Continuity within the Mad Max film collection is fairly complicated. It is perhaps onerous to consider, however the 40-year-old franchise spawned from a micro-budget Australian film about raiders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t even have probably the most coherent timeline. Furiosa, the full-speed-ahead newest movie within the collection, doesn’t clear something up, though it does have a selected timeline connection to its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Street. However we’ll do our greatest that will help you perceive it.
The primary essential factor to recollect about Mad Max’s timeline is that it kind-of-sort-of received rebooted. Fury Street, the fourth installment within the collection, was initially deliberate for manufacturing within the ’90s or early 2000s, with Mel Gibson returning to his central function as roving loner Max . Nevertheless, after quite a few delays, and quite a few situations of Mel Gibson being a horrible particular person in public, the film received an up to date script and a brand new Max — the a lot youthful Tom Hardy.
Picture: Warner Bros.
With the change in actors and in Max’s obvious age, the collection needed to be modified barely, too. So Fury Street is actually set in an alternate timeline from the unique motion pictures, the place key occasions occur at barely completely different instances. In Fury Street’s timeline, the nuclear annihilation of big parts of humanity occurred between the occasions of Mad Max and The Street Warrior, reasonably than after The Street Warrior, like they do within the authentic trilogy.
This feels particularly complicated provided that Furiosa’s first trailer says the film takes place 45 years after “the Collapse.” Technically, this implies the film in all probability takes place rather less than 45 years after the occasions of The Street Warrior. This doesn’t make a ton of sense when in comparison with the occasions of Fury Street, particularly if it’s the identical Max character.
Picture: Warner Bros.
However when you’re making an attempt to sq. that math both with the occasions of the unique Mad Max trilogy or with Fury Street, let me supply some useful recommendation: Don’t. It in all probability doesn’t make sense. Actually, the comedian books that got here out since Fury Street tried to suit its timeline again into the unique trilogy, and by no means received near succeeding.
And you recognize what? That’s OK.
Mad Max director, author, and creator George Miller, in his infinite knowledge, rightly determined with the discharge of Fury Street that possibly Max is an concept bigger than petty grievances like canon and continuity. Max is a fable and a legend, and as Miller himself stated, something that occurs to him is simply “an episode” in a tumultuous life, with no particular connection wanted. As he put it in a press convention for Fury Street:
All of the movies don’t have any strict chronology. It’s in all probability after Thunderdome, but it surely’s an episode within the lifetime of Max and this world. It’s principally an episode, and it’s us revisiting that world. I by no means wrote the story, any of the tales, with a chronological connection.
Furiosa isn’t any completely different, and that first trailer stated as a lot in its first few seconds. That is her Odyssey. She’s destined to develop into a fable, and myths are too essential to fret about precisely how the main points line up. We all know this can be a prequel as a result of it offers along with her childhood and younger maturity; we all know it spans 15 years of her life as a result of she tells us within the film itself that 15 years have handed since we first noticed her on display. However by way of precisely how a lot time passes between the top of Furiosa and the start of Fury Street… Miller isn’t involved with that, and we don’t must be both.
