I remember in the first film, things were still semi civilized. Max even began as a cop, there are vacation spots, men earning their living in an honest way.
But in this sequel there's nothing anymore, a desolate completely devoid of any reason. Did they explain why the change of scenery? Did Max come to scavenge on a different place?
For the record, though, I prefer the second setting.
Society is ending in the first one. It's the last leg of what could be called civilization. Resources are running out, humanity is panicking and willing to do things they weren't a few years ago. In this one? Civilization is GONE. No more resources, government, cities, etc.
shareI recently saw a trailer for a movie called The Misfits. It is loaded with action scenes and it is starring Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Chung, and Tim Roth. It looks super fun and I cannot wait to watch it!
shareIt literally explains it at the beginning with the narration.
shareI just last night saw some behind the scenes stuff where George Miller's writing partner Terry Hayes explained exactly what happened.
In the original script for Mad Max 1, it was set in a major city, Melbourne or Sydney, I forget what he said. It was supposed to take place in the present. But shooting in the city would have been far more expensive than they could afford, so they went out into the boondocks and shot in and around old buildings, a lot of which were abandoned. It was purely out of necessity, but they ended up leaning into it by saying "In the near future..." and letting it seem like society had started to fall apart somehow. How? They didn't say, because they didn't know, because they hadn't put the slightest amount of thought into it. It wasn't important to their story about a young cop losing his wife and baby to a violent biker gang.
When they started writing Mad Max 2, they decided to go full bore on the post apocalypse aspect. 'OK, so how should we say the world ended?' Nuclear war was too trite and cliche. One of them remembered this incident during the big OPEC oil embargo in the mid 1970s. The gas shortage got so bad, all of the gas stations in an entire city had to shut down for a full day. 10 hours into the shutdown, there was a shooting at a gas station. (Gotta remember, a shooting in Australia in the mid 1970s would have been freakishly rare.) So their idea was, "If all it takes is 10 hours for people to go berserk in a gas crisis, imagine what people will do if the crisis goes on for 10 weeks? Or 10 months, or 10 bloody years!" They decided the big cities would just become madhouses of non-stop murder and mayhem and everyone would probably flee to more rural areas just to survive. And voila, next thing you know you get the Humongous as the new ruler of the Wasteland.
EDIT: Reading the original script again for the first time in years, it actually begins in an abandoned city, Max is scavenging for loot and he stumbles across Wez and the gang, and they go on a big chase through the streets. They drive him out into the desert, then it picks up as the movie we all know. Guess they still didn't want to spend the gobs of money that would have been required to shoot in the city.
Cool story.
share