrette. It does appear that The Road Warrior has gotten a cleaned up HD scan and sound work done to it for this set, so you also get probably the best home video version of The Road Warrior that has ever been available. There’s also a commentary track here as well. Beyond Thunderdome is totally devoid of any special features beyond the aforementioned “first available HD version” here in the US.
The first two films look absolutely stunning. I’m not an expert in the HD conversion/scanning process, or even in cinematography. But I know flawlessly beautiful shots when I see them. And the colors and details here are sharp, yet natural! On Beyond Thunderdome, I noticed a lot more grain and even some lines which looked like they were part of the original film stock used to create this scan. But to be honest, those things didn’t really bother me as the movie was crafted by geniuses in the first place, so it still looks incredible and gets my vote of confidence for whatever that is worth.
The Mad Max Trilogy launched Mel Gibson and George Miller onto the international stage and both have gone on to craft several decades-worth of entertainment for international audiences. I am a life-long fan and cannot wait for the fourth installment of this franchise (which will sadly not feature Gibson, but is being helmed by Miller, so my confidence level is high.) I can only imagine that this trilogy is being released as a bit of a primer and advanced marketing for the new film which is headed down the pike and currently in post-production. That leads me to believe that this will NOT be the last time we see all three Mad Max films, and soon all four, packaged together.
This is not an “Ultimate Edition” type of release. You are getting three great films treated well here and packaged neatly. I recommend the package as a massive fan of the films themselves. But I sure would love to have a “triple A” release of these films some day with newly-shot, retrospective special features and massive access to the behind-the-scenes elements of these classics. Something tells me that the marketing machine for Mad Max: Fury Road might just be the ticket to getting our hands on something like that. And when the time comes, I’ll be there to buy it. Take notice, Warner Brothers!
And I’m Out.
