Review: George Miller’s Mad Max Anthology on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

One of the greatest action franchises of all time receives a terrific UHD spit-polish.

Mad Max AnthologyThe original Mad Max trilogy is the work of a talented virtuoso who blended seemingly every trope of every movie genre into a series of punk-rock action films. The plots, which are nearly irrelevant, are primitive even by the standards of low-budget genre films: In a bombed-out future version of the outback, a vicious gang pisses off a brilliant highway daredevil, Max (Mel Gibson), and stunning vehicular mayhem ensues. Within this consciously simple narrative framework, director George Miller created two of the greatest of all action films, fashioned one of the most influential pop-cultural visions of the post-apocalypse, and capped it all off with a spectacularly wrongheaded kid’s movie.

Though the second film, most commonly known in America as The Road Warrior, is often cited as the masterpiece of the series, the original Mad Max is still the most ferocious and subversive. The 1979 film most explicitly riffs on delinquent racing movies and the kinds of crudely effective 1970s horror movies that would sometimes show a family being violated in a prolonged fashion, and there are sequences in Mad Max that could be edited, probably with few seams, into, say, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Mad Max also has a distinctly Australian masculine tension that’s reminiscent of other outback-set classics such as Wake in Fright, as it’s concerned with the pronounced sexual repression and frustration of a predominantly male population that’s all dressed up in tight leather with little to do apart from mounting their bikes and revving up their big noisy engines.

One doesn’t have to go looking too hard for a gay subtext in Mad Max. Following the death of his family, a grief-stricken man straps on his leather duds (which Miller never fails to fetishize) in order to do battle with the psycho killers who appear to have risen from the ether of his subconsciousness. The film is so disturbing because it implies, however fleetingly, that the annihilation of the hero’s family incidentally enables him to come to terms with his predilections (this film would pair wonderfully in a double feature with Cruising) and Miller is pointedly indifferent to the usual platitudes that filmmakers often offer in hypocritical gestures intended to render their vigilantes “likable.” There’s no emotional closure in this film, and no illusions of any selflessness, as Max kills the bad guys, in a spectacular series of road duels, for gratification and drives off to potential oblivion. The end, cue credits.

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The Road Warrior, from 1981, is a poetic action sonata of cars and leather that’s rich in beautifully composed wide shots that are designed to tickle the eye, climaxing with an awesomely inventive act of demolition-derby warfare. But the film is disappointingly conventional. Unlike Mad Max, its kinkiness is superficial, and Miller is overly preoccupied with offering Max up as a mythic hero right out of Joseph Campbell, despite the scant evidence on display to support that assertion. Though brilliantly staged and influential to this day (Fast & Furious 6 offers a similar climactic battle royale), the film is disappointingly structured as a conventional coming-of-age adventure in the tradition of Shane or the original Star Wars trilogy—if George Lucas had the temerity to put his Ewoks in ass-less chaps, that is.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, released in 1985, is retrospectively interesting for serving as a rough draft for the film that might be Miller’s masterpiece: Babe: Pig in the City, from 1998. There are a number of promising ideas and one terrific fight sequence set in the titular coliseum, but the film finds Miller succumbing fatally to the misguided notion of Max as a messiah. One might have forgiven the cuddlier, less ambiguous Max if the staging were crisp, but the pacing is limp, and Beyond Thunderdome totally falls apart after a serviceable first act that suggests a political sci-fi allegory that never comes to fruition.

Taken together, these three films evoke a traditional autobiographical arc of a once angry and wily filmmaker who, perhaps inevitably, softened with age and success. Which is why Mad Max: Fury Road inspired so much curiosity and excitement before its release, as it promised an enticing update on the evolution of an eccentric talent. Miller is a stickler for detail and tactility, and he understands that a fight of any sort must be reveled in, built up, transformed into theater. Breathtaking landscape shots are populated with gonzo warriors who steer their prehistoric, insect-like vehicles into battles that include the flipping of switches, the clinking and clanking of chains and firearms, and the beating of drums.

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In Fury Road, one most immediately and explicitly responds to Miller’s pronounced exhilaration to be working on such a vast scale to mount what’s, at heart, a cult film. This is the Lawrence of Arabia of highway-demolition movies, abounding in tableaus that could only be hinted at in the prior installments of the series. The desert wasteland glows with an unruly, painterly neon heat that resists the dull, dusty visual clichés of most future-shock films, and the patched-together vehicles that humans use to battle one another wreak of obsessive absurdity. In some scenes, there are cars that resemble porcupines, with great jutting spikes that appear to be impractical for the driver (how do you get into it?), but deadly for prospective opponents. One “war machine” is a made-over bulldozer, another a convertible that sits atop a tank—and then there are the usual fully armed tractor-trailers, made for transporting the “guzzoline” that will be familiar to fans of the prior Mad Max movies.

