The Post-Apocalyptic Guide to Watching Every 'Mad Max' Movie
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SOUPED-UP, FUEL-INJECTED, AND with pedal firmly affixed to the metal, the Mad Max franchise of anything-goes motor mayhem has shown a unique tenacity as it’s rolled on and on for forty-five years. (How long has it been since the first, you ask? At the time, Mel Gibson was understood to be a universally liked heartthrob with undeniable leading-man bankability.) The installments haven’t come so fast or furious—a three-decade hiatus separates the third and fourth films, then nine more years before the fifth—but the combination of death-defying car stunts with increasingly intricate universe design has kept audiences coming back, no matter how faint their memories of the last ride. There’s always a little fuel left in the tank, and that goes for director George Miller as well, who claims to already be hard at work on his next maniac opus.
The latest road trip through hell is Furiosa, the first branded with the subtitle of A Mad Max Saga instead of the other way around. Presumably, Mad Max: Furiosa would’ve sounded too similar to Mad Max: Fury Road, the megahit casting a long shadow from which the prequel/sequel Furiosa has been traced. The hyper-saturated blues and oranges, the gritted-teeth performance from Anya Taylor-Joy working off the blueprint laid out by Charlize Theron, the emphasis on women subjugated by violent men—they all pair these two films with a similarity otherwise unseen in this constantly shape-shifting property.
Between the long pauses in the release schedule, the overhauled aesthetics as Australia gradually coagulates into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the frequent reshuffling of the cast, regular reinvention has long been a key part of Mad Max’s winning formula. But for a newcomer, it poses a conundrum: when each film has been praised as a freestanding masterpiece independent of its bigger narrative continuity, one could feasibly choose to start anywhere.
The chronology of the series’ story and its premieres aren’t so different, really only diverging in the ordering of Fury Road and Furiosa. Watched in narrative sequence, the program would go as follows:
Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max 2, released in America as The Road Warrior (1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Incidentally, that’s also the ideal way to take in this sprawling epic of hardship and triumph, the relatively expansive myth-making of Furiosa best served by not being forced to follow the high-water mark of the series. Fury Road plays like a grand finale, a show of power guided by a minimalism that winnows away everything from the concept until all that’s left is sinew and bone. It leaves a viewer catching their breath, and adheres to the old showbiz motto that you always leave ‘em wanting more. So stock up on clean water and guzzoline, get in the driver’s seat, and start your engines. Here is your definitive course through the high-octane demolition derby that is Mad Max:
Mad Max (1979)
A hundred-million-dollar phenomenon spawned from $400,000 and plenty of gumption, the original Mad Max set a new record for the most profitable film ever made, and it shows in the best way; the shoestring budget, evident in the rust-and-tar palette of the cruder vehicles, was elevated by the fearlessness with which Miller orchestrated his seemingly suicidal spectacles of speed. This one hews closer to reality as we know it, set “a few years from now,” a time when Max Rockatansky was less a haunted shell of his former self and more like a no-mercy cop with a wife and child to think about. The film doubles as a crash course to the elements of Miller’s style, preparing the home binge-watcher for the elaborate visual choreography during action scenes, the stony characterization of Max taken from the cowboys in Westerns of old, and the gnarly glee that governs a Down Under without rules.
Mad Max 2, a.k.a. The Road Warrior (1981)
The first Mad Max pit our man against, for the most part, some ne’er-do-well bikers. Lord Humungus, the hulking, hockey-mask-clad “Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rollah” who targets Max in the sequel, barely even seems human. With ten times the amount of money to play with, Miller’s ambitions ballooned, and he plunged his hero into a future farther along the process of societal breakdown. Unencumbered by his late family, with only a dog for company as he traversed hostile territory, Max raised the ante on madness: the costumes got wilder, the races got faster, the villains got more colorful. With a look equal parts Aussie punk and sun-bleached comic book, this film was the first to perform the miracle of outdoing its predecessor—somehow, the standard expectation for a franchise that keeps topping itself. (A flashback preamble opening the film also fills in the blanks about the events leading to the first Mad Max.)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
After Miller’s friend and producer Byron Kennedy died in a helicopter crash, he didn’t feel like returning to his kingdom of oil and blood for another go-round—but encouragement from eventual co-director George Ogilvie changed his mind. On screen, however, the worshipful camera suggests that he was even more reenergized by bringing in queen of the stolen scene Tina Turner, reigning over the dog-eat-dog metropolis of Bartertown as the vainglorious Aunty Entity. Max’s world has gone full-tilt on lunacy, the rule of law replaced by take-no-prisoners combat in the gladiatorial Thunderdome, as if the future has regressed into the past of ancient Rome. The fever-pitch extravagance bordered on camp and tested the resolve of some fans resistant to change, but anyone who sees the charm in the kooky, over-the-top eccentricity of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom will have no trouble locking onto the freakier frequency.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
Our pal Max makes one fleeting cameo in this quasi-spinoff shifting focus to another figure of trauma and vengeance. In baroquely titled chapters, the odyssey of Furiosa recounts her girlhood kidnapping from her verdant oasis home, her hardscrabble youth under the brutal tutelage of Lord Dementus (played by Chris Hemsworth, visibly having the time of his life), and her eventual rise to rebellion against the cruel systems that raised her. Both this and Fury Road come to us from the digital era, the scale of the showstopper set pieces larger than before, but Furiosa in specific places a greater emphasis on lore-building. The writing never presumes our familiarity with the character, which not only makes this a natural pick to watch out of release order, but also challenges Furiosa to earn every piece of her legend. Or, as Dementus taunts her in a moment of hubris: “D’you have it in you to make it epic?”
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
George Miller spent the better part of twenty years trying to get Fury Road made, his attempts impeded by 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq, and the implosion of Mel Gibson. (Along the way, there were aborted plans taking the shape of an anime-style cartoon feature and a video game.) He got the chance at just the right time, the precise moment that the rapidly advancing technologies for CGI and lightweight digital cameras caught up with his unhinged vision. The result is an adrenaline-spiking feat of hyperkinetic coordination, as impossibly tricked-out hot rods hurtle at life-and-death speeds through volleys of gunfire and explosive projectiles. The plot couldn’t be more bare-bones, consisting mostly of “Furiosa and Max drive over that way, take a beat, then drive back the way they came.” But Miller fills the cleared space with pure tension, every second stretched to maximum excruciation as the pair of wayward souls fight their way through an environment designed to stamp out life. Their survival is a never-ending fight, and the ultimate victory.
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