Viewing Blog "Mad Max"

Okay so I just want to back track a little bit to the theme of “Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic”. This past weekend I had the opportunity to watch “Mad Max”. This is a pretty good example of the pre-apocalyptic setting. Things haven’t quite gone wrong in society yet but they’re on their way towards failure. As far as my movie critique goes, this movie probably wasn’t the greatest of its time but I’ve heard quite a few people say they enjoy it and that they enjoyed the whole series of movies as well. It takes a little while to get into the action and understand why Max is “mad”. After that climax happens, the movie gets much better and much more interesting than before. In the beginning I think that the shots and characters are kind of disorganized and hard to understand in the way the director/writers had intended.

I just wanted to point out how this story contradicts itself in aspects of scientific probability. There are quite a few injuries encountered in this movie but only a few of them could actually happen. For example, one of the bikers tried to cling on to Max’s Wife’s van by wrapping a chain around his hand and making it wrap around the car. Due to the fact that she is driving away at a relatively fast speed, it is absolutely plausible that his hand would be ripped off (amputated), by the force of the chain attached to the car. However, it is not plausible that his ENTIRE arm would come off. He would most likely have some severe bruising, a muscle tear, or even a tendon tear but it’s highly unlikely that the entire arm would come off. My other example is the awesome rig that Max creates when trying to kill off the last of the bikers, he essentially creates a miniature Rube Goldberg machine. The probability of this rig working out is high! It is absolutely plausible. However, Max handcuffs the man to a car and tells him that he can either saw through his wrist or wait till the machine works and he gets blown up. I just want to make it perfectly clear that it is highly unlikely that you'd be able to cut through your entire wrist with the saw that max provided. Just to give you an example of how strong bone is, in certain circumstances bone can withstand 19,000 pounds or more which is the same weight as about 4-5 pick-up trucks. Yes bones break everyday but, these bones don’t break because of force, they break because they twist or are manipulated in an unnatural way. It would take a lot of work and physical manipulation to be able to saw through bone, not to mention the mental ability to be able to saw off your own! Basically, I’m just trying to say that is it totally implausible that this biker would even have the chance of sawing through his own bone. There’s quite a few more examples of these kinds of things in this movie but overall, most of the injuries, like all movies, are just exaggerations of the truth.

The most important part of this post is “How does this relate to science fiction”. Well, like I said it is a part of an almost/partially apocalyptic society. The apocalyptic society is represented in the desolation of the areas around them. Also, by the strange behavior that people exhibit and never worry about getting in trouble. Although this movie is apocalyptic I don’t really think it was intended for it to be in the future. I say this because of the older cars and motor cycles, along with the clothing and style of houses featured in the movie.