George Miller. I view Miller completely different now since Fury Road and I am racking my brain for another example of an auteur with a career peak this late (70 at the time of his best film). There are auteurs who bloom early and fizzle out early (Godard, Bertolucci), those that die early (Murnau, Fassbinder and too many others to count), those that take forever between movies (Malick’s 20 year gap, Kubrick, Tati, late Cameron), and lastly those that take a long time to get started but once they do, they take off (Haneke, Hogg, Dardenne, Altman (sort of at least- he was 45 when he made MASH)). With the 10-year moratorium for all new films on my top 500 of all-time list Fury Road doesn’t make it yet. So, Miller has just one top 500 film (Fury Road will absolutely get there in time but it could push off The Road Warrior) and certainly a distinct voice (4 of his 5 archiveable films are Mad Max films).
Best film: Mad Max: Fury Road. Since May 2015 when I saw it I’ve barely been able to shut up about this brilliant film. I will say, and perhaps add this to the comments above, that however surprising this film was (very few auteurs have 34 years between their best and second best films) it does not feel fluky or like Miller was at the helm for some sort of happy accident. It’s clearly a Miller film from the style, the editing, to the content and narrative. This is very much the work of the auteur of The Road Warrior– I just thought there would’ve been more indicators along the way the last 30 years since Beyond Thunderdome.
total archiveable films: 5
top 100 films: 0
top 500 films: 1 (The Road Warrior)
top 100 films of the decade: (The Road Warrior, Mad Mad: Fury Road)
most overrated: Nothing. The TSPDT critical consensus has two Miler films in the top 1000. Fury Road is rising fast and doing fine and Road Warrior is #471 so they have the right two films and both are in fine spots for now.
most underrated: Ditto here- TSPDT is pretty much spot on. Thunderdome has grown on me over the years but there isn’t a third film that should be in the top 1000 that isn’t.
gem I want to spotlight : The Road Warrior. Before Fury Road this was one of the films considered one of the best of the action genre. It is part Rio Bravo but still wholly Miller from the intense overture montage to the big reveal ending. This is also the best Mel Gibson film– which may not sound like much but I have a lot of respect for his early Peter Weir films and the first Lethal Weapon .
stylistic innovations/traits: The jump cut editing seems like a no-brainer in this genre but what Miller perfects in Fury Road has its roots over 35 years ago in the no-budget Mad Max original. The pace and frame splitting has an absolutely palpable effect on the viewer. Miller also gets credit now for creating the rich characters and a wholly convincing world and all the sumptuous visual and narrative detail of Mad Max the character- not unlike Lucas with Star Wars. It’s part sci-fi, part action, and frankly part western with the barren lawless landscapes and antiheroic nature of the title character.
top 10
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2)
- Mad Max
- Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
- Lorzeno’s Oil
By year and grades
| 1979- Mad Max | R |
| 1981- The Road Warrior | MS |
| 1985- Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome | R |
| 1992- Lorenzo’s Oil | R |
| 2015- Mad Max: Fury Road | MP |
*MP is Masterpiece- top 1-3 quality of the year film
MS is Must-see- top 5-6 quality of the year film
HR is Highly Recommend- top 10 quality of the year film
R is Recommend- outside the top 10 of the year quality film but still in the archives
George Miller films I have seen ranked:
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – MP
2. The Road Warrior (1981) – MS
3. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – R/HR
4. Mad Max (1979) – R/HR
5. Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) – R
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) – NR
Furiosa is unarchivable? That’s a huge miss. It’s certainly Miller’s 2nd or 3rd best
@Matthew- I didn’t like it.
What are the main reasons for that?
@Matthew- I didn’t like the excessive use use of CGI/AI (even the dogs), blurred lines in the Production Design, the excessive use of close ups, the acting, the story, or the characters. I had to watch Mad Max: Fury Road the next day to cleanse my palette.
Isn’t Babe (1995) generally considered to be George Miller’s film (producer, screenplay) even though the directing credit went to Chris Noonan? Miller went onto direct the sequel after the first film’s success.
I definitely feel like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome could have had a better grade if it actually had a better start (the start here is a flat comic attempt) and some grittiness(the death count is extremely low and even then they are not brutal). Because in many ways it is a better film than The Road Warrior. For the first time Miller uses actual colour grading and the world building is incredible(From the WarGames to Bartertown etc.). It clearly has a bigger production quality than the first two films and incredibly well made practical sets. It could be seen as a rough draft for Fury Road. I still think the grade could be higher than a simple R though.
