Mad Max (1979)

Film: Mad Max (1979)
Stars: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns
Director: George Miller
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's unusual for me to see a sequel to a film without having seen all of its predecessors.  I generally like to think of a film series in the same way I do a television series, and even if I have a rough idea of where we started, I think it's important to see all of the installments.  However, when Mad Max: Fury Road came out I definitely upped this particular series on my Netflix list, and over the next few weeks I'll be catching both this and The Road Warrior as a way of finishing up the 1999 Entertainment Weekly "100 Greatest Films" list.  After watching the initial film, it's kind of shocking to see where this universe graduated to, as the first film, while definitely bizarre, has a grounded-in-reality aspect to it that disappears by the time we hit Fury Road, thanks in no small part to the low, low budget action that is on-display here.

(Spoilers Ahead) Between this and Fury Road, I am left to understand that the actual plots of Mad Max films are largely ancillary to what is going on on screen, but here goes.  We're in a post-apocalyptic future, one where motorcycle gangs rape and pillage the countryside, and where cops are the only line-of-defense for the people, most of which are not actually present for this film (it's the rare police film that doesn't show much of the actual people they're defending).  Max (Gibson) is one of the best cops, though he's one that wants to quit the force to spend time with his girlfriend Jessie (Samuel) and their infant son Sprog.  He eventually does quit after his partner is burned alive, but he and his girlfriend are pursued by a particular gang of roving motorcyclists, headed by the Toecutter (Keays-Byrne).  After the motorcyclists brutally kill Jessie and Sprog, the film becomes a revenge fantasy, with Max killing off every member of the gang one-by-one.

Gibson is the only actor in this cast who eventually became famous from these films (though Keays-Byrne did play the villain Immortan Joe in Fury Road, albeit one that is seemingly in no way connected to the Toecutter).  At the time he was a virtual unknown, with his only work of any note being on the soap opera The Sullivans.  This film made him a celebrity, and it's easy to see why.  Gibson today is easily dismissed because of his heinous offscreen politics, but for two decades he was a movie star for a reason-he is swaggering, game, and consistently magnetic with little character development as Max, and I can't wait to see him in The Road Warrior, by all accounts the superior of the two films.  It also has to be said that there's a strangeness to the fact that the eventually quite bigoted Mel Gibson almost certainly caused a sexual awakening in countless young gay men as Max, clad head-to-toe in leather and looking almost impossibly handsome with his pillowy lips and cold blue eyes.

The movie is violent, with brutal rapes happening at least twice in the picture (in what I'd assume would be odd for a movie made in 1979, the sexual assaults are perpetrated against both men and women), and it's a bit crude.  The budget for it was very light (which, with its $100 million gross at the time, made it the most profitable movie ever made until Paranormal Activity), with most of the sequences clearly involving mannequins or dummies, but Miller's prowess behind the camera cannot be denied, and the chases sequences are shockingly good for such a tiny amount of cash.  That said, the movie itself feels a bit strange to me, and not in the way I was hoping.  I always think when you're universe-creating that you walk a fine line into being indulgent, and frequently a movie that cares little for the plot veers into madness, with the bad guys becoming interchangeable and the violence being glorified.  The movie initially deeply polarized critics (as with most things that become popular, this has been white-washed through history and it's now hailed as a landmark film), and I kind of get it. The movie does, occasionally, seem to worship the rape and murder onscreen, and kind of glosses over Max's sadistic revenge options, eventually culminating in him killing one man in a Rube Goldberg-style device that involves him trying to outrun a lighter/pile of gasoline by cutting off his leg with a hacksaw (for real, this is how the movie ends).  As a result, I didn't like it even if I can admire the technical prowess Miller needed to have to get this movie made at all.