Mad Max: Fury Road - 8 Things We Learned From The Trailer

8. The World Is Screwed

There's a reason that he isn't called Reasonable Max. And not just because that isn't alliterative. The trailer opens with an audio montage of news reports that get new viewers up to speed with the world that Max Rockatansky is dealing with, and why exactly he has to live in a tooled-up death car in order to survive. To sum up: most governments have announced martial law due to the world somehow managing to run out of water (thanks a lot, Al Gore), making it a commodity that people are willing to kill for. It is secondary only to oil, which people are still pretty keen on, especially in this arid desert landscape - eh, some political commentary for you there, eh, eh. Which we did sort of already know. That's the set up for the first three Mad Max films, although it's less of a big deal in Beyond Thunderdome, since everyone's wrapped up in the "two men enter, one man leaves!" deal, courtesy of Tina Turner. In the first film Max is part of one of the last remaining bastions of law and order in this post-apocalyptic future, an officer of the Main Force Patrol. That's what the car's all about: he drove around the transcontinental highways, taking down the roaming motorcycle gangs and bandits who tried to half-inch precious gas and water off of unsuspecting innocents. Of course by the time of the Road Warrior old Rockatansky had grown more than a little disillusioned with the MFP and gone rogue, waging a one-man war on the savages tearing apart his homeland after losing his wife and infant child to them. We think that's where the "mad" part comes from. Fury Road is set between the first two films, so we'll be finding Max in a pretty bad way and, from the looks of it, will discover first hand how things went from bad to worse: how the "world has crumbled and, the cities have exploded in a whirlwind of looting and a firestorm of fear, in which men began to feed on men". Oh and there's a two-headed lizard at the start, which seems like a bad omen.