This month’s release of Furiosa, billed as “A Mad Max Saga” and functioning as Max-less prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, continues George Miller’s exploration of his a postapocalyptic landscape set in the wasteland of the Australian Outback. But how does the new film, which Miller directed at the ripe young age of 79, stack up to his earlier works? Here’s our ranked listing of all five films in the franchise.

5. Max Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Let’s be clear: Thunderdome is by no means a bad movie, and it gets a special kick from Tina Turner’s surprisingly nuanced turn as the not-completely-evil antagonist Aunty Entity. (You have to wonder why Turner, appearing in her first movie since her memorable turn as the Acid Queen in 1975’s The Who rock opera Tommy, didn’t become a mainstay of mainstream Hollywood movies.) Plus, Miller staged one of his most memorable action sequences with Max’s viscerally staged battle with the Master Blaster within the caged confines of the Thunderdome — a scene that boosted the popularity of professional wrestling and steel-cage matches everywhere.

But there’s something very Hollywood about the whole enterprise, from Turner hits like “We Don’t Need Another Hero” blasting on the soundtrack to Mel Gibson’s Max veering from the sullen antihero of the first two films into a more traditional good guy who declines to kill a baddie who turns out to mentally disabled and then rallies a child army like some kind of Pied Piper of Neverland. Who knew Max had such a marshmallow heart beneath that rugged leathery exterior? (Some have speculated that the project may have lost some focus since Miller, who handed some of the shoot to his co-director, George Ogilvie, after his longtime collaborator Byron Kennedy died suddenly in helicopter crash just before production.

4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa is an absorbing, well-paced prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, detailing the backstory of Charlize Theron’s laser-focused one-armed warrior who shared the screen with Tom Hardy’s sullenly monosyllabic Max. But despite solid performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and particularly Aylya Browne as the much-younger Furiosa, the film suffers from the same challenge that faces just about every prequel or origin story for an already-established character: the element of narrative surprise. We know that our heroine can’t die (though she must lose her left arm below the elbow at some point).

Still, there are pleasures along the way. Chris Hemsworth is almost recognizable as a rogue warlord baddie delightfully dubbed Dr. Dementus, becoming increasingly camp as the film progresses, while Tom Burke appears as a mentor and ally that fits more in the tradition of Old School Max than Hardy ever did. And Miller pulls off some memorably intense action sequences — he’s particularly adept at establishing the geography of the battlefield so that individual clashes fit into a larger whole rather than blasting us with individual shots of carnage that are all sensation and don’t make much narrative sense.

3. Mad Max (1979)

George Miller’s first feature-length movie was an instant sensation — a low-budget thriller that became a No. 1 hit in Australia and one of the most profitable films of all time. It launched the film career of a newbie named Mel Gibson and established Miller himself as an outsider auteur with a flair for cinematic action sequences. (The opening Night Rider sequence, which nods to Steven Spielberg’s work in Duel, remains a stunner.) Hugh Keays-Byrne also makes a memorable mark as the villainous Toe-Cutter (the actor later returned to the franchise as Immortan Joe in Fury Road).

Yes, the film has a rough-around-the-edges quality — Miller is still feeling his way around filmmaking in many senses, relying on familiar Ozploitation tropes like putting Max’s wife and infant in danger to harden his hero into a vengeance-seeking killing machine. But there’s a reason why this character, and this barren Australian landscape, have endured for so long. From the start, Miller tapped into both anxieties about the gas shortage, the environmental crisis, and fears of nuclear war with admirable prescience. And he also recognized that humans might tend toward barbarity rather than decency in the absence of the traditional guardrails of society.

2. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

For many Americans, this film marked the first introduction to George Miller, Mel Gibson, and the Mad Max character. Miller used the crafty montage introduction to distill his postapocalyptic setting in a sharper way than he did in the original film — he also introduces elements like modified vehicles, rival gangs of outlaws, and over-the-top fight scenes that would become hallmarks of the franchise. All on a budget that was only slightly bigger than the first film’s. Kjell Nilsson’s Lord Humungus and Bruce Spence’s Gyro Captain are memorable baddies, and the fight scenes have a raw, primal quality that makes you wonder how nobody was killed on set.

But it’s Gibson’s performance that stands out as a man whose seen-it-all stoicism relaxes just long enough to remember his previous impulse to protect innocent lives. In this case, he agrees to help a mostly mute moppet (Emil Minty’s Feral Child) defend a peaceful, communitarian oil refinery settlement from acquisitive warlords. (This nod to classic Westerns like Shane and Once Upon a Time in the West also set the stage for later ’80s action heroes like Rambo and the Terminator.)

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

George Miller deservedly picked up his only Academy Award nomination for directing for this action classic, which has rightly emerged as a masterpiece of the genre. (The film earned six Oscars, including for editor Margaret Sixel, and also became the rare action blockbuster in the post-Miramax era to get a nod for Best Picture.) This is old-fashioned cinematic storytelling, with dialogue pared down to a bare minimum, and some of the most pulse-racing action sequences ever recorded set to the driving metal-rock beat of Junkie XL’s score.

While stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron famously hated each other during the grueling production in the Namibian desert, the two turned in arguably the best performances of their careers. Theron, with her fashion model frame, emerged as a genuine action star whose shorn head, buff physique, and steely gaze were put into the service of an unmistakably noble cause: protecting defenseless pregnant women (and seeking out her long-abandoned home settlement). Hardy’s Max, meanwhile, borrowed less from Gibson than from his mumble-mouthed turn as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises — but the approach works as you watch this hardened soul gradually rise to a challenge that calls for compassion as well as brute strength.