@Malith – R/HR for me. Here were my notes on it
I haven’t looked at all to see why this one isn’t very well received, or why it’s considered the worst of the series, my guess is that if you fell in love with the first two Mad Max’s films for the innovative, jump-cut chase sequences, then you probably won’t like what this one is going for (we don’t even see a car in this film until an hour and 23 minutes into the film). I could also see people having the same reaction to the tone of this one that the Return of the Jedi deniers had with the Ewoks in that film. Compared to the previous installment on the series, it’s very kid-y. This one is too. The second half is actually quite a cute film
Mad Max car chase fans are rewarded if they stuck around to the end here. There is an incredible chase sequence at the very end of the film that incorporates a train
Anyways, I loved it and love the approach of the film. It features far and away the most expansive and inspired world building of the franchise up to date. Bartertown is a fascinating little town and set piece
While this is NOT as good as The Road Warrior (Miller’s greatest strength are his car-battle-montages), this is probably the most beautifully photographed film of the series up till this point. There is some absolutely stunning Lean-esque photography here [https://imgur.com/a/B7oIl5f]. And there are no stronger visuals than the images we get on the plane set piece [https://imgur.com/a/cz7CSbX]
Wild narrative. Max arrives to a town looking for someone. Instead he gets into a bungee cord fight with a midget controlling a mentally handicapped giant. Then he’s exiled to the desert. Finds a hidden all-kid society that thinks he’s a chosen one messiah that’s been sent to lead them to a promised land. He then chases the kids that escaped him back to the aforementioned town where he and the kids rescue the midget and book it. Okay.
Great of Miller to show us the ruined cityscapes of Sydney, both because of how the children use the city for worldbuilding purposes but because it gave us this absolutely gorgeous establish shot of the city lit up at night
A fascinating thing about the Max Mad world is that while, at its core, it’s an absolutely brutal world, it has an extremely colorful and cartoonish surface level to it. Miller openly says that he didn’t want a post-apocalypse world where the color is visually desaturated and it has the feeling of just a cold, bleak world
Max is a Searcher (1956). Wanders the desert wasteland making himself more myth than man. Onto to the next journey for this aimless soul
Miller can do better than ripping off the swordsman vs gun visual gag from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Han chasing a couple of enemies only to come running back after he is led into a huge amount of enemies visual gag from Star Wars
A very ambitious effort that is quite underrated
Tina Turner
R/HR
@Drake what is your grade for Furiosa? I just watched it for the first time since seeing it in the theater. I think I’m between an HR or HR/MS. A very good film.
@LeBron Smith- I have it as a HR right now- agreed- very good film
Good luck tonight, LeBron
I think Beyond Thunderdome has better visuals/cinematography and world building than The Road Warrior. But hurt by a few problems. One is a very lame start. This thing takes a long time to get going. No comparison with Road Warrior which brings us right into a chase. Plus I feel like the formal narration bookends in The Road Warrior has to be highly praised. Beyond Thunderdome has great narration at the end too but is not set up like The Road Warrior. The other one is Beyond Thunderdome is much less bloddier, grittier than the predecessors. The effects of higher Hollywood Studio interference. Feels like a big missed opportunity. With a few tweaks here and there this could have been very close to The Road Warrior or even better.
My ranking of George Miller films:
1.Mad Max: Fury Road(2015)-MP
2.Mad Max: 2-The Road Warrior(1981)-HR/MS
3.Mad Max(1979)-R
4.Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome(1985)-R
5.Three Thousand Years of Longing(2022)-R
Performances:
1.Theron-Mad Max: Fury Road
2.Hoult-Mad Max: Fury Road
3.Hardy-Mad Max: Fury Road
4.Swinton-Three Thousand Years of Longing
5.Elba-Three Thousand Years of Longing
6.Gibson-Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
7.Gibson-Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
8.Hugh Keays-Byrne-Mad Max: Fury Road
9.Hugh Keays-Byrne-Mad Max
10.Melissa Jaffer-Mad Max: Fury Road
11.Keough-Mad Max: Fury Road
12.A.Lee-Mad Max: Fury Road
13.Nilsson-Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
14.
14.Wells: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
15.Rossito/Larsson-Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
16.Grubb-Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
17.T.Turner-Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Yet to see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
The Road Warrior I thought was much better than Beyond Thunderdome. But is it crazy to suggest Mel’s performance is on the same level or better in Beyond Thunderdome than it is in The Road Warrior? I thought he nailed it. But I hate the toning down of violence to make it PG-13 and the lack of a genuine threat/villain.
@Drake-Where would you place Furiosa in George Miller’s filmography? At P3 behind Fury Road and Road Warrior?
@Lionel – good question – how about you? I’ll probably wait for a home viewing again to really dig in and think on it.
@Drake-Sorry for the late response. I think I need to see Furiosa again at home too. At first glance it felt like there was a lot more CGI used in it than Fury Road.
@Drake – Thanks, man! I can’t imagine a higher compliment, for a film critic.
