For George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ Series, The Fourth Time’s A Charm

Apparently, last year, Mad Max‘s return to the big screen was over a decade in the making, if not longer, since the last and third film with Tina Turner and Mel Gibson in 1985.

It wouldn’t be until that film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, that anyone with any clout in the movie industry would take notice of director George Miller’s wasteland epic, and that person was critic Roger Ebert.

The film critic would end up giving the movie the highest rating he every gave to the best movies, as well as put it on his list of the top ten movies for that year, leaving it to score higher than the Cohen Brother’s Blood Simple at 10, with the Oscar winning Color Purple at number one.

“It’s not supposed to happen this way. Sequels are not supposed to be better than the movies that inspired them. The third movie in a series isn’t supposed to create a world more complex, more visionary and more entertaining than the first two. Sequels are supposed to be creative voids. But now here is “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” not only the best of the three Mad Max movies, but one of the best films of 1985.”

It’s perhaps also the case that a fourth movie in a series is not supposed to be so good that it gets more than a few Oscar nods, which apparently, according to The Guardian, ‘Mad Max Fury Road‘ will be showered with.

It’s been reported that the amount of Oscars will be 10.

The Inquisitr stated that George Miller will most likely return for more Mad Max sequels, including spinning off with Charlize Theron’s character Furiosa, which is currently only talk.

More specifically, however, these Oscars will center around the Australian film industry, which happens to include an award for Cate Blanchett for Carol.

And even with the unexpected attention towards Mad Max, Miller has already received some recognition before with an Oscar for Happy Feet in 2007, for best animated feature.

Miller refers to the mentioned list of best movies for 1985, in an article by The Leader when he talks about how “not” nervous about the nomination he is — where the Oscar for best director is pending — hinting that he might have gotten passed up back then.

“There have been very good films in the past that have been nominated for many, many Oscars and not won one – films like The Color Purple come to mind. I think we’ve got a reasonable chance for two or three of them but you can’t predict it.”

Much like the surprise that Mad Max is being taken seriously enough to almost be considered for the award, and his masterpiece, was the way Miller decided to use his team of cinematographers, sequence editors, and colors in a different way.

According to the trivia section in IMDB, the director had to make John Seale — who came out of retirement to do this film — keep the main characters centered on the screen, where he had to get used to cutting off objects around the perimeter of his view before he could get used to it.

There are many other creative qualities added to the making of Mad Max which, no doubt, is the reason it earned the nomination.

[Featured image David Holt via Flickr | CC BY-SA 2.0]