We don’t need another hero: ‘Mad Max’ has continuously influenced pop culture for well over 30 years. Let us count the ways.
The director was a Sydney doctor who’d never made a feature film before, the leads were virtual unknowns and the budget was less than $500,000. To top it off, the film this ragtag team made was a mutant B-movie about a crumbling future Australia where motorcycle gangs and police officers squared off in automotive combat. Did anyone really know what we were about to get…
Thirty-six years after George Miller’s classic Mad Max was released, offering a scarifying new vision of Australia and our filmmaking capabilities, the movie easily stands as one of the most influential cinematic works in the medium’s modern history. A vengeful former police officer turned lone warrior in the post-apocalyptic wastelands, Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky became the vehicular equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and the automotive mayhem that followed him was shot and edited with a razor-sharp intensity and thrilling momentum.
Together with the sequels Mad Max 2 in 1981 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, Mad Max has been the cultural equivalent of the 600 horsepower engine inside the [READ IT ALL]