The sequel isn’t bad, either. It’s a lot less coherent and it feels like a much smaller, more minor film but it’s still got a lot of really interesting stuff going on – and a much weirder sense of humor that kind of took me off-guard when I saw it.
@Jeff Baugh– you’ve made me excited to revisit Happy Feet. I saw it in 2006, thought it was fine but unspectacular and honestly haven’t given it much thought since. They Shoot Pictures doesn’t have it in the top 1000 of the 21st century. That doesn’t mean anything except for if it is as good as you say- it’s one of the most underrated films of the past 20 years.
@Drake – Oh, definitely. I think it’s completely self-assured in its weirdness and style, and actually takes a lot of the visual and narrative ideas that Miller experimented with in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome takes them further (with the exception of car stunts, of course). I also think it shows a slightly greater maturity as a filmmaker, because of that essential optimism I mentioned, which is also a big part of why Fury Road is such a masterpiece – and the fact that there’s a greater multiplicity of tones. There’s goofy humor, show-stopping dance numbers, family and societal drama, and the weird, epic grandeur of the second half that dabbles in bigger ideas, all working in complete synergy. It’s fantastic. This isn’t to downgrade The Road Warrior at all, because it’s definitely a major work (and one of my favorite films) and I think the two stand side-by-side in his filmography.
I also think there’s something fascinating in it’s place in Miller’s evolution as a filmmaker, because of how closely related it is in its visual and thematic DNA to Fury Road – there are a lot of the same ideas at play. In particular, it’s the first time in his films that the unpredictability of the environment itself plays a direct role in the narrative, which would later come to fruition in Fury Road, with the leopard seal and killer whale sequences, and the Blizzard storm which is like a mirror image of the Storm sequence from the latter film. It also, like Fury Road, deals directly with religion and the functions it serves (and what it can do to people) – and to a similar, albeit more optimistic, outcome. There’s so many close similarities between both films that I wonder which movie had these ideas first actually, since they both began development at the same time. But then, Fury Road’s storyboard-script was finished first – but Happy Feet came out first. So, it’s anyone’s guess!
Also, thanks so much for the kind words!
@Jeff Baugh – thanks for visiting the site and the comment here. Well I’m not going to call anyone as articulate as you crazy.We’re on the same page about Fury Road dwarfing them all but really? You think Happy Feet is on par with Mad Max 2 — or The Road Warrior? Can’t follow you on that one. I’m not as in love with the 1979 original or Thunderdome and don’t dislike Babe, Happy Feet or Lorenzo but I think there’s a big gulf there between Road Warrior and Happy Feet
Call me crazy, but I’ve always rated Lorenzo’s Oil, Babe: Pig In The City and Happy Feet just as highly as the original Mad Max films in Miller’s oeuvre – they’re all brilliant for different reasons. Lorenzo’s Oil is a humanist chamber-room medical drama with the visceral kineticism of a horror movie, Babe: Pig In The City is filled to the brim with fairy-tale poetry, subversive ideas and moments of deepy-felt sadness and humanity (for talking animals, I mean). Then there’s Happy Feet, which I genuinely believe is the best commercially-released animated film of the last thirty years – and, without which Fury Road’s visual aesthetic probably wouldn’t exist. It’s just an intense synergy of old-school Golden Age Disney storytelling (like Bambi or Pinocchio, which Miller calls one of his favorite films) and Martin Rosen’s magic realism animal fables, shot through with Miller’s characteristic myth-making, and examinations of religion, tribes trying to survive in a barren wasteland (two elements in particular it shares with Fury Road but it’s a lot more optimistic), conservation of the environment, and even a pretty ample “first contact” metaphor hailing from his time working on Contact. And of course, his very Australian sense of humor is very present throughout, along with the best singing and dancing you’ll see on screen anywhere, filmed in the same headlong style as one of his chase scenes (which the film also has). With the whole film being computer-generated, Miller’s control of the subjective camera and environmental mis-en-scene are at their best here, something he’d been grappling with since the first Mad Max, and which both carry over heavily into Fury Road.
Apologies for the rambling paragraph. I’ve written at length about it and the rest of Miller’s films professionally elsewhere (and I had an editor then!), but – yeah, I think it’s pretty great.
Fury Road dwarfs them all, however. It’s just a monumental achievement and is sure to become the new standard for action filmmaking and pure cinema in the coming decades, in the same way that The Road Warrior was previously.
fury road is near perfect. anyways, how do you feel about 1) watching movies fully including credits and 2) watching movies on phones
@m It is near perfect isn’t? I can’t wait to revisit. Including credits? Hmmm. I assume you mean the end credits? Not usually. Do you? And I’ve never watched a movie on a phone and really have no desire to. How about you?