The Mad Max timeline will be troublesome to decipher. There are contradictions, retcons, and free connections because the franchise continues in addition to a 30-year hole between the third and fourth films wherein the primary character is recast from Mel Gibson to Tom Hardy. Mad Max: Fury Street featured a prequel comedian that reset many features of the timeline whereas that includes parts, just like the automobiles used, that don’t match with what was beforehand established. Nonetheless, acknowledging these inconsistencies, it’s nonetheless doable to map out a normal Mad Max timeline throughout the 4 films, and the prequel movie Furiosa.
Sequence creator George Miller has addressed these retcons, saying that the unique intention for the fourth movie was to have Gibson return to play an outdated, grizzled Max. As an alternative, the model of Mad Max: Fury Street that was finally launched to common acclaim is form of a reboot, form of a sequel, and form of a retelling. That ambiguous standing turns the entire Mad Max story into extra of a legend than a strict, linear story. Framed this manner, a Mad Max timeline will be created throughout all 4 Mad Max films by every in flip and bearing in mind the latest modifications which were made.
The unique Mad Max, which was launched in 1979, opens with the caption, “A number of years from now.” That, and a chunk of graffiti on a highway signal dated December 1984, places the occasions of the primary movie squarely within the mid-80s, almost certainly 1985. On the time the story begins, Australia — together with the remainder of the world — has been thrown right into a social and financial breakdown because of warring across the Persian Gulf, which causes a dramatic drop-off in oil manufacturing. The shortage of gas sparks a world monetary collapse, with numerous international locations declaring martial regulation to maintain order.
On this timeline, violent highway gangs have taken over the highways of Australia, solely stored in test by the officers of the MFP (Essential Power Patrol), which features a younger “Mad” Max Rockatansky. In contrast to the opposite films within the franchise, some semblance of society nonetheless existed with regulation enforcement and shops nonetheless working and the world was secure sufficient that Max and his household even go on a highway journey trip, albeit one which ends in tragedy. It’s also value noting there was nonetheless greenery and never simply an empty wasteland.
Over the course of the primary of the Mad Max films, the younger officer’s spouse and youngster are brutally murdered by certainly one of these highway gangs, sending him on a mission of vengeance; he hunts down every member in his trademark interceptor and kills them one after the other. By the movie’s finish, it’s clear that the world is in tough form however {that a} semblance of order nonetheless exists. On the very least, a visual divide stays between the wasteland and what stays of civilization.
Mad Max 2: The Street Warrior takes place about three years after the tip of Mad Max, setting it within the late Eighties. That is the place Miller’s retcons begin to get a bit complicated. Within the unique timeline, The Street Warrior‘s story precedes the eventual world nuclear battle, and the wasteland as proven within the film is simply the results of additional decay and societal breakdown, not the aftermath of nuclear winter.
Within the Mad Max: Fury Street prequel comics, nonetheless, that is modified, and the nuclear battle takes place between the primary and second movies. Whatever the timeline, the impact is similar: society has continued to interrupt down considerably in only a few brief years because the finish of Mad Max, particularly within the Australian wasteland the place Max now lives and travels round in his interceptor looking for gasoline.
There are types of civilization left, together with a peaceable tribe of folks that Max finally ends up becoming a member of. The film additionally sees the rise in warlords who will play a bigger position within the franchise going ahead. The Humungus runs a crew of bandits seeking to take the gasoline from the weaker communities organising the theme of this new world wherein the robust and cruel have taken management by brute pressure.