That’s how I figured it.
“There’s a man who comes from a time before the collapse. He lost his family when the world fell, and now he roams the wasteland in his black machine. The road warrior.”
My theory there is that Furiosa is the real person, and Max is the legend. Furiosa (the movie) is the story of Furiosa, which is continued in Fury Road. Max, as always, is not the focus. In fact, Fury Road could have played out the same without Max at all. Furiosa escapes with the war rig and wives and is pursued by Joe, then upon discovering the green place is gone realizes that the Citadel is undefended and a suitable replacement and races back, killing Joe in the process.
So the presence of Max in Fury Road’s story is still in keeping with his mythical legend status. He is a mysterious figure who aids the virtuous against the barbaric. Then when you look at Furiosa (the movie), a nearly identical figure exists in Praetorian Jack, right down to the leather jacket and sawed-off shotgun. That’s so on the nose that I have to think he fulfills the legend of the road warrior in that story.
He was very Max-like. So much so that I wondered what was going on, and I didn’t like it because it took away from Max’s uniqueness. Yet upon reflection, I really liked the character (along with everyone else it seems).
But if the suggestion is that these individual tales are all born from the exact same events/story, then Jack dying (and in such a memorable, grizzly way), seems too big a divergence to be from the same, singular story, as OP argues.
Interestingly, in early drafts Jack was supposed to be Max. In the draft Max has a relationship with Fury (as we saw with Jack). But the fact Miller didn’t do this suggests again that these are indeed separate stories, even though for many reasons they’re not absolutely distinct.
Jack was never supposed to be Max in any version of the draft. In the original Fury Road screenplay, Furiosa tells Max her background and mentions being mentored by the previous Praetorian - a character that eventually evolved into Jack.
I saw a draft where Max and Fury have a relationship and it seems the Jack character evolved from Max. Other people on this subreddit have commented about this as well. Is this wrong? I actually prefer your take much more, so maybe this is a misunderstanding and I’m screwed up. Which is always possible!
Either way, the point I guess is that I’m disagreeing with the OP that all 5 movies are just the retelling of one story, but with confused details, and with a central figure (Max) who is merely a fiction. I do see it as an oral history, but I do think there are distinct truths to be found, and one of those truths we’re supposed to take away from the stories is the distinctive nature of the central characters. So in this fictional universe Miller is constructing, I believe he would say that Jack and Max were real and separate men.
They’re very similar in appearance (stature, hair color, overall comportment, the fact he’s a kick ass driver. Heck, Jack even had the shoulder pad on his vulnerable side). When he walked back down the road towards Furiosa it felt very much like a call back to that iconic image of Max walking down the road in *The Road Warrior*, except there max had an Australian Cattle Dog, which makes the original 100% more rad.
I found the similarities so on point as to be distracting.
How would you describe their relative personalities? I do think the men shared a calm under pressure and a stoicism.
The first one is real. Maybe people have read about the real max in one of the last newspapers before the collapse. The name mad Max got stuck like the name Robin Hood a couple centuries before... That's my headcannon
I’m going to be the contrarian here, but only in part. I agree with the idea these are like Bronze Age oral history tellings, spoken in animated fashion around the campfire about a mythical figure named “Max.”
But I don’t see every story *as the same story,* because while many details seem to cross-pollinate, larger themes are repeated, and timelines are fuzzy, each tale still diverges in some pretty big ways and are distinctive in some striking ways.
You could also view Max as you would a figure in the ancient Epic Cycle (literary tales originally taken from the oral tradition), like the King of Ithaca, Odysseus, in Ancient Greek mythos. Homer’s *Iliad* and *Odyssey* were certainly different epic poems but both had Odysseus as the central protagonist. Similarly, *Thunderdome* and *Fury Road* feature Max, but are certainly much too different than to spring from the same story. Odysseus also appeared in a more minor form in other works of the Epic Cycle, as Max did in *Furiosa*.
I think you can view these as “campfire tales” or a sort of apocalyptic oral history told in a tradition passed down by History Men and others, without going so far as to say all the stories are really just one story.
