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July 1, 2004
Not So Mad Max
Tonight I watched Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as the finale of a fun, three-part Mad Max trilogy that my housemate, Will encouraged.
Interesting point: We never even bothered to watch the original Mad Max before I returned it. We had both seen it long ago, and I started it, but it simply appeared archaic, dusty and uninteresting. I put it right back into the Netflix package where it belonged.
Neither this movie nor the previous one, Road Warrior, is a marvel of modern cinema. Fascinating, yes, to the teenage sci-fi junkie that I was in the early eighties when they were released. Now that I’ve written a few things, however, I’m left to wonder about the continuity among the three movies.
Mad Max’s IMDb description shows it as follows:
In an Australian dystopia of decaying order and violent highways, a police pursuit driver is drawn into a path of vengeance after a motorcycle gang targets him for the death of their former leader.
I still can't remember what especially made it “the future” in Mad Max. I all seemed very mundane when I watched it. Road Warrior goes through a convoluted set-up that involves a war and then a gas crisis. Not much about nuclear devestation but it all seems to be about gasoline anyway. I think there could have been a political statement more applicable to today then 1981.
The Thunderdome movie ends with a flight over a clearly post nuclear Sydney. I'm still trying to figure out with whom Australia went to war. Indonesia?
Mel Gibson apparently was going to sign on to a fourth movie...the script was written and everything but it seems that Namibia is not a safe enough place to film the Australian desert and they canceled everything. I read somewhere that Mel Gibson said he was too old to play action movies.
How old is Sean Connery?
Posted by Bastique at July 1, 2004 11:46 PM