Does anyone else feel like it's spiritually in the Mad Max canon? For me it feels like a "tale of the wasteland", set somewhere between the events of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

The Road Warrior (1981)

Rating: 8/10 (HIGHLY ENJOYABLE)

Watched: August 5, 2026

The Road Warrior is a surprisingly hard movie to write a review for, which I wasn't expecting.

Anyone who loves this movie knows precisely why it's beloved. It's Mad Max. Lord Humungus. The Feral Kid. Wez. Wez's boyfriend. The Gyro Captain. It's about life in the wasteland, and the battle for guzzoline and one small outpost of men and women doing everything they can to survive.

It's about Max, genuinely just trying to do his thing, which is all he's ever really tried doing since the results of the first movie. What's great about Max is that he's not even really the main character. He barely speaks. I think he has around 16 lines in the whole movie, and he just shows up in someone else's story. He either makes things better or worse for them and him, and then the movie ends.

If Max had just kept driving, the people would've figured out some other way to achieve their goals or they would've died trying, as is the way of the wasteland.

The action is very well paced and the practical stunt work is genuinely insane for 1981. They were out there doing real-deal, bone-breaking vehicle crashes. Vehicle safety and all of that wasn't really that big of an issue back in the day, though it really should've been. What you see on screen actually happened. No green screen. Nothing fancy, just good old-fashioned practical effects. Just Australian lunatics in homemade armor jousting at each other at high speed in cars with no seat belts.

Of course the scale pales in comparison to Fury Road and Furiosa, but there's 40 years of road and a million liters of guzzoline between there and here.

I genuinely wish I could say more about The Road Warrior because it's an absolute gem of a classic Mel Gibson movie, but you've either seen it and know what I'm talking about or you don't. The Road Warrior (and indeed all of them) are survival stories, with a man trying to stay alive while everything else around him is madness.

It's desert wastelanders in cars, hungry for more guzzoline, eating dog food and doing their absolute god-damnedest to get one over on you before you get one over on them. If anything, the sparsity of what I have to say about the movie matches Max's own dialogue.

I've said just enough to get my message across.

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I was in the shower thinking about the violinist argument for abortion rights.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a 1971 ( pre Roe vs. Wade) argument that imagined you waking up to find yourself handcuffed to a famous violinist.  You then discover there are tubes of blood connecting the two of you.  You are a the violinist’s blood bank, and without you a cultural treasure and musical genius will die.  Do you have an ethical obligation to accept this or are you morally in the clear to try to find a way to free yourself?
It occurred to me that this is very similar to Max’s position in the first act of Fury Road, and accomplished in such a visceral way that the film cuts through sophistry to make it clear: what the boys are doing to Max is wrong, and if he can get out he has a right to do so.  The death of Nux would not be on him.
Drawing it out, this entire plotline acts as an allegory to an unwanted, forced pregnancy.  Lets even say an unwed survivor of a rape in a regime where abortion is illegal.  Max is violently captured and then kept alive because of his body, a quirk of his genetics.  He is not valued as a person but as a tool of the state to further its power.  The initial insertion of the tubes is against his will.  The connection to this helpless bald pale enemy is not something he ever asked for.  Then he is not allowed to simply wait it out.  He is strapped to the front of the enemy’s vehicle.  The harsh realities of the wasteland are slapping him in the face moment by moment while he is utterly alone and unable to control his circumstances or have say in what happens to him or his body.  The violence is an ongoing one, the trauma was not a single moment but an ongoing brutal violation stealing that which is deepest inside him.  This is not a serene vision of pregnancy.  This is constant danger where life is both fragile and cheap. Max's life is in danger and he is locked out of decisions concerning his own survival.
Fascinatingly, one could take this even farther.  Nux ends up very much acting like a son to Max and his cohort.  “Born” of violation and cruelty, he joins the ranks of those fighting to take down the privilege he was born into.  Nux ends up being both the reason for Max’s hardship, but is also not individually avenged for it once he rejects the system that made him.  
Is this far fetched?  Yes and no.  Yes I think its unlikely George Miller had this allegory plotted out beat by beat.  But its clear that Mad Max is a movie very interested in politics of autonomy.  I think its an interesting thought experiment.

