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Can’t wait for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga? 5 post-apocalyptic movies from Asia to watch, from Akira to Snowpiercer
- Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly on hellscapes. From Hayao Miyazaki to Bong Joon-ho and Louis Koo, Asian filmmakers have delivered post-apocalyptic hits
- Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira offers a towering vision of a dystopian future, and Shinsuke Sato’s I Am a Hero revived the zombie feature ahead of Train to Busan
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Next week, Australian filmmaker George Miller whisks audiences back to his signature desert hellscape with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
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Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy star in this prequel to 2015’s multi-award-winning Mad Max: Fury Road, and the fifth film in the franchise overall, laying out the origin story of the one-armed warrior previously played by Charlize Theron.
Since the first Mad Max film back in 1979, Miller’s dust-choked, gas-starved vision of the future has inspired generations of artists and filmmakers with its feverish combination of post-apocalyptic cyberpunk chic and edge-of-your-seat daredevil stunt work.
In anticipation of the new film, we look back at five of our favourite depictions of an uninhabitable future in Asian cinema.
1 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s breakthrough anime combines ravishing visuals with a powerful ecological message, establishing a formula the celebrated auteur would return to time and again over the course of his career.
Set 1,000 years after a global conflict destroyed civilisation, Miyazaki’s post-apocalyptic vision finds isolated clusters of survivors fending for themselves in a hostile wilderness overrun by poisoned forests and marauding giant insects.
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