Furiosa made me realize that this kind of storytelling, one that relies on worldbuilding and often prior-worldbuilding is the (or a) current way we approach movies. I mean pretty obvious considering the primacy of superhero movies, but worth accepting to better understand what's going on.
I've come to believe that one of the interesting aspects of the Mad Max movies is that often (not always) director George Miller makes them using the current popular language of cinema -- Mad Max and Road Warrior were Ozspoitation, Thunderdome (though admittedly not entirely his vision) was a Spielbergian blockbuster. Furiosa works wholehearted in the current vogue, building off and elaborating Fury Road. Not judging really, just observing. It's where we are now.
I found Fury Road's rough sketching of its immediate surroundings and setting, the implications of a backstory peeking out in the background but never focused on, far more effective than the explicit fill-in-the-blanks of Furiosa.
I fully enjoy both when done well. When the initial worldbuilding is thought-provoking and fun to theorize on, and the seuqels/prequels fill in the blanks in satisfying ways. The best example is Star Wars - "From a Certain Point of View" takes it so far as to give the trash compactor monster a backstory, and it turns out to be force sensitive. I loved it.
In a way The Mad Max movies remind me of the Zelda game series in that they'll have recurring characters and themes but aren't really hung up on canon and will cheerfully contradict each other.
Do they really contradict much? I've seen them all and I thought they fit together just fine. I just rewatched Fury Road, the first Mad Max, and Furiosa recently, while me and the girlfriend were looking for 4k/5.1 content to try out the sound system and tv on. Been a minute since I saw 2 and 3 but nothing jumps out at me from memory.
Well, the timeline of when the apocalypse happened is a bit weird -- like did it happen in the lifetime of Max himself or not? And is Max supposed to be exactly the same person in each movie? I'm not even talking about the actor change in Fury Road -- I mean in the first he's living in a grim near-future (but not destroyed) Australia, and the following movies present an ever more sophisticated post-apocalyptic society with their own cultures and traditions that would need time to evolve. It isn't even clear if the characters in the recent two even know about pre-war civilization. One of the trailers for Furiosa claims that it is set 70 years after the apocalypse. So how could she have met young Max in Fury Road? He'd be in his 90s at least.
The framing of most all of the Max Max movies is that they are stories being told by an unknown narrator. So any variation is fair game, I think. Unreliable narrators and such. In the context of the new movies, they've even created characters who have the job of remembering and telling the stories -- which is another really imaginative and compelling elaboration on what was merely framing in the earlier films.
I've come to believe that one of the interesting aspects of the Mad Max movies is that often (not always) director George Miller makes them using the current popular language of cinema -- Mad Max and Road Warrior were Ozspoitation, Thunderdome (though admittedly not entirely his vision) was a Spielbergian blockbuster. Furiosa works wholehearted in the current vogue, building off and elaborating Fury Road. Not judging really, just observing. It's where we are now.