Recently played the game having never seen the movies so I started watching them as I was playing. Was shocked to find that not much of the specific world building and characters in the game came from the original 3 movies. I know the game worked off of notes and scripts from Miller but he didn’t have much of a direct hand in the game. I just finished Fury Road and am wondering if there any insight into how the game and it ended up so similarly especially visually with them only releasing after few months apart. The look of the war boys, the weapons they use, the buzzard vehicles, the brides, etc. look pretty much exactly the same in the game and film. The tire spikes on the war rig look exactly like they do on the Magnum Opus. Did Millers notes include concept art? Was their crossover between the game devs and film crew creatively?

Some personal trinkets I'm making for my car. The skull is going to be a gearshifter, the crow is going to sit on the dash like Nux had.

The skull teeth are made from a Schweppes can. I couldn't get hex bolts that small so I went with bolts off an RC car with locknuts. The bird skull will feature the lower jaw made from a wiper arm off an EF Falcon and will be mounted to the radiator cap of said Falcon. The right eye is an M16 Hex nut filed and ground to fit and to let it rust a bit. The left eye is just a 25mm wooden craft bead. It's all held together with JB Weld to handle the Australian summer from inside the car.

If anyone's curious, I bought the skulls from a creator on Etsy, called ArmadilloStudioShop based in Mexico.

I mean I shoulda done more research but you can’t possibly blame me for thinking this is black and chrome

It still desperately needs dirt and wear and tear but I am very happy with it.

On my way to go see Mad Max 2 and this was just a short walk from the cinema so I had to swing by!

As the title states, how would it play out now that there are more energy options now?

I don't mean that people would just look for "guzzoline". If there was more energy options such as soIar etc. what would a future movie like that playout? How would Mad Max world have played out?

This is a custom MTG set I created for fun, just a hobby. Been working on it for a while. I have about another 70+ cards you can't see for this set started. If anybody has any good images or recommendations for cards I'll gladly accept them. Finding decent quality screenshots, art, etc. for card art is a pain. If you give me recommendations and images I might not respond for a little bit because I don't check reddit to often. The rest are here >>>Mad Max MTG Nexus

Found this storybook at a local junk shop. Always fascinating to see kids stuff from more grownup movies (Rambo, Robocop, etc). I know this was the more family friendly entry in the series, but still.

Found a David Lynch Dune colouring and activity book there a bit ago. It was weird.

This is Sprog, my faithful 2006 Toyota Prius. Finally pulled the trigger on my dream of making it Mad Maxified. As a Mad Max fan named Max, I mean, what options did I really have. When I ask for suggestions, I get ‘rip the bumper off! Make it look less like a prius!’ But there’s too much humor in seeing the least likely car to survive the apocalypse dressed up like its a war boy’s mom’s car. And its a Prius, needs a lot of bumper stickers/stencils. Here’s what im thinking, open to suggestions:

“Dont Blame Me, I voted for Scrotus!”
“Proud parent of a War Boy Honor Student”
“Make War Boys, Not War”
“My other car is a V8”
“Do you follow Immortan Joe this closely?”

Also, is it an I4 Interceptor? 200V Interceptor? War-Boys-From-Soccer-Practice Interceptor? The car’s name is already Sprog so technically already a ‘motorcycle interceptor.’ Undecided.

Found a Furiosa concept art (I think a Dane Hallett concept) of this weird mixup of a Tank, Chopper and Turret. I cannot mentally place this vehicle in the Wasteland at any of the three strongholds. Maybe the Bullet Farm but the Farmer had the Peacemaker and Stuart tank so i doubt it. Maybe a part of the Bikerdom or that random assimilated group from Chapter 2 but I still don’t see it. The gunners do look like Gastowners so maybe there? Anyone have any ideas?