FYI: There are some original movies spoilers here, but most probably won’t ruin your enjoyment of them.
Post-apocalypse settings in pop culture come from many different origins: nuclear war, viral outbreaks, global natural disasters, robot uprisings, zombies, vampires, alien invasions, and just a general societal breakdown. Of course, societal breakdown is usually the result of any of the above causes.
How people change or don’t change to survive after society collapses during the aftermath is what always interested me about these stories. For instance, I’m not a zombie story fan in general but I love The Walking Dead because of how it explores how it affects the survivors.
However, the Mad Max movies are more about the extremes in what’s left of the world than changes in small groups of survivors. So extreme that, when I watched them growing up, they seemed to be set on a different planet. Awesome vehicles that looked like mutated, frankensteined forms of regular cars, trucks, and motorcycles and extreme costumes created with the same scavenged, savage sensibilities.
There is a visceral thrill in watching these movies, but as I grew up, I started appreciating them in a different way. The settings may be different, but I recognized the similarities between the Mad Max films and great western stories. Mad Max may get around on his supped-up Interceptor instead of horse, but he’s much like a wandering gunslinger in a frontier-like post-apocalyptic world.
The Max Rockatansky from the first movie—Mad Max—is a hero cop in a police force that seems to be one of the last things keeping the lawless chaos born out of the fallout of nuclear war from the remaining civilization in the area. He’s also a family man. It’s the loss of this family that ultimately pushes him into “madness”—causing him to give up his own humanity and morality to ruthlessly take down the gang who went after his family.
At the beginning of the next two movies—Mad Max 2: Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome—he’s no longer a hero. Instead, he’s a fierce survivor, travelling alone, looking out only for himself. He wants no ties to anybody or any place, just works to get what he needs to keep surviving—which is mostly gasoline, a desperately fought for resource in this new world.
Like many movie gunslingers with a tragic past, he finds himself in situations where the peril of good or innocent people forces him to remember his humanity. Instead of looking out for himself, he ends up selflessly works to protect the people who still believe in hope for a better world or chance for a new start for a peaceful human civilization. Something he may be too broken to ultimately be a part of.
There’s not much in the way post-apocalypse exposition in the first movie, or much plot in the second, but the third one—Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome—is really where the character and post-apocalyptic world best show the series’ western roots. There’s a bleak trading community—Bartertown—built around laws and rules that give it some form of civilization. Trying to get back what’s stolen from him, Max ultimately comes into conflict with who runs Bartertown.
This movie still has the extremes the franchise is known for, but is grounded with better world building, more fleshed-out characters, better plot, and less chase-centric action. The writing is greatly improved, there are many memorable lines and characters, and the Thunderdome is one of the best action concepts in movies (“Two men enter, one man leaves!”).
Each movie is pretty self-contained. I highly recommend the last one, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It’s not just my favorite of the series, but one of my favorite movies of all time.
I can’t wait to see what series creator and director George Miller does with the reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road.
Bad Speler. Good Writer. 
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