George Miller in the Thunderdome: Ranking his movies, from Fury Road to Happy Feet

While it’s debatable exactly which film launched the subgenre of post-apocalyptic desert movie, 1979’s is certainly the one that popularized it. It also launched Miller’s career and kickstarted Mel Gibson’s (for better or for worse). And what a breakthrough it was. But what holds up to this day is how astoundingly well-assembled the film is considering it was made for around $350,000 American dollars. What Miller and his team did with what was around them is not just badass independent filmmaking—for years it held the Guinness record for the box office-to-budget ratio—it’s also nothing short of a narrative and visual miracle. Shooting in a seemingly unregulated Australian Outback, with a whole bunch of beat up cars, enlisting actors up for anything and a director with vision and cinematic know-how, Mad Max remains an incredibly entertaining film that also serves as a starting point to examine a Miller’s work as a director. [Don Lewis]

is arguably Miller’s most divisive film. People love it or hate it. While I’m with the crowd that considers Happy Feet 2 a dud, I adored Happy Feet, both as a journalist and a dad. Like a cinematic hug, it embraces you with sweetness, catchy songs, bright animation, and pure joie de vivre. Elijah Wood is perfect as Mumble, a penguin who can dance but not sing, which he must do to win the heart of Gloria (Brittany Murphy). Fortunately, Ramon (Robin Williams) and the Amigos have his back. You’ve not lived until you’ve heard Williams croon “My Way” … in Spanish. Murphy sang beautifully, too. The voice cast also includes Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Miriam Margolyes, Hugo Weaving, and … Steve Irwin. Add to that action, humor, affection, sweeping camera moves and admittedly on-the-nose environmental messaging, and you’ve got a cartoon confection for the ages. Oscar agreed: it was bestowed with the Best Animated Feature statuette. [Ian Spelling]

After serving as a producer and co-writer of Babe, directed by Chris Noonan, Miller took over the directorial reins for the film’s sequel, a decidedly stranger, darker tale of porcine resilience than its heartwarming predecessor. That opens with lovable, sheep-herding pig Babe inadvertently causing an accident that leaves Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) in a body cast and the farm at risk of being seized by the bank is indicative of its bleaker tonal shift. Once Babe arrives in the sprawling city of Metropolis to try to win money to save the farm, more horrors await, including a sequence showing a pit bull nearly drowning in a canal that was seemingly engineered to traumatize young children.Anyone old enough to process the surprisingly extreme peril can appreciate how Miller uses his baroque visual imagination to give the sequel a lavish design upgrade and infuse its absurdist set pieces with dizzying, Rube Goldberg-esque intricacy. Plus, it’s hardly as if Babe: Pig In The City completely abandons the first film’s adorability. There’s a hotel filled with cute new animal characters, and Babe’s unflappable insistence on kindness and compassion still dominates. It’s just that Miller, in his perverse yet wise way, doesn’t sugarcoat the opposition to those values that the world ceaselessly presents. [Brett Buckalew]

George Miller executes the pinnacle prequel trick of turning the relationships, connections, and losses collected in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga into subtext that makes the already sublime Fury Road even better. Furiosa’s story is told in five chapters, opening when we meet her as a child (Alyla Browne) living within the hidden, idyllic community of the Green Place of Many Mothers, then through 15 years of her life, ending in her mid-twenties when she’s become the Imperator Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) within a much younger Immortan Joe’s (Lachy Hulme) Citadel. In parallel, she (and we) observes the ascendance of her captor, the Wasteland warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). While Dementus is almost cartoonish upon our first meeting of him, in Hemsworth’s hands, he deftly shifts between blowhard buffoon and terrifying monster without ever dipping into the kind of camp that would undermine the character’s power. It takes until chapter three, when Furiosa is taken along for the inaugural run of a massive, fortified Citadel provisions truck she helped build, for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to explode past its simmer and hit a rolling boil. It’s the first time Miller stages an extravaganza of stunts, choreography, and explosions like he executed in Fury Road. And it’s just as glorious to witness, as Miller’s gift for action hasn’t waned. But here it’s got a particular purpose in revealing Furiosa’s years-long, honed skills as an unflappable mechanic, problem-solver, acrobat, and driver. Furiosa overwhelms the senses, especially in IMAX, as Duggan and Miller immerse you within the vehicles as they rumble over the dunes, or pound the strips of road that connect the Citadel to The Bullet Farm and Gastown. Almost every piece of Furiosa comes across visceral and real, which reminds you how special it is to get this kind of experience at the movies every once in a while. [Tara Bennett]

It’s fun to imagine the pitch meeting for a Mad Max sequel. George Miller was undoubtedly almost drooling at the opportunity to reboot the franchise with a big, fat budget, like Robert Rodriguez later did with El Mariachi and Desperado. But what makes the bigger budget of so cool is that George Miller justified the cash by completely nailing the film, bringing to fuller life all of the energetic weirdness that he couldn’t quite get to before—which is saying something, because Mad Max certainly wasn’t lacking in energy. Basically The Seven Samurai in the post-apocalyptic Australian desert but instead of seven would-be heroes, The Road Warrior features Mel Gibson returning to his badass role, this time coached back towards humanity by a desperate group of freedom fighters (and the bracing discovery that in a lawless land, one man doesn’t survive for very long). Indeed, if Mad Max was as loud as it gets, The Road Warrior finds a way to dial it up to 11. And it’s a movie that’s still incredibly engaging and fun today. Also, we have to give a shoutout to Emil Minty as “The Feral Child.” [Don Lewis]

In 1971, Miller was a medical resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, when he and his best friend made a no-budget short called Violence In Cinema, Part 1. The positive response encouraged Miller to hang up his stethoscope and pursue filmmaking. But he didn’t completely leave his medical training behind. In 1992, he used that knowledge to co-write and direct his first (and, to date, only) domestic drama, the riveting true story . Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon play the parents of Lorenzo, a 5-year-old boy stricken with a rare degenerative nerve disease called ALD. When they can’t find a doctor willing or able to treat him, they try to find a cure themselves despite having zero training in medicine. The script, which earned Miller and Nick Enright an Oscar nomination, leans heavily into medical jargon, yet they make it all understandable while never losing sight of the emotional devastation wreaked upon Lorenzo’s parents.Nolte is fiery and laser-focused, although his Italian accent raised some eyebrows at the time. Sarandon earned the film’s only other Oscar nomination as the ferociously dedicated mother whose tenacity starts to border on fanaticism. A detective story, a family drama and a condemnation of an inflexible medical community, Lorenzo’s Oil is distinct from Miller’s other films but nonetheless one of his finest. [Mark Keizer]