FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024) - 5/24/2024
What is the Mad Max timeline?
There is something in the Mad Max universe that seems to be just as crazy as the stories and environments themselves, and that is the timeline. With the exception of the incredible new George Miller vehicle (pun intended), there really is not a coherent throughline between these five films. Part of that is great, because as I have talked about before, they can all kind of stand on their own, making any of them a great or at the very least, an entertaining barrier of entry into this world. But since we now have this prequel to Fury Road, I now want to try and piece together some sort of coherent timeline in a very incoherent world.
I believe these films do go in order, with the exception of Furiosa. Therefore the general layout will be like this:
Mad Max
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Mad Max: Fury Road
Now, there is reason to believe that Thunderdome might be last, because the main car Max uses - The Pursuit Special - appears in Fury Road and Furiosa but not Thunderdome. However, Miller issued a series of prequel comics to Fury Road, which pits Thunderdome as the third in the sequence of films. Still, there are inconsistencies between them, with some even having recurring characters, so I want to try and link them together.
We start with Mad Max, where in the near future - not dissimilar from A Clockwork Orange - there is still society, but gangs seem to be creeping in and causing anarchy. During this time period, there is still plenty of vegetation and water as we can see throughout the film. Max here, is a cop in this future trying to crush out these gangs and specifically comes across the devilish Toecutter, whom kills after Toecutter and his gang runs over his wife and son.
Then we move to Mad Max 2, where now that Max’s family has been killed, he wanders the wasteland looking to avenge his fallen family by taking out those who are evil. We can assume whatever climate atrocity mixed with nuclear war has fast tracked complete environmental disaster. This film came out two years after the original, but based on the desertification of the area, I’m going to assume this was at least five years into the future. Now, there is the Gyro Captain and a small child who end up heading the clan at the end of the film that go off into the north country.
In Thunderdome, we start with Max getting raided by Jedidiah, a pilot, and his young son. Jedidiah in this film, is the same actor as the Gyro Captain, although they claim not to be the same1. I think this man is the same captain, and because of years passing between them as well as faded memories, they may not exactly recognize each other. The Gyro Captain is Jedidiah who found out that living near Bartertown could help out his mechanical interests. During this film too, a young boy that is part of the child clan in the valley2 is painted in all white and obsessed with skulls. He looks like a young War Boy. I believe this kid comes from a different place than this plane crash the rest of the children come from because he does not talk and is wildly weirder and different than everyone else in the clan. This hints that he may have been a War Boy in training that somehow escaped and ended up with this group deep in the desert.
Now, we move on to Furiosa. This prequel is pretty self-explanatory and as I stated earlier, there are prequel comics that help build this world. However, over the 20 years that this happens, I think the Thunderdome may fall right before it for the War Boy theory stated before. Also, I think Furiosa does happen about 10 years after Thunderdome. Part of this is because of Immortan Joe. Now, because Joe in Fury Road is the same actor3 as Toecutter in Mad Max, Toecutter may have actually been saved and rehabilitated, hence all of this gear he has to keep him breathing and alive, plus he has the same hair. Toecutter reinvents himself as this general that takes control of the Citadel and then runs his empire from there, a place where previously a young War Boy runs away and finds a hovel of other youths in a canyon in the desert. Then the events of Furiosa happen followed by Fury Road.
Now, in Fury Road, we have a wildly different Max. Realistically, it is probably just the recasting of Mel Gibson for a lot of reasons I won’t get into here, seeing as how the Max credit is the same Max Rockatansky. But, let’s play around with this, shall we? So at the end of Mad Max 2, we learn the narrator is the young boy who is a wild child and doesn’t speak, but he does say that he never goes on to see Max again. I think that this young child was so enthralled by the man who saved him and his clan, that he decides that he, himself, will dawn the black leather and become a Max of his own, which he does over the next thirty years. This could be why the Pursuit Special is different in the last two films and why we have a different Max. In a future where names don’t matter, why can’t he have taken one from someone he admires in the belief that he will one day do the same for the crumbling world around him? Also, to go back to the Immortan Joe/Toecutter theory, right when Joe has his car crushed towards the end, we get the same eye-popping quick frame from the Joe accident that we do in the Toecutter accident in Mad Max.
Anyways, that’s my Mad Max timeline theory. It’s all over the place but so are these movies which fucking rule.
The son is different.
I do not think is part of the Green Place in Furiosa because 1. No adults 2. Different environment.
He’s not in Furiosa because the actor died in 2020.