Country:
Australia
Recognizable Faces:
Mel Fuckin' Gibson
Directed By:
George Miller
Netflix Canada has quickly earned a reputation among film buffs, for being an inferior product to his American counterpart. The selection of movies is small and the quality of the material varies from Akira Kurosawa to Uwe Boll. And there is quite a few Boll movies there. My fellow film/video games buffs will agree with me that a single Uwe Boll flick is one too many. A man thorn in between his love for video games and his misanthropic views of the world should never be allowed near a camera. If we can keep that from happening in the future, Uwe's passage on the planet will have not been meaningless. Sometimes Netflix can teach me a thing or two though. Take the Mad Max franchise. I am not the most familiar with the series that turned Mel Gibson into a superstar. I thought The Road Warrior was the first movie of the series. I had obviously overlooked this Australian gem that pulled Hollywood's favorite Jesus freak out of the acting gutter, just in time for the eighties.
It's a very different movie from the rest of the series, where Max Rockatansky (shit, I didn't even know he had a family name) is a goodie two-shoes cop turning rogue in a futuristic Australia, overrun by a gang of criminal bikers. Please remark that when I say "criminal", it's with a constraint of realism and the lack of a better adjective. These guys look like a bunch of ubiquitous nutters that have nothing better to do than follow Max and his family across Australia and torment the shit out of them. They are boogeymen in motorcycle apparel. Anyway, the sole point of their existence is that in the lawless future, the fight in between good and evil happens on the road. It makes sense when the bulk of your movie is organized around car chases. Mad Max is one of those movies that pretends that what you drive and how you drive it defines you as a person. I'd take offense to this kind of mentality if this wasn't an awesomely dated piece of cinema, filmed with surprising creativity.
While I'm not well versed in Australian politic, the worldwide success of Mad Max and its subsequent Americanization. It was the dawn of the Reagan years, where the conflict with Russia winded down and the U.S felt invincible. The menace was still there, but the "good guys" were in a stronger position than ever. Of course, that lead to eight years of demented republicanisms that changed the country forever, but at the dawn of those years, as the reign of goodie two-shoes president Jimmy Carter was ending, power and freedom were two images that the American (and the Occidental in general, let's not point the finger) were craving. Mad Max establishes that ideal of strength and order, a world where justice and good can have meaning despite the state of chaos. Hell, maybe Mel Gibson was doomed from the start to be that righteous avenger. Josie said it best: "This guy played the same part for all this life, no wonder why he believes it so much now"
Mad Max was shot with the highest ideals of Hollywoodian glory in mind and it achieved everything it aimed for over the eighties. It turned Mel Gibson into the superstar that he is today, it invented an imaginary wasteland, humanoid bad guys and a few righteous defenders of the "old world" values. I'm ready to forgive the original movie for contributing to Mel Gibson's plethora of mental diseases because it's a lovely piece of seventies film making. It has one foot in Sergio Leone's direction style (wide angle shots, minimalistic yet effective use of soundtrack, use of travelling rather than fast paced editing), unconventional angles, etc. It's also plagued by severely bad acting and a simplistic plot that brings everything back to the good versus evil mentality. None of the characters really have a personality further than the value they are supposed to represent. It would be hard to take seriously in the theaters today, but the grainy footage, the cheesy keyboard and every factor that makes this movie dated makes it even more flavorful on a T.V screen on a Sunday afternoon.
Part of the feeling of fun and extreme satisfaction I had watching the original Mad Max came from the knowledge that humanity has outgrown that simplistic vision of the world. That globalization has grown on us so much in the last fifteen years that we came to a clear understanding that "us good, them evil" is not a valid way to think about things anymore. People are not necessarily evil because they ride motorcycles, pray Allah (pray at all) or have different political opinions than me. I had a few hearty laughs while watching Mad Max. Some of its most dramatic aspects took a different meaning over time. It's a movie that takes itself seriously, but time took on itself to bring it back to its rightful place. Watch it as a memento of a time passed, with your friends, an open mind and a gameplan to watch the corniest stuff cinema had to offer at the dawn of the eighties and you will be satisfied.
SCORE: 80%
It's a very different movie from the rest of the series, where Max Rockatansky (shit, I didn't even know he had a family name) is a goodie two-shoes cop turning rogue in a futuristic Australia, overrun by a gang of criminal bikers. Please remark that when I say "criminal", it's with a constraint of realism and the lack of a better adjective. These guys look like a bunch of ubiquitous nutters that have nothing better to do than follow Max and his family across Australia and torment the shit out of them. They are boogeymen in motorcycle apparel. Anyway, the sole point of their existence is that in the lawless future, the fight in between good and evil happens on the road. It makes sense when the bulk of your movie is organized around car chases. Mad Max is one of those movies that pretends that what you drive and how you drive it defines you as a person. I'd take offense to this kind of mentality if this wasn't an awesomely dated piece of cinema, filmed with surprising creativity.
While I'm not well versed in Australian politic, the worldwide success of Mad Max and its subsequent Americanization. It was the dawn of the Reagan years, where the conflict with Russia winded down and the U.S felt invincible. The menace was still there, but the "good guys" were in a stronger position than ever. Of course, that lead to eight years of demented republicanisms that changed the country forever, but at the dawn of those years, as the reign of goodie two-shoes president Jimmy Carter was ending, power and freedom were two images that the American (and the Occidental in general, let's not point the finger) were craving. Mad Max establishes that ideal of strength and order, a world where justice and good can have meaning despite the state of chaos. Hell, maybe Mel Gibson was doomed from the start to be that righteous avenger. Josie said it best: "This guy played the same part for all this life, no wonder why he believes it so much now"
Mad Max was shot with the highest ideals of Hollywoodian glory in mind and it achieved everything it aimed for over the eighties. It turned Mel Gibson into the superstar that he is today, it invented an imaginary wasteland, humanoid bad guys and a few righteous defenders of the "old world" values. I'm ready to forgive the original movie for contributing to Mel Gibson's plethora of mental diseases because it's a lovely piece of seventies film making. It has one foot in Sergio Leone's direction style (wide angle shots, minimalistic yet effective use of soundtrack, use of travelling rather than fast paced editing), unconventional angles, etc. It's also plagued by severely bad acting and a simplistic plot that brings everything back to the good versus evil mentality. None of the characters really have a personality further than the value they are supposed to represent. It would be hard to take seriously in the theaters today, but the grainy footage, the cheesy keyboard and every factor that makes this movie dated makes it even more flavorful on a T.V screen on a Sunday afternoon.
Part of the feeling of fun and extreme satisfaction I had watching the original Mad Max came from the knowledge that humanity has outgrown that simplistic vision of the world. That globalization has grown on us so much in the last fifteen years that we came to a clear understanding that "us good, them evil" is not a valid way to think about things anymore. People are not necessarily evil because they ride motorcycles, pray Allah (pray at all) or have different political opinions than me. I had a few hearty laughs while watching Mad Max. Some of its most dramatic aspects took a different meaning over time. It's a movie that takes itself seriously, but time took on itself to bring it back to its rightful place. Watch it as a memento of a time passed, with your friends, an open mind and a gameplan to watch the corniest stuff cinema had to offer at the dawn of the eighties and you will be satisfied.
SCORE: 80%
