The world of Mad Max 2

June 24, 2005 10:59 AM

Can anyone enlighten me as to a more detailed account of the premise behind Mad Max 2?

I'm looking maybe for an interview with the writers or something indepth on how the world as it is presented in the movies came to be. Had a look but couldn't find much...thought i'd throw it to the metafilter crowd

posted by mikeanegus to society & culture (11 comments total)

Well... did you see the first movie?
posted by jjg at 11:13 AM on June 24, 2005

I'm guessing you are looking for a synopsis of what happened between I and II, no?
posted by Pollomacho at 11:21 AM on June 24, 2005

We don't know. We're never told what went wrong, only that it was major and slow-acting. In Mad Max, things are delapitated but almost normal, by Road Warrior, the social order is gone.
posted by bonehead at 11:22 AM on June 24, 2005

The wikipedia entries for Mad Max and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior give some info on the backstory.
posted by isotope at 11:23 AM on June 24, 2005

To answer the question implied by your tags, just because there's a lot of wrangling over gasoline doesn't mean the story is based on peak oil.
posted by jjg at 11:33 AM on June 24, 2005

We're never told what went wrong...

Wha..? Sure we are are, right at the beginning:
"Two great warrior tribes went to war" over the black fuel; the machine sputtered, and stopped; the leaders talked and talked...

I thought some versions omitted that prolog (but the IMDb doesn't confirm), maybe that's the one you saw?
posted by Rash at 11:56 AM on June 24, 2005

There was also a comment by one of the characters in the first along the lines of "there goes the last of the V8 interceptors." This could imply rising gas prices, not necessarily due to peak oil. Gas was probably on everyone's mind in 79.
posted by 6550 at 12:36 PM on June 24, 2005

I was never sure if it was fuel economy awareness or if the country was just getting so run down that they just couldn't make high performance engines (V8 or otherwise) anymore.

That IMBd link was pretty interesting, I hadn't known that Mad Max held the cost:earnings record for so long before losing out to Blair Witch. I wonder if Blair Witch is going to have the staying power of Mad Max or if MM if eventually overtake BW again on earnings.
posted by Mitheral at 1:06 PM on June 24, 2005

To overtake Blair Witch on earnings ratio, Mad Max would have to make 1.8 billion dollars, so it could take a while even if BW never makes another penny. (MM made 333 times the production cost, BW 6000 times.)
posted by teg at 1:46 PM on June 24, 2005

You mean you didn't read this week's TheOnion?

The relevant news article is here. I think the Onion had a computer glitch and accidentally printed this issue 50 years earlier than scheduled.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:41 AM on June 25, 2005

Wha..? Sure we are are, right at the beginning:
"Two great warrior tribes went to war" over the black fuel; the machine sputtered, and stopped; the leaders talked and talked...

Not really. The initial voiceover in MM2/Road Warrior only says that there was a war, and that fuel stopped flowing. I assure you that in the event of a global thermonuclear war utterly unrelated to diminishing oil reserves, gasoline will be hard to come by, at least for a while. There's more backstory embedded in MM3.

I don't think there's any consistent backstory, really. In Mad Max, society broke down for one reason or another. There's nothing in the film, as I recall, to suggest that gasoline is in short supply -- the closest scene I can think of is Toecutter's gang stealing gas from a tanker, but that's just 'cuz they're cheap hoods.

By the time MM2 rolled around, Miller and Hayes had decided they wanted a story about oil, so they jiggered the backstory to fit with some sort of war resulting in no more oil.

Then by the time MM3 rolled around, they decided that, well, really they wanted a movie about how you can't hug children with nuclear arms, so -- Hey! -- now the big thing was a nuclear war.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm leading up to is that even if you find some interview with backstory like that, it's all just stuff they made up afterward that more-or-less fits the movies they'd already made (or, retcon).
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:25 AM on June 25, 2005