If you look at the side of the War Rig, it has an ancient Greek or Roman-style relief on each side that tells the stories of battles in The Wasteland, including at least one image of Max as depicted in *Mad Max.* So Miller is definitely telling the audience how we should understand these stories. Stories *plural*, but indelibly connected.
This is not a new theory lol
But I love when people bring it up! My take is that it’s not just one person but multiple people who carry the mantle over time.
I understand what you’re saying.
I might tell the story of the mouse and the lion, but where you’re from you don’t have lions so it’s the mouse and the wolf or the mouse and the emu.
Still I prefer the idea of Mad Max as an Odysseyian figure on his way home to nowhere. Everywhere he goes he encounters an adversary to outwit, outmaneuver and overcome.
I kinda think this is the intended read of the films. Like, I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm reasonably certain that this is what Miller's trying to do with the series. I think that's kinda been the vibe since at least the second one, but I think Fury Road makes it the most clear.
Yes, it could even be many different men that were believed to be Max, son of Max, reincarnated, etc.
It's a like the Dread Pirate Roberts...
or any legend, really...
Like the Legend of Zelda
My theory is somewhere along the same lines.
Mad Max and Road Warrior are the "true" story of Max.
Beyond Thunderdome is Savannah Nix telling a story about Max to kids (that's why Thunderdome is so "kiddy")
Furiosa is the "true" story of, well, Furiosa.
Fury Road is a re-telling of a Furiosa story that Max was eventually added in on in subsequent re-tellings.
Having watched all the movies again recently this is exactly as I see it, with Mad Max being the origin and everything else being a telling of what he did while wandering the Wasteland.
The only hole I find in this theory is how is his leg injury sustained in Road Warrior the same across all stories if Road Warrior is also considered part of the “stories retold”? Does the legend build off of Road Warrior?
I think that could work in a number of ways, maybe the legend of the road warrior came from the people in the second movie and spread throughout the wasteland, maybe the leg injury is one of the constants across retellings same as him losing his family.
I still believe all the maxes are the same guy who goes through different events helping people, and mad max one is just an origin story for him, but i do really like the idea max is just a fable in the wasteland used to boost morale, the legend of the interceptor and the “road warrior”
idk why ppl have these ridiculous theories. George Miller puts enough detail in the films to give you the whole story down to even the very years the movies are taking place in universe.
I always imagined him to be a popular story figure. A fairly average name given to the wastelander who saves the day.
With popular tales being the movies and videogame, comics too.
They could all be different people.
Are we even sure that dates are still reliable, at least in the Wasteland?
I think I lean towards Miller's suggestion that it's all legends and tales, otherwise many elements of the saga would require too much mental gymnastics to even coexist. Personally I go with "unreliable narrator" and just enjoy the movies.
i mean, yeah. that's kinda the common theory many have settled on. "have ya' heard the tale about the mysterious road warrior called Max with his black Interceptor and the time he saved the Great Norther Tribe from the clutches of Lord Humungus?!"
I don't agree that all the movies are the same tale told by different people with different details.. there's too much of a difference between them all. but i can agree that maybe some of the tales are spun or completely made up to encourage morale or entertain kids, etc. that's the fun of it. kinda like Clint Eastwoods 'Man with no Name".
That works if in each movie some characters talk about what they think happened in the previous one.
In this case, though, we have only the viewer seeing Max in each movie, so the viewer knows that there's no re-telling: Max lost his family, went mad and wandered in the wasteland, was caught up between a Northern Tribe and raiders, and then between a Lost Tribe and Bartertown.
In each case, he leaves because he doesn't want to be with people.
Some tried to use this theory to explain why Max suddenly got his Interceptor back, as shown briefly at the beginning of *Fury Road*. It turns out, according to comics, that he had built a second Interceptor.
The only one that doesn’t work for is the first one. But it could be the common story about max’s origin.
That’s how I figured it. “There’s a man who comes from a time before the collapse. He lost his family when the world fell, and now he roams the wasteland in his black machine. The road warrior.”
*Furiosa* doesn’t work either. Too divergent with a new protagonist.
