This Is Why the Original Mad Max Was Awesome

2 minute read
Mel Gibson In 'Mad Max'
Mel Gibson in a scene from the film 'Mad Max', 1979.Archive Photos / Getty Images
By Lily Rothman

The new Mad Max movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, in theaters this Friday, will be the first one in the franchise without the familiar face of Mel Gibson. (Tom Hardy plays Max this time around.)

But that might not really matter. As Richard Corliss wrote in his review of the original 1979 thriller, the title character wasn’t the real reason Mad Max worked:

As a story, the film makes for overwrought, even repellent melodrama. The movie has little feeling for, or interest in, the human idiosyncrasies of its characters; they are glorified stunt men, stock figures in stock cars. But Mad Max is not a “people picture.” It is an action movie whose subject is machines, and the sophisticated killing machine man could become. The hardware is the star here: the souped-up Chevies and demon motorcycles, captured by Miller’s supple, fender-level camera–one machine in sync with another. With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

In fact, Corliss wrote, Miller’s skill with the language of violence amounted to an example of true directorial integrity — and that its “tough-gutted intelligence” would be studied in film schools in years to come.

Read the full review, here in the TIME Vault: Poetic Car-Nage

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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com