Aaron Clarey isn’t really a Mad Max fan.

This is pretty clear already given that his viral rant about Fury Road doesn’t betray much knowledge of the franchise at all—he doesn’t seem aware that “the director of Fury Road” he reviles is, in fact, George Miller, the director of the entire Mad Max franchise. He calls one of the most iconic Australian cultural exports of all time a “piece of American culture.” He boldly states “No one barks orders to Max!” when, in fact, all three previous Mad Max films feature Max taking orders from someone (Roger Ward’s Captain Fifi in Mad Max, Michael Preston’s Papagallo in The Road Warrior, Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity in Beyond Thunderdome).

But the single biggest sign Clarey doesn’t know the first damn thing about what George Miller or Mad Max is his triumphalist line: “When the shit hits the fan, it will be men like Mad Max who will be in charge.”

Mad Max isn’t in charge of anything throughout the Mad Max film franchise. Max is emphatically not the archetype of the badass hero who gets the girl, gets the crown, and rules as a patriarch over society as is his due. He’s a fucked-up loner who isn’t fit to live among civilized people; who begins each film alone, wounded, broken, and who ends each film in the same state or worse.
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All the Mad Max films have had tragic endings, and if you don’t grasp that this is the tragedy at the heart of Mad Max (and the gritty Westerns and samurai films Mad Max emulates) then you don’t get Mad Max. If you think Max has an awesome life and we’re supposed to wish we were him, you really don’t get Mad Max.