The new Mad Max: Fury Road trailer is a paean to the post-apocalypse

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Mad-Max-Comic-Con-Signing-Art

Over the weekend, we saw some incredible trailers come out of Comic Con 2014, including the new Sin City and The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies trailer.

But if you ask me, the best trailer to come out of Comic Con was easily the trailer to the new Mad Max movie. Starring Tom Hardy as the titular character, Fury Road‘s trailer is so incredible… well, you just have to see it for yourself.

Some stray observations:

• It’s hard to tell where Fury Road fits into the timeline established by the previous trilogy. In the original Mad Max movies, it’s strongly implied that the post-apocalypse only becomes a nuclear one between the second and third movies… but by then, Max has already lost his V-8 Interceptor, which we can clearly see in the trailer. But we know Fury Road probably happens after some sort of nuclear incident, because there’s a two-headed lizard at the beginning.

• The most obvious guess would be that Fury Road is some sort of prequel to the Road Warrior that retcons the nuclear war that happens between the second and third movies to one that happens right after the first. That’s fine: most people consider the Mad Max films to happen after a nuclear apocalypse. But if that’s the case, why does Max still have his Interceptor by the time of the Road Warrior? It looks like it gets trashed pretty good in Fury Road, although I suppose it could be recovered.

• One of the things that makes the Mad Max movies so good is that they are about more than road wars and post-apocalyptic scavengers. In the first film, Max is a conscientious police officer who abandons his duty after losing his wife and child to take revenge on the road gang who murdered them. By the second film, he has chosen to go into the wasteland as a scavenger, but he can never really let go of the fact that he’s a good man, no matter how much he wants to. In The Road Warrior, Max once again opts to become the protector of both a community (the people of the Oil Refinery) and a child (the Feral Kid). And in Beyond Thunderdome, Max’s instincts as a protector of children once again come to the forefront when he refuses to kill Blaster in the Thunderdome when discovering he has “the mind of a child,” or when he leads the tribe of children in the film to safety.

• One aspect of Max’s character that Miller has never touched upon, though, is that of Max as a husband and a protector of women. If I had to guess, I think this is what Fury Road is really about. The ladies in white fleeing across the desert in the Fury Road trailer are called “The Wives” and the plot hinges, apparently, upon Imortan Joe (the scary guy with the skull mask) looking to recover his brides after they run away with the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Given that director George Miller has already indicated that a sequel called Mad Max: Furiosa is coming, it seems likely that Max and Furiousa may be destined for one another… at least for a time.

Mad Max: Fury Road comes out in May 2015. Obviously, I can’t wait.

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