'A few years from now."
They're the first words to appear onscreen in the original Mad Max film from 1979.
I was in my early teens when I first saw Mad Max on the wood-cased TV in my Melbourne, Australia, living room. I had a vague idea what the film was about. Cars. Accidents. Violence. Topics of interest to a boy.
But nothing could have prepared me for the film I saw, one that left tread marks of scorched rubber across my memory.
A big part of that was thanks to how close to home the film was. Max was shot at locations around Melbourne, the cast had regular Aussie accents and they were driving recognizable cars on roads less than an hour away from my driveway.
I was on the edge of my seat from the moment Mad Max dumps you into the high-speed pursuit of a fugitive named The Nightrider (no, not Hasselhoff). It set up the world and the characters against the backdrop of screaming engines. The high-octane brutality of the road-borne battle hits you head-on thanks to the cinematography, editing and sound.
All the more impressive is that it was shot in only a few months on a paltry budget.
But when the engine roar died down, it was that "a few years from now" phrase that haunted me into sleep the night after that first viewing. For a work of exaggerated fiction, it all seemed so real and imminent.
Years later, driving the same locations that starred in Mad Max, I realized that the roads themselves were a character in their own right in the film.
There's a loneliness to these straight, rural Australian roads. The way the breeze flows over fields and the heat radiates off the tarmac. Out there alone, it's easy to imagine a world where a full tank of fuel is the difference between life and death.
Each kilometre of blacktop has a story to tell: Hieroglyphs written in strips of undulating rubber laid down by burnouts. Deep tire furrows on the gravel shoulder. Glinting glass debris from a collision.
Mad Max 2, known as The Road Warrior in North America, and 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome eschewed suburban-gritty for desert-bleak. Together, these movies set the aesthetic for what a post-apocalypse world should look like, which echoed through films and video games such as Fallout and Rage.
Twenty years after Thunderdome, Max is back.
In a career that veered off into films about talking pigs and dancing penguins, original director George Miller returns to his creation with Mad Max: Fury Road, in theatres Friday.
Mel Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky, but some clever casting has an original actor returning to the franchise. Hugh Keays-Byrne played Toecutter, the lead bad-guy in the original, and he's the main antagonist in Fury Road, Immortan Joe. (He's the guy in the skull half-mask in the trailers.)
What's unknowable about Fury Road is how much resonance its themes will have with contemporary audiences. The threats of war, lawlessness and gas shortages seemed tangible in the early Max films. Will Fury Road's apparent environmental collapse seem too distant or abstract in our time of drone strikes, smartphones and electric cars?
I hope someone coming fresh to the brutal world of Mad Max via Fury Road will have it imprinted on his or her mind as vividly as the first film was on mine. And I hope they, too, pause to guess at what the world may be like, a few years from now.
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