Miller thrives on that feeling of disorientation, and whatever we pick up about the setting is learned entirely on the fly, amid the noise of shotgun blasts and souped-up, nitro-charged muscle cars and motorcycles. To experience Mad Max is to feel like you’ve slumbered like Rip Van Winkle and woken up in a future that’s terrifying and virtually unrecognizable, and the best you can do is survive on your wits. Here and in the sequels, Miller is trading a little coherence for chaos. There are clues everywhere to suggest that society has collapsed, but no explanation of what brought it to this place, only credits that deliver the chilling news that the end of the world as we know it is just a few years away and that it’s going to feature “Hugh Keays-Byrne as the Toecutter.” But revisiting the original Mad Max now, it’s remarkable how little interest Miller has in exposition or conventional world-building. Now that we’re 40 years and four movies into Miller’s Mad Max series, his vision of a near-future Australian no-man’s-land has been better defined and expanded, with the ravages of war and shortages in resources like fuel and food leading to mass anarchy and the emergence of various barbarians to fill the power vacuum.
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