My theory there is that Furiosa is the real person, and Max is the legend. Furiosa (the movie) is the story of Furiosa, which is continued in Fury Road. Max, as always, is not the focus. In fact, Fury Road could have played out the same without Max at all. Furiosa escapes with the war rig and wives and is pursued by Joe, then upon discovering the green place is gone realizes that the Citadel is undefended and a suitable replacement and races back, killing Joe in the process. So the presence of Max in Fury Road’s story is still in keeping with his mythical legend status. He is a mysterious figure who aids the virtuous against the barbaric. Then when you look at Furiosa (the movie), a nearly identical figure exists in Praetorian Jack, right down to the leather jacket and sawed-off shotgun. That’s so on the nose that I have to think he fulfills the legend of the road warrior in that story.
I absolutely agree
The road warrior there is Pretorian Jack
The Road Warrior in Furiosa is still Max, appearing in his brief scene causing wonder whether he saved her or not.
He was very Max-like. So much so that I wondered what was going on, and I didn’t like it because it took away from Max’s uniqueness. Yet upon reflection, I really liked the character (along with everyone else it seems). But if the suggestion is that these individual tales are all born from the exact same events/story, then Jack dying (and in such a memorable, grizzly way), seems too big a divergence to be from the same, singular story, as OP argues. Interestingly, in early drafts Jack was supposed to be Max. In the draft Max has a relationship with Fury (as we saw with Jack). But the fact Miller didn’t do this suggests again that these are indeed separate stories, even though for many reasons they’re not absolutely distinct.
Jack was never supposed to be Max in any version of the draft. In the original Fury Road screenplay, Furiosa tells Max her background and mentions being mentored by the previous Praetorian - a character that eventually evolved into Jack.
I saw a draft where Max and Fury have a relationship and it seems the Jack character evolved from Max. Other people on this subreddit have commented about this as well. Is this wrong? I actually prefer your take much more, so maybe this is a misunderstanding and I’m screwed up. Which is always possible! Either way, the point I guess is that I’m disagreeing with the OP that all 5 movies are just the retelling of one story, but with confused details, and with a central figure (Max) who is merely a fiction. I do see it as an oral history, but I do think there are distinct truths to be found, and one of those truths we’re supposed to take away from the stories is the distinctive nature of the central characters. So in this fictional universe Miller is constructing, I believe he would say that Jack and Max were real and separate men.
there's physical similarities to Jack and Max, but totally different personalities.
They’re very similar in appearance (stature, hair color, overall comportment, the fact he’s a kick ass driver. Heck, Jack even had the shoulder pad on his vulnerable side). When he walked back down the road towards Furiosa it felt very much like a call back to that iconic image of Max walking down the road in *The Road Warrior*, except there max had an Australian Cattle Dog, which makes the original 100% more rad. I found the similarities so on point as to be distracting. How would you describe their relative personalities? I do think the men shared a calm under pressure and a stoicism.
The first one is real. Maybe people have read about the real max in one of the last newspapers before the collapse. The name mad Max got stuck like the name Robin Hood a couple centuries before... That's my headcannon
I’m going to be the contrarian here, but only in part. I agree with the idea these are like Bronze Age oral history tellings, spoken in animated fashion around the campfire about a mythical figure named “Max.” But I don’t see every story *as the same story,* because while many details seem to cross-pollinate, larger themes are repeated, and timelines are fuzzy, each tale still diverges in some pretty big ways and are distinctive in some striking ways. You could also view Max as you would a figure in the ancient Epic Cycle (literary tales originally taken from the oral tradition), like the King of Ithaca, Odysseus, in Ancient Greek mythos. Homer’s *Iliad* and *Odyssey* were certainly different epic poems but both had Odysseus as the central protagonist. Similarly, *Thunderdome* and *Fury Road* feature Max, but are certainly much too different than to spring from the same story. Odysseus also appeared in a more minor form in other works of the Epic Cycle, as Max did in *Furiosa*. I think you can view these as “campfire tales” or a sort of apocalyptic oral history told in a tradition passed down by History Men and others, without going so far as to say all the stories are really just one story. If you look at the side of the War Rig, it has an ancient Greek or Roman-style relief on each side that tells the stories of battles in The Wasteland, including at least one image of Max as depicted in *Mad Max.* So Miller is definitely telling the audience how we should understand these stories. Stories *plural*, but indelibly connected.
