Mad Max

Marked essential, with a caveat most people are surprised by: this is not a post-apocalyptic film. There is no wasteland. There are courts, hospitals, a police force with uniforms and paperwork, a functioning coastal town and a man with a wife, a baby and a beach house. Society is fraying at the edges, the roads have been ceded to gangs, and nobody in authority can be bothered. The collapse happens between this film and the next one.

It cost almost nothing, somewhere around four hundred thousand Australian dollars, and the money is all on screen in one respect: the driving. George Miller was an emergency room doctor before he was a director, and he had spent years treating what happens to human bodies at speed on country roads. The film is built on that knowledge. The crashes are shot low and close, the vehicles are real, and the stunt work was done in conditions that would not be permitted now.

Structurally it is a revenge film with the revenge withheld until the last twenty minutes, and those twenty minutes are why the series exists. Max does not become a hero. He becomes something emptied out, and the leg-iron sequence at the end is as cruel as anything in the franchise.

One oddity worth knowing: the American release was dubbed with US accents because the distributor thought Australian ones would not travel. Watch it with the original audio.