Another green world: The Mad Max series

In terms of world cinema, no other Australian film, or set of films, has been as influential as the Mad Max series. The international impact of the Mad Max trilogy differs from that of contemporaneous Australian features in that its reputation is located in its ‘complete mastery’ of the action genre, in its ‘sheer technical virtuosity and aggressively decadent vitalism’. This chapter examines the Mad Max trilogy and its belated fourth instalment, Mad Max: Fury Road, in order to challenge conservative accounts of sequelisation and advance an understanding of cinematic remaking in the first decades of the new millennium. Fury Road is characterised by a strategy of repetition with difference, rearticulating the Mad Max myth to exhibit a productive pull, or tension, in the series between continuous movement and the assemblage of its fragments. The film’s unprecedented near clean sweep of ‘technical’ Academy Awards is typically attributed to Miller’s authorial vision and ‘creative courage’.