With plans to go see Furiosa a week from now for my birthday, I figured I'd go back and watch one of the original movies, and among them, chose to see the one that is generally considered the best. I've "seen" the original Mad Max, though this was on mute in a bar while socializing, so it doesn't really count. The Road Warrior was reputed to be where the series really developed its post-apocalyptic setting and aesthetic, and that certainly seems to be on display.
I know this movie is beloved by many, but I came away from the experience thinking quite resolutely that Fury Road is the better film. With the glut of legacy sequels coming out of Hollywood these days, Fury Road was a rare case where the artistic intent and integrity was fully maintained (it didn't hurt that it had the same director, but we've seen cases of brilliant filmmakers returning to their popular franchises and not really sticking the landing, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
I think a few things benefit Fury Road (a movie that, shockingly to my millennial mind, is already nearly a decade old) such as improvements on special effects, a seemingly larger budget, and a George Miller who I think has continued evolving as a person.
It's hard not to notice that Lord Humungus, and particularly his primary war dog Wez are kind of gross homophobic caricatures. The movie has a very 1982 attitude toward homosexuals, which boils down to "violent thrill-killers and perverts." In the early part of the movie, Wez travels everywhere with what is plainly his lover, a man with long blonde hair, and when this lover is killed as Wez ducks the Feral Child's razor-sharp metal boomerang (the movie is very Australian) it hits this (as far as I know) unnamed man, filling an already psychotically violent character with a particular rage. There's a lot of BDSM imagery with Humungus' gang, and, well... the movie was not exactly ahead of its time on these issues.
The plot is simple, which clearly serves this franchise well. Max encounters a man with an ultralight helicopter and, as tends to happen in the wastes, gets into a violent confrontation that the "Gyro Captain" (that's gyro like gyroscope, not the delicious Greek pita sandwich) in which the Captain offers to take Max to a settlement where a group of people have been able to refine gasoline. They travel there and discover that a gang of raiders (the Humungus) have been attacking the place, trying to steal its resources. Max witnesses some of the residents trying to flee, only to be caught by the raiders and subjected to rape and murder. Max attempts to take a survivor back to the settlement in the hopes of earning some fuel for his troubles, but the man dies, and so instead he has to prove himself by helping to fight off another raid.
The leader of the settlement, Pappagallo, has been planning an evacuation, where they're going to go north to a place that is supposedly less violent and dangerous. To get his car back with some fuel, Max offers to bring back a truck that he had found on the road, giving us one of the big car-chase setpieces as he brings it back to the settlement. With his car returned, despite making a connection with these people, he decides to head off on his own - only for Wez to catch up with him and wreck his car (the fact that both here and in Fury Road we see Max's V8 Interceptor destroyed really reinforces the hazy approach to continuity). While Max escapes getting killed, his dog doesn't, and it's the Gyro Captain who rescues him and takes him back to the settlement.
And that brings us to the climactic set piece - Max drives the truck with the fuel (supposedly) while the other residents escape riding in the opposite direction. There's a giant fight on the highway in which characters who we like even if we don't have names for them get killed, but ultimately it all ends when Lord Humungus drives straight into the truck while Wez is on its hood, smashing both remaining headliner villains to smithereens.
Again, we can see how Immortan Joe of Fury Road feels like an evolution of Lord Humungus. The latter wears a steel hockey mask at all times, but is otherwise clad in skimpy fetish gear. But we see a shot of the back of his head, where his hair seems to have fallen out and he's got weird, pulsing veins. We never see his face, but what little hair is left is stringy. He also has a vague German accent, and notably pulls a german pistol with a scope from a box that has an S.S. skull symbol in it, suggesting that perhaps he's got some connection to Naziism, or at least likes the aesthetics. But the way he hides his face (and we never see it) suggests perhaps some freaking deformity. It's never 100% confirmed that nuclear war has happened - in fact, it almost seems as if the "wasteland" where the story takes place is not necessarily how the rest of the world looks (though given that the epilogue tells of how the residents of the settlement become the first of the Great Northern Tribe, one has to imagine there's pretty broad societal collapse).
As with Fury Road, Max's experience amounts to essentially a couple of really tough days in a life full of tough days, and while the supporting characters go on to evidently live in peace and start to rebuild society, they don't see Max again.
Given how uniquely non-stop Fury Road is, it was a little surprising to me how little of the movie was car chases - which is not to say that it doesn't have its fair share. In fact, there are some big aesthetic parallels - both Fury Road and Road Warrior largely involve fighting atop a giant truck being swarmed by an army of evil raiders.
I do think that an interesting contrast between the two movies is that Immortan Joe feels like he commands significantly more power. He's a member of a triad of local warlords, and probably the most powerful of the three, with a fortified settlement of his own. Lord Humungus has a big gang, but it's not clear if the gang really has a permanent home at all, and instead seem to be just parked near the refinery for most of the movie.
I don't think this is a flaw - the stakes are still high even if the whole thing is just on a smaller scale. But I do think that while this movie takes things much farther into the post-apocalyptic world (the original movie arguably not being post-apocalyptic at all, and just scuzzy and crime-ridden the same way that The Warriors portrays 1970s New York) by the time we get to Fury Road it feels like the old world has been so completely swept away that something else is emerging to take its place.
Max's lesson in this movie, if he can be said to have one, is learning to accept help and partnership - exactly the thing whose breakdown has allowed this anarchic wasteland to exist. That Pappagallo and his people are even attempting to rebuild something resembling a society tells us they're the good guys, while Lord Humungus seems in it for the short-term gain of raiding the place and taking what they've produced.
I haven't seen Beyond Thunderdome, but skipping ahead to Fury Road, it feels like we're now looking at the next steps: Immortan Joe has, in a way, rebuilt society, but he's carrying over the worst aspects of the civilization that came before - exploitation, demagoguery, and patriarchy. We can hope, perhaps, that at the end of that movie, Furiosa will arise as a just ruler who will actually work to cultivate and uplift the people who depend on her. I don't think we get as much of an epilogue in Fury Road, but my general sense is that, for all their desolation and violence, these movies are ultimately optimistic, showing humanity climbing their way back from the abyss. It's just that not everyone is going to make it, and Max's tragedy is that he can't really walk into that better world to come.
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