He wants to get away, to be left alone with his pain and his memories, but at the same time he can’t stand aside and not help when he’s needed. But on the other, as we see in Fury Road, as well as the earlier films, the flame of who he once was still burns inside of him-he was a cop, a husband, a father, a good man-which is the part of him that won’t let him walk away from trouble. On one hand, he floats through this desolate existence, just surviving. In a ruined world already tearing itself apart, this was the last thing tethering Max to the remnants of civilization, and severing that final tie set him adrift, which we subsequently saw in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. In 1979’s Mad Max, Max, played by Mel Gibson, loses his wife and infant son to a vicious motorcycle gang headed by Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also plays the villain Immortan Joe in Fury Road). Mad is both on a quest to find himself, his better self, and outrun his past. This character type is also one with a past, and as you see, haunted by horrific visions, Max is certainly carrying around some rather hefty baggage with him as he wanders the sun-scorched wastes.
Hardy’s Max is certainly a throwback to this archetype, only this time around they’ve taken the whole strong-but-silent thing to crazy-ass extremes, and swapped out horses for customized battlewagons and war rigs.
Just as often, he’s a reluctant hero, one who doesn’t want to get involved initially, who only wants to look out for number one, but is moved by forces greater than himself to intervene. Post-apocalyptic movies, including the Mad Max family of films, often take their cues from the western genre, stories where the grim, stoic man-of-action arrives on the troubled scene and takes measures, usually violent, to rectify the situation.
0 kommentar(er)
