8/15/2023 0 Comments Mad max 2 castWhen it came time to make a third Max movie, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Warner Brothers put up enough cash so that Miller (joined in this outing by co-director George Ogilvie) could go wild. cult hero to a mainstream figure, and Mel Gibson's place in the firmament was secured. Overnight, Mad Max went from being a U.S. When Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior arrived two years later, with a bigger budget and higher aspirations, Warner Brothers spent some money on the advertising campaign and opened it wide. It had a limited American run before disappearing. The film starred an as-yet unknown Mel Gibson in the title role and received minor U.S. Mad Max was made in 1979 by Miller on a shoestring budget. There's a sense of spontaneity to each action set piece, and we're never sure exactly how things will turn out. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Mad Max movies (I credit director George Miller for this) is that, despite a certain amount of repetition, the films never threaten to become routine. The films' appeal is strictly visceral one can pretty much shut down the higher functioning areas of the brain. The essential formula is straightforward, and involves a lot of fights and chases. This is very skillful filmmaking, and "Mad Max 2" is a movie like no other.The Mad Max trilogy is pure adrenaline - a quality that was not lost when the franchise received an injection of American money for its third installment. The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. It operates according to its special rules and values, and we experience it. The filmmakers have imagined a fictional world. What is the point of the movie? Everyone is free to interpret the action, I suppose, but I prefer to avoid thinking about the implications of gasoline shortages and the collapse of Western civilization, and to experience the movie instead as pure sensation. The special effects and stunts in this movie are spectacular "Mad Max 2" goes on a short list with " Bullitt," " The French Connection," and the truck chase in " Raiders of the Lost Ark" as among the great chase films of modern years. The pursuers and defenders have various kinds of cars and trucks to chase or defend the main truck, and the whole chase proceeds at breakneck speed as quasi-gladiators leap through the air from one racing truck to another, more often than not being crushed beneath the wheels. In "Mad Max 2," there is basically a truck and a road. Although "The General" is comedic, it's also very exciting, as Keaton, playing the engineer of a speeding locomotive, runs an endless series of variations on the basic possibilities of two trains and several sets of railroad tracks. The director of "Mad Max 2," George Miller, compares this chase sequence to Buster Keaton's "The General," and I can see what he means. The set piece in "Mad Max 2" is an unbelievably well-sustained chase sequence that lasts for the last third of the film, as Max and his semi-trailer run a gauntlet of everything the savages can throw at them. After this premise is established with a great deal of symbolism, ritual, and violence (and so few words that sometimes we have to guess what's happening), the movie arrives at its true guts. Max volunteers to drive a tanker full of gasoline through the surrounding warriors and take it a few hundred miles to the coast, where they all hope to find safety. He happens upon a small band of people who are trying to protect their supplies of gasoline from the attacks of warriors who have them surrounded. Max's role in "Mad Max 2" is to behave something like a heroic cowboy might have in a classic Western. Max is played by Mel Gibson, an Australian actor who starred in "Gallipoli." Before that, he made "Mad Max" for the makers of "Mad Max 2," and that film was a low-budget forerunner to this extravaganza of action and violence. They speak hardly at all the movie's hero, Max, has perhaps two hundred words. The road warriors of the title take their costumes and codes of conduct from a rummage sale of legends, myths, and genres: They look and act like Hell's Angels, samurai warriors, kamikaze pilots, street-gang members, cowboys, cops, and race drivers. There are motorcycles and semi-trailer trucks and oil tankers that are familiar from the highways of 1982, but there are also bizarre customized racing cars, of which the most fearsome has two steel posts on its front to which enemies can be strapped (if the car crashes, the enemies are the first to die). The vehicles of these future warriors are leftovers from the world we live in now. The movie takes place at a point in the future when civilization has collapsed, anarchy and violence reign in the world, and roaming bands of marauders kill each other for the few remaining stores of gasoline.
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