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

There’s no other way to say it: Happy Feet Two is lousy. In Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Kyle Buchanan’s exceptional oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller and his collaborators more or less acknowledge that this animated sequel exists only because they needed Warner Bros. to bankroll Fury Road, which was suffering through a protracted pre-production. And why wouldn’t the studio want another Happy Feet? The first won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

As he did with Babe: Pig In The City, Miller ventured deeper into the mythological and philosophical complexities of the first film’s premise. But unlike that sequel, either his heart or his mind were not fully in it. While Happy Feet Two improves on its predecessor’s animation, the story feels cobbled together and the film itself is digressive and noisy. Then again, maybe it was worth it if it meant Miller could make another Mad Max-related masterpiece. [Todd Gilchrist]

The Witches Of Eastwick is a textbook case of a movie not quite being the sum of its parts. But, holy hell, those parts. Jack Nicholson stars as devilish Daryl Van Horne, who arrives in boring Eastwick, Rhode Island, and seduces three single women: Alex (Cher), Jane (Susan Sarandon), and Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer). After spending a night with Daryl, they discover that they’re witches, and plot to rid the town of Daryl. That’s when the fun starts in Miller’s adaptation of John Updike’s novel.

Miller lets the ladies flaunt their stuff; they’re smart, shrewd, sexy, and fun, and he films them gorgeously. He also unleashes Nicholson, who goes full Jack. Nicholson convulses and winks and rants and spews cherry pits. He creates a character that’s decadent, profane, and misogynist, yet (almost) sympathetic.

But even with a great John Williams score, The Witches Of Eastwick never fully comes together. We don’t get to know the ladies especially well and thus don’t care, which dulls the Grrrl Power edge. A couple of the magical sequences are visually arresting, but too many of them—characters hovering in mid air and especially Daryl’s transformation into his final form—are undermined by clunky visual effects. As the saying goes, the Devil is in the details. [Ian Spelling]

Writing about Three Thousand Years Of Longing just days after its opening makes it tough to gauge how the film will be received—or potentially reappraised—in the months and years ahead. After all, Babe: Pig In The City wasn’t initially considered the low-key classic it has become. With Three Thousand Years Of Longing, The A.V. Club’s critic thought its travelogue vignettes weren’t tightly enough interconnected, and didn’t love the framing device of the conversation and subsequent romance between Alithea (Tilda Swinton) and the Djinn (Idris Elba). But others on our staff felt the film’s exploration of relationships—their histories, and their complexities—raised some compelling ideas about the paths to new partners, and how backstory (particularly relevant in this film) weighs on who we are and what we seek from others. It’s not a film for everyone, but it uses stories to teach deeper truths, shared and self-created, and provide understanding and connection as we explore a past from which we can all learn. [Todd Gilchrist]

Produced by The British Film Institute as a part of its Century Of Cinema series (which also featured an installment by Martin Scorsese), this 1997 documentary chronicles 100 years of Australian cinema in a little over an hour—and it’s positively riveting. Hosted and narrated by Miller, who frequently appears over roving Australian vistas photographed by cinematographer Dion Beebe, the film balances its overview of films great and small with Miller’s unsurprisingly philosophical attitudes about the art form itself: “When we congregate with strangers in the darkness of the cinema, it’s a kind of public dreaming,” he observes.

Starting with its title, Miller balances an encyclopedic breakdown of Australian archetypes (“the larrikin”) and narrative tropes with an indictment of its white-centered cinema, even as he essentially assembles a not-so-short list of films from that country you immediately feel like you must see, from 1906’s The Story Of The Kelly Gang—widely regarded as the world’s first feature-length film—to Muriel’s Wedding, and many others in between. Currently available only on YouTube, the film is less essential for fans of Miller’s own work than as an aperitif for the whole of Australian film and all it has to offer. [Todd Gilchrist]

Twilight Zone: The Movie has as many fans as detractors. That’s mostly because three of the anthology’s four segments, directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante, are varying degrees of okay. Thankfully, the producers saved the best for last, concluding the film with George Miller’s remake of 1963’s classic TZ episode Nightmare At 20,000 Feet. In the original, directed by Superman’s Richard Donner, a pre-Star Trek William Shatner plays an agitated airline passenger, recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, who thinks he sees a gremlin on the airplane’s wing.

Miller’s remake trades Shatner for a terrific John Lithgow, but the director is the star here. Nightmare At 20,000 Feet was Miller’s first big screen credit after 1981’s The Road Warrior, and he makes an effortless transition from the vast exteriors of a barren, post-apocalyptic Australia to a cramped passenger jet. Add to that the well-calibrated build-up of intensity, the staccato strings of Jerry Goldsmith’s score and the memorable side characters, including the little girl wielding the Polaroid camera, and what could have made for a bumpy landing in a mediocre anthology became a showstopper. Say what you will about the rest of Twilight Zone: The Movie, but Miller thoroughly honored Donner’s version of Nightmare At 20,000 Feet while also making it his own. [Mark Keizer]

The Mad Max movies are usually, and rightfully, extolled for their impressive vehicle chase scenes, from the clever editing in part one to the chase-as-entire-movie that is Fury Road. More significant to their pop culture contribution, however, is their aesthetic, a sort of post-apocalypse dieselpunk sportsgear chic. And on those terms, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome remains the most significant ... and indulgent. Of course it retains a climactic big vehicle chase, but the rest of the movie leans into world-building, showing us how and where people live in the post-nuke nightmare, and clarifying details of the apocalypse that were left intentionally vague in the previous two films.

Everyone remembers “We Don’t Need Another Hero” over the end credits, as the movie mournfully laments a destroyed world that we want to get beyond. (Even the movie’s title can be read that way, instead of the more literal directional take.) But it’s Tina Turner’s fierce delivery of “One Of The Living” that sets the savage town for the nightmarish world of Bartertown, along with her performance as the villainous Aunty Entity, still the only principal Mad Max adversary to survive a movie. [Luke Y. Thompson]

While it’s debatable exactly which film launched the subgenre of post-apocalyptic desert movie, 1979’s Mad Max 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]

Happy Feet 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 Babe: Pig In The City 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 The Road Warrior 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 Lorenzo’s Oil.

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]

It’s deliciously subversive that the crowning achievement of Miller’s career, Mad Max: Fury Road, positions the iconic hero of his career-making sci-fi series, post-apocalyptic warrior Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, replacing Mel Gibson in the role), as the sometimes comically bumbling backup to a group of vengeful, badass women. These female fighters are retaliating against Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a cruel, tyrannical, obese, vainly makeup-clad ruler (sound familiar?) who enslaved them. The women are led by the iron-willed Imperator Furiosa, embodied with such fierce conviction by Charlize Theron that she earns her place among the all-time best action movie heroines.

The film itself is just as worthy of pantheon placement. Miller’s purist approach emphasizes the practical effects of elaborate stunt work and vehicular chaos over green screen fakery, serving a narrative boldly distilled down to a feature-length chase sequence that dispenses with all of its exposition and eccentric world-building details (a favorite being the freaky, electric guitar-shredding Doof Warrior) while on the run. Mad Max: Fury Road is a feverish, visionary spectacle that elevates the action film to the level of abstract art. It’s hard to imagine Miller topping it, but thankfully he’ll get to try—he’s currently in production on Furiosa, a prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the mighty Imperator, due in theaters summer 2024. [Brett Buckalew]