The humans are no less finely imagined, often outfitted to suggest the French Revolution playing out in the bombed-out outback. The villain, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, the “Toecutter” from Mad Max), has a huge shock of white, mad-scientist hair, a respirator that resembles the jaws of a skull, and a rotting body that literalizes the notion of patriarchal corruption and hypocrisy gone to hell. One of Joe’s henchman wears a metallic nose to replace an appendage that’s certainly crumbled away, and a hero, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), with her elegant close-cropped dome and greased battle paint, is understood to be a Joan of Arc waiting in the wings to redeem this debauched society. Elsewhere, Joe’s soldier-boys, brainwashed by a religious code that recalls that of the knights of the Crusades, spray their mouths with chrome before they’re to stage acts of kamikaze sabotage.

There’s a head-spinning amount of visual information in Fury Road. Like Babe: Pig in the City, it has a real suggestion of mad grandeur, particularly in the images that paint the Citadel as a throwback to the decadently grand cities of Cecil B. DeMille’s Bible epics, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and even D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. One’s always drinking things in, whether it’s the specifics of the human blood bags or milk-producing women, or the ruined, crow-infested swamps of the “Green Place.” When Immortan Joe stands above his people to claim their admiration for his suppression of them, we see, from the former’s point of view, the terrifying, exhilarating largeness of the area he rules, from his high, rarefied vantage point.

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The action scenes, chain reactions of cause and effect, aren’t staged in a conventional one-after-the-other manner. We see five of the greatest action sequences in the history of cinema unfold simultaneously throughout, merging into one another in viciously inventive ricochets of mechanic swashbuckling set atop drag races, suggesting a fusion of the Mad Max series with cubism with The Wages of Fear with a ’40s-era pirate movie. One can look at a different part of the frame each time one watches Fury Road and see an entirely different film.

Initially, you may miss the dangerous, feral sexuality of Mad Max and The Road Warrior, but that’s proven to be subsumed within Fury Road’s aesthetics. The fussy specificity of this world—the set design, the wardrobes, the physical gestures—is intensely sexual, knowingly reeking of attempts at fastidious distraction from the denial of carnal satisfaction. Sex is understood to be an instrument of power in this film that’s wielded over slaves, and so the common citizenry has no idea what to do with sex when faced with freedom; in the past, for them, it has embodied oppression, though they have these biological desires to contend with nevertheless. The vehicular promenades are foreplay, the warfare is vaguely equalized fornication, and the uncertainty of the more-or-less optimistic conclusion signifies what exactly? What comes after the rehabilitation of patriarchal perversity, and are there dominating portions of that sensibility with which one’s hesitant to part? Can kink and personal health cohabitate?

Image/Sound

Mad Max and Fury Road have previously been released on UHD, and their respective discs in this Mad Max Anthology set appear to contain the same A/V transfers as before. Mad Max sports healthy grain distribution and natural color tones and Fury Road boasts the full range of its boosted color-grading and sharp digital detail. The real draw here, then, is getting The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome in 4K for the first time, and both look better than ever, as their transfers maximize the dusty color palettes and grimy textures of the films. So fine is the image clarity that you can easily make out touches like sand darkening from drops of leaking gasoline and the yellow teeth of the characters. On the audio front, each film comes with their original soundtracks (and 5.1 surround remixes for the earlier movies), while the sequels also include Atmos tracks that maximize the roar of car engines and gas explosions. The mixing is surprisingly subtle on the earlier films, with just as much emphasis placed on carefully arranging the ambient effects in moments of calm, while Fury Road is, by design, pure sensory overload and a great workout for any home theater setup.

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Extras

This 4K-only set is pretty threadbare in the extras department, as we only get an intro by Leonard Maltin and an enjoyable, if hardly essential, archival commentary track by director George Miller and cinematographer Dean Semler on The Road Warrior disc. This release would have really benefited from including the extras found on Shout!’s 2015 release of the first film.

Overall

One of the greatest of all action franchises receives a terrific UHD spit-polish, though the dearth of extras leaves this Mad Max Anthology feeling more than a bit incomplete.

Score: 
 Cast: Mel Gibson, Steve Bisley, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Tim Burns, Geoff Parry, Michael Preston, Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells, Kjell Nilsson, Virginia Hey, Emil Minty, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence, Adam Cockburn, Frank Thring, Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz  Director: George Miller, George Ogilvie  Screenwriter: George Miller, Terry Hayes, Brian Hannant, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris  Distributor: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment  Running Time: 415 min  Rating: NR, R  Year: 1979 - 2015  Release Date: November 16, 2021  Buy: Video

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