Up until a bit over a year ago, I would’ve never believed that the Mad Max movie franchise would soon be among my favorites. Granted, I hadn’t seen a single one of them before then (Letterboxd says I watched Fury Road at the start of 2023, which sounds right), but I was hooked once I sunk my teeth into them.
They are hair-raising and adrenaline inducing, often forcing you to question how series creator and ongoing director George Miller was not only able to conceive of these situations and set pieces, but actually put them to film. Even in an era where nearly everything can be digitally rendered and constructed, the Mad Max films still feel singularly unimaginable.
And they also feel succinct and intertwined despite a non-linear, and often incoherent, story structure between films that don’t necessarily reinforce one another besides the recently released Furiosa prequel. They live in their own worlds, and yet they feel as one, where the post-apocalyptic landscape lends itself to one cutthroat story after another.
As a younger viewer who initially was exposed to the Mad Max franchise with Fury Road, I obviously have more of a relationship to the newer entries of the saga, but I still have a ton of admiration and respect for the originals, which find ample ways each time around to reinvent the wheel. Even Beyond Thunderdome (which feels at-odds with the two movies before it) has moments of pure anarchy that are exhilarating to experience over and over again.
And I really hope that Furiosa’s disastrous outing at the box office doesn’t spell the end for George Miller making these movies. There’s a rumored third film in this new batch of stories (codenamed The Wasteland) that I’m worried will get shelved following the financial losses of this new one.
But that’s a topic for another day. For now, here’s how I’d rank the Mad Max movies from worst to best:
5. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
4. Mad Max (1979)
3. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
George Miller finds so much new ground to cover with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga that perfectly justifies its own existence. While Fury Road was interested in such a contained story propelled by larger-than-life action sequences and big rig warfare spawning from a game of cat and mouse, Furiosa fills in the gaps of a world much larger than what is expected. Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth stun in a prequel well worth the wait.
Read Cinephile Corner’s review of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
1. Mad Max Fury Road (2015)
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