Furiosa might not have set the box office alight like its makers would have hoped, although many people have argued it wasn’t helped by its release window, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Mad Max franchise is a modern classic.
With three original films coming out before a long, long gap, and then being followed by the simply stellar Fury Road, many people haven’t ever seen the first trilogy. Its best film just so happens to be on Amazon Prime Video here in the UK, though, although it leaves soon.
The original Mad Max is good fun, but it’s also incredibly low budget, and therefore doesn’t have the scale that you can tell director George Miller was really going for. Its success propelled things to a new level for its sequel, though.
Mad Max: The Road Warrior is bigger in every way, with huge chases, crazy vehicles and even some air-to-ground combat in one of its craziest action sequences. Watching it, you get a way more direct sense of how things would eventually progress to the enormous set-pieces of both Fury Road and Furiosa.
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It also has something to boast about – it’s only 95 minutes long, which is just about the perfect length for an action movie. In fact, being the best streaming service might not just be about the pure quality of your films – having a bunch of shorter movies is key, too.
The Road Warrior isn’t just the sort of movie that fans love, though, and it backed up its claims to fame with an impressive 94% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes – so you can trust that it’s genuinely great. It’s also much less camp than the next sequel, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
If you’re here in the UK and you have a Prime Video subscription, this is one that you should definitely get on your watchlist just after the month ends – it’ll disappear on 7 October 2024. That gives you plenty of time to watch it, but it’s still worth setting a reminder in case you get close to the line!
