mad max fury road
Tom Hardy survives explosions and dangerous cars in the new "Mad Max: Fury Road" trailer. Warner Bros. Pictures

What originally started as a low budget dystopian film set in the Australian outback starring a then unknown Mel Gibson has spawned one of 2015’s hotly anticipated films, “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

In the 1979 film, Max Rockatansky (Gibson) is a police officer fighting to keep law and order in the dire times of fuel shortages. Motorcycle gangs destroy his home, and Max must avenge his fallen partner and family. Director George Miller reportedly shot “Mad Max” for under $400,000 and enjoyed a worldwide gross of $100 million. Two sequels, “Mad Max 2” and “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” continued the fuel shortage plot and experimented with more elaborate costumes and cars.

Director Miller walked away from the series in 1985 to try more conventional fare like “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Happy Feet.” Now that’s he’s back in the driver’s seat of the Mad Max series, he’s joined up with a new Max in Tom Hardy. Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz and Nicholas Hoult will ride shotgun in the fourth installation of the series. “Mad Max: Fury Road” follows Max Rockatansky (Hardy) as he teams up with Imperator Furiosa (Theron) to survive desert wasteland and car gangs.

Here’s a few of the top moments from the new trailer:

1. Run! Hardy! Run! The trailer opens with a fast-paced chase already in progress. Max looks to be escaping from about half dozen shirtless captors before making a leap for freedom.

2. Get little hints of the plot. “We are not things!” yells an unseen woman to the Bane-masked baddie (presumably Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus) at the 42 second mark. He responds, “Where is he taking them?!” suggesting Max is perhaps rescuing Furiosa at the start of the film.

3. Best costumes, best chastity belt. From “Mad Max 2” and on, Miller became a lot more liberal with the series’ costumes to create the look of a dystopian future starved of fuel. Somehow, this translated to lots of leather, white tunics, chain mail and chaps. This is the second trailer to show off the latest in "Mad Max" style, a spiked chastity belt.

4. Half of the movie is probably car chases. If car chases compose of nearly 75 per cent of the trailer, that’s a reasonable expectation, right? There’s spiked cars blowing up other cars in large mushroom cloud of flames. There’s a shot of a motorcycle on top of a train at some point, and there’s even a car flipping into a spiked ditch at the 1:20 mark. "Mad Max: Fury Road" might even put the aerial shots in “Furious 7” to shame.

Below is the trailer making its theatrical debut ahead of that other car movie, “Furious 7" in theaters this Friday.

“Mad Max: Fury Road” opens nationwide on May 15.