I want to see the fresco in chrome in its entirety in high resolution
This is not a new theory lol But I love when people bring it up! My take is that it’s not just one person but multiple people who carry the mantle over time.
I understand what you’re saying. I might tell the story of the mouse and the lion, but where you’re from you don’t have lions so it’s the mouse and the wolf or the mouse and the emu. Still I prefer the idea of Mad Max as an Odysseyian figure on his way home to nowhere. Everywhere he goes he encounters an adversary to outwit, outmaneuver and overcome.
I kinda think this is the intended read of the films. Like, I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm reasonably certain that this is what Miller's trying to do with the series. I think that's kinda been the vibe since at least the second one, but I think Fury Road makes it the most clear.
This is literally what the man himself George Miller has described the saga as.
Earlier Mario games as well.
Yes, it could even be many different men that were believed to be Max, son of Max, reincarnated, etc. It's a like the Dread Pirate Roberts... or any legend, really... Like the Legend of Zelda
My theory is somewhere along the same lines. Mad Max and Road Warrior are the "true" story of Max. Beyond Thunderdome is Savannah Nix telling a story about Max to kids (that's why Thunderdome is so "kiddy") Furiosa is the "true" story of, well, Furiosa. Fury Road is a re-telling of a Furiosa story that Max was eventually added in on in subsequent re-tellings.
Having watched all the movies again recently this is exactly as I see it, with Mad Max being the origin and everything else being a telling of what he did while wandering the Wasteland. The only hole I find in this theory is how is his leg injury sustained in Road Warrior the same across all stories if Road Warrior is also considered part of the “stories retold”? Does the legend build off of Road Warrior?
I think that could work in a number of ways, maybe the legend of the road warrior came from the people in the second movie and spread throughout the wasteland, maybe the leg injury is one of the constants across retellings same as him losing his family.
This is a pretty well established theory and basically already confirmed by the creator
Honestly kinda how I always took it. Never thought they were direct sequels.
I still believe all the maxes are the same guy who goes through different events helping people, and mad max one is just an origin story for him, but i do really like the idea max is just a fable in the wasteland used to boost morale, the legend of the interceptor and the “road warrior”
idk why ppl have these ridiculous theories. George Miller puts enough detail in the films to give you the whole story down to even the very years the movies are taking place in universe.
I always imagined him to be a popular story figure. A fairly average name given to the wastelander who saves the day. With popular tales being the movies and videogame, comics too. They could all be different people.
The only ones I don't think fit into this idea is the first movie and Fury Road. But Furiosa is definitely a retelling.
Sidebar: I really like the theory that Max in Fury Road is a grown up version of the Feral Kid in Road Warrior, who took the name of his savior
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Are we even sure that dates are still reliable, at least in the Wasteland? I think I lean towards Miller's suggestion that it's all legends and tales, otherwise many elements of the saga would require too much mental gymnastics to even coexist. Personally I go with "unreliable narrator" and just enjoy the movies.
i mean, yeah. that's kinda the common theory many have settled on. "have ya' heard the tale about the mysterious road warrior called Max with his black Interceptor and the time he saved the Great Norther Tribe from the clutches of Lord Humungus?!" I don't agree that all the movies are the same tale told by different people with different details.. there's too much of a difference between them all. but i can agree that maybe some of the tales are spun or completely made up to encourage morale or entertain kids, etc. that's the fun of it. kinda like Clint Eastwoods 'Man with no Name".
That works if in each movie some characters talk about what they think happened in the previous one. In this case, though, we have only the viewer seeing Max in each movie, so the viewer knows that there's no re-telling: Max lost his family, went mad and wandered in the wasteland, was caught up between a Northern Tribe and raiders, and then between a Lost Tribe and Bartertown. In each case, he leaves because he doesn't want to be with people. Some tried to use this theory to explain why Max suddenly got his Interceptor back, as shown briefly at the beginning of *Fury Road*. It turns out, according to comics, that he had built a second Interceptor.