Just go with me on this one, The Road Warrior is the most subdued Mad Max movie. Yes it has a man named Humungus in a Jason-style hockey mask and very little else. Yes it has Bruce Spence flying around in a one-seat helicopter dropping snakes on fools. Yes there’s a feral child with a razor blade boomerang, but if you take it with the other movies, The Road Warrior is kind of low key and, dare I say, realistic?
Critical Mush in conjunction with The Society for the Preservation of Weird Cinema presents:
A Mad Max Retrospective Part 2
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior – 1981
It begins with a voice over telling the story of how we got from the end of Mad Max to where we are now and I don’t think this movie is given enough credit for how prophetic it is and may turn out to be. The obsession over fossil fuels and our dependence on it is the only thing that movies should be about at this point. This one, rather than scaling with time, now feels like it could take place in like, December.
The Road Warrior is very good. Mad Max is wild, but it’s not seamless. The Road Warrior is pretty seamless. The plot is structured well and it’s all believable in the world where it lives. There’s some great camera work you don’t get to see very often. There’s a whole scene in the beginning where Max is casing an oil refinery that’s either been built or commandeered by the people for whom we will shortly be rooting. He’s up on a hill with his dog and he’s just watching. We see this whole drama play out between the good guys and Humumgus’s gang from WAY far away. We’re zoomed out so we see all this great action but from a unique perspective. The cars look like toys which is fun, and you get a great sense of the scope of the wastes and all the work that went into building that refinery both as a fictional place and as a movie set.
There’s lots to love about this movie. There’s not a ton of dialogue because ya don’t really need it. There’s very little to talk about in the wastes other than the heat. Although try telling Humungus that, Guy likes to grandstand. So much so he has an emcee played by Max Phipps making the most of his one scene. Everyone is solid, Mick Jagger look-a-like Michael Preston is a decent and honorable leader. The unexpectedly hot Virginia Hey keeps it cool. I mostly bring her up because her IMDb bio tells the incredibly detailed story of her harrowing battle with cancer all the way up to about a month ago. She’s doing ok for now, but let’s all wish her well. Bruce Spence as The Gyro Captain is bringing all the charisma – he probably wins best actor in the movie. Vernon Wells as Wez is psychotic in his feathered shoulder pads. You may know Vernon Wells in Commando as “Guy Who Gets Killed With a Big Pipe.”
I forgot to mention Brian May composed the score for Mad Max. He does so again in The Road Warrior. It’s excellent, but I’m never sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing when I find myself thinking about the music in a movie. Yes this music rocks but shouldn’t I be thinking about what’s happening?
Halfway through The Road Warrior, you start to see why Fury Road is so good. Miller took all the elements that worked from his previous 3 films and put them all together.
In Mad Max you get the general outline of the world and, in the beginning, a line about blasphemers. It’s almost a throw away but it’s clearly something Miller liked so in Fury Road he cranked it up and made his War Boys religious zealots.
In The Road Warrior you get a ton of the genetic material that would later form Fury Road. More outrageous costumes, the idea of the tanker truck as the mother ship in the chase, little dune buggies and motorcycles hissing and zipping around it, people staked to the front of vehicles, Humungus and Immortan Joe, two masked warlords, hell you even have the concept of going out and then turning around and heading straight back into the teeth of danger. It’s almost as if George Miller just kept making the same movie over and over again until he got it perfect.
In The Road Warrior he got close but there was more work to be done. I remember Beyond Thunderdome being bad, but I’m excited to give it a fair shake. You can’t go wrong with either of these first two though. The Road Warrior delivers in every scene, and let’s face it, may become required educational viewing as we continue to tempt the apocalypse with our every waking action.
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