To this day, Miller describesWastelands treatment as more like a book than a traditional script.
And it is based extensively on Millers notes, research, and treatments forMad Max: Fury Road.
The figure subsequently guides Furiosa to the ugliest bucket of bolts the Wasteland ever knew.
Animated as a more traditional hunchback in the Quasimodo tradition in theMad Maxgame, Chumbucket becomes Maxs sidekick.
Hes also an acolyte who worships Max as a kind of motor-head messiah.
He believes Max is a Wasteland saint and offers Max what Chumbucket calls his magnum opus.
In any event, the game begins with a Max who has already been in the desert too long.
Perhaps he did this because he recently tried to play the hero… and it went terribly wrong.
Max would seem to agree since Hardy mutters, Youre dead.
Nonetheless, he turned out to be right about one thing.
He did let a little girl die.
Their names were Hope and Glory.
Hope also had a daughter whom she named, cutely enough, Glory.
The video game thus ends in bitter, nihilistic despair.
He really did let them die.
Max wants to be alone.
And so he is when the game ends where it began.
Max recovers whats left of his Interceptor and drives off into the desert.
In the broad strokes, this fills in the details of what might have been Millers triptych.
Thus like his wife and son before them, a mother and child die.
As with the originalMad Maxfilm, Max Rockatansky achieves a pyrrhic victory.
He avenges the dead, but does nothing to make the world better.
The disillusionment of this drives him further off the reservation and into the feral fellow we meet inFury Road.
Millers fragile flickers of hope and dignity in the films are nowhere to be found.
That might be one of the many reasons Miller ultimately expressed disappointment with the interactive project.
But then, discrepancies and inconsistencies are baked into the DNA of the Mad Max mythology.
The Mad Max films are intended to express a dystopian folklore.
