I didn’t see any of them opening night until FR but I was lucky enough to see Mad Max 2 (sorry I’m Australian and this is what we call it) at a local film festival. Amazing 70mm experience.
You're lucky and I envy you! I wish I had seen Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) without any prejudice or preconception with a fresh mind on a big screen. I did, however, see it on video only a few months after its release, so there was some sense of discovery about it.
In North America (Canada on my end) the first Mad Max was something of a pulp b-movie that played at drive-in cinemas. I still remember seeing the newspaper ads with the poster art and wondering what this odd curiosity was. We didn't have the convenient terminology for dystopian post-apocalyptic/future-past genres of sci-fi at our disposal (it existed, but wasn't commonly thrown around to identify the genre in film) to know what it was. The second Mad Max (Road Warrior) was a minor hit with good reviews behind it, but still a relatively small release that flew under the radar of most theatre-going audiences. Fair to say, Road Warrior was more of an outsider cult hit in 1981, with the burden of an R-rating, and I was only 12 years old, so I couldn't see it in the cinemas anyway.
Not soon after both films became big home-viewing video hits with a solid following. They also played on TV all the time throughout the 80s and 90s. Road Warrior was one of the first VHS tapes I ever rented, and was a film I often re-rented and I watched with my best friend on repeat, many times over, slowed down and reversed and forwarded, just to catch all the stunts and various details. It's still one of those films I can watch at any given time because it's such a tight, clear, concisely linear narrative and "efficient" piece of filmmaking (there's no extraneous scene or material in it, no waste or misstep in storytelling). Road Warrior never ceases to hold the viewer's attention and really is one of those "near-perfect" films that adheres to its intentions and delivers on its promise.
Fury Road doesn't hold quite the same appeal as Road Warrior, but I don't believe any Max film can or will ever again match that one true sequel-classic. A classic that singularly defined its genre. But Fury Road is a pretty good testament of what a Max film should likely be in this age – keeping in mind film screenplays/scripts simply don't tell stories the way they did 40 years ago – and I'm just glad a generation has
their Max film. Fury Road still has a lot to like... A LOT!... and I do believe Fury Road is more meaningful and personal to young audiences who discovered it fresh in 2015, more than any prior Max film might be to them. We have our Max and they have theirs, and it's all part of a great world that Miller built and gave us.
More than anything I'm grateful that Miller returned to the Max franchise at all and approached it with the same unhinged guerrilla/punk filmmaking sensibility that he had decades ago. Fury Road is NUTS and so is Miller! I've been a longtime admirer of Miler's work and think he's is old enough, and has done enough unrelated films, that it would have been easy for him to age himself out of Max and never return to the franchise or, at best, just hand it off to a studio and some other filmmaker. I think we're pretty lucky Miller came back to Fury Road with the same, or relatively similar, sense of purpose, integrity, fever and "FURY" and re-built that classic Max world for us. Despite Fury Road's minor problems it was awfully exciting to return to Miller's Max after 30 years and see that so much of the original concept was respected, adhered to and intact in 2015.