By Erin Free
George Miller’s bone-rattling 1979 biker flick, Mad Max, is undoubtedly one of the finest and most original action films ever made, and was responsible for a plethora of cheap knock-offs and genre revisions. Set in a violent near-future where vicious biker gangs strike terror into anyone on the road, Mad Max follows the downward spiral of young cop, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson in his star making performance), who goes from disillusionment to burnt out frenzy when his wife and baby are mowed down by a gang, setting off a shattering chain of events that spark murder, rape, and sadistic savagery. “It was a learning thing,” Gibson said of his breakthrough role at a 2012 Q&A for Mad Max at LA’s Egyptian Theater. “I didn’t even know how to behave in front of a camera. I have a great deal of affection for Mad Max, and for George Miller, because he taught me so much. It was part of my greater education, and it gave me a really strong foundation.”
An extraordinarily visceral, unforgiving thrill ride that critiques the culture of violence while at the same time offering up some of the most gut wrenching action ever committed to film, Mad Max is a fuel-injected masterpiece. George Miller then equalled it with 1981’s Mad Max 2 (titled The Road Warrior internationally), which pushed its titular anti-hero into an even more dystopic future, where petrol is scarce, and the world is a shattered mess. A third, less successful entry – 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – didn’t dent the magnetic aura that had risen around Max Rockatansky, a lone anti-hero every inch as essential as Alan Ladd’s Shane, or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Despite having only minimal dialogue, Max is a man of action, and those actions – often performed under taciturn duress – are what define him.
The character is now appropriately part of the cult cinema firmament, and was, of course, famously rebooted by George Miller himself with 2015’s much loved Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy in the title role. “I still get letters from people wanting to write a thesis on Mad Max as classic post-modern cinema, although when I made the first film, I thought that it was just a car-chase movie,” director, George Miller, has said of Mad Max. “And then in every place, it seemed to have a resonance. Someone from Iceland said that Max is a lone Viking guy. In Japan, they told me that he was a samurai. I suddenly had the wit to see that I was a storyteller, and a servant of the collective unconscious.”
Blood Father is released in cinemas on September 1.