That's right: Miller's other three works of post-apocalyptic craziness, serendipitously enough, reside on HBO Max. Mad Max 2, released in the United States as The Road Warrior, upped the ante with a bigger budget, crazier stunts, and a Western-flavored story which saw Max — now a drifter wandering through the wasteland after the complete collapse of society — assisting a ragtag band of settlers under continuous assault from a roving gang of marauders calling themselves, well, the Marauders. While the flick didn't post the stellar box office numbers of its predecessor, it mostly earned rave critical reviews owing to its absolutely relentless pace and expertly shot and edited action sequences. Wrote the great Roger Ebert in his three-and-a-half star review, "[The Road Warrior] is a film of pure action, of kinetic energy ... one of the most relentlessly aggressive movies ever made ... The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking."
Next up is 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in which Max runs up against the intelligent, conniving Aunty Entity (Tina Turner, in a rare turn as an actress), the ruler of "Bartertown" where all conflicts are resolved by way of a duel to the death in the titular gladiatorial arena. The flick once again racked up the critical raves but didn't exactly set the box office on fire. A fourth installment, the idea for which Miller began kicking around in the '90s, languished in that fabled corner of Hollywood known as Development Hell for the better part of two decades. Fortunately, to say it was worth the wait would be an understatement.
