Road Warrior, The (1981)

July 2, 2003

by Nathan Shumate

aka Mad Max 2

Directed by George Miller
Written by Terry Hayes and George Miller with Brian Hannant
Starring
- Mel Gibson
- Bruce Spence
- Mike Preston
- Max Phipps
- Vernon Wells

Yes, I can hear you from here: “Doesn’t the Internet already have enough freaking reviews of The Road Warrior?” Yes, it probably does, but up until now, it hsan’t had my review of The Road Warrior. And since I’ve sentenced myself to watching an entire month of post-apocalyptic movies, I decided to start with the movie ancestral to most of them.

Not that The Road Warrior was the first post-apocalyptic movie, by any stretch. Ever since the spectre of outright societal annihilation first reared its head, people have been making features about the aftermath thereof. (It’s worthy to note, up front, that The Road Warrior isn’t strictly a post-apocalyptic movie, in that there is no distinct cataclysm bringing the world to an abrupt halt. Things just generally fell apart, giving us a movie which is very much set in a post-civilized milieu.) But The Road Warrior managed to invent (or re-invent) a set of tropes which plenty of bottom-feeding moviemakers (notably Those Durned Italians) managed to imitate, with varying degrees of success, for the next decade.

A man who knows what he likes… and he likes androgyny!

Our hero, or anti-hero, is Max (Mel Gibson), title character to Mad Max, to which this movie is a sequel. Of sorts. Truth be told, the American retitling was a stroke of genius, both because relatively few people outside of Australia had seen Mad Max in theatrical release, and because a knowledge of the first movie is in no way necessary to understanding the second. There’s a one-minute recap of just who Max is and how he got all tortured and burned-out at the start of this movie, but even that’s pretty much unnecessary. World-weary loners with a soul-destroying history that you really shouldn’t ask about have been a staple in cinema for decades, in some genres more than others. (More on that later.)

Anyway. Max, former cop, is now a lone scavenger in the broad wastelands of Australia, living from tankful to tankful of the gasoline necessary to get around, rendered so rare in the general social and economic collapse. He starts things off right by pissing off a marauding mohawked punk listed in the credits as Wez (Vernon Wells, who’s had quite a career as a psycho heavie in genre flicks). He then runs into a character known only as “The Gyro Captain” (Bruce Spence), who becomes the Nonodious Comic Relief as Max and his dog drag him along with them. The Captain, see, barters his life in their little confrontation for some information: He knows where there’s a working oil refinery, still pumping and refining gasoline, and he offers to guide Max there.

Max arrives to find the refinery under siege by The Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), a desert warlord who wears a leather harness over his waxed muscular physique and a hockey mask — in other words, he’s the fetish porn version of Jason Voorhees. And among his retinue, surprise surprise, is Wez. Just after Max gets there and starts observing the refinery from afar, several vehicles leave the refinery and try (not terribly successfully) to pull and end-run around the besiegers. Max manages to free one of the survivors and take him back to the refinery, using the rescue as his ticket inside.

Nice sky? Yes. Nice guy? No.

The occupants, who all wear white and off-white wraps like some post-industrial Bedouins, are under the benign leadership of Pappagallo (Mike Preston, whose other genre claim to fame is as Jared-Syn in Charles Band’s Metalstorm — how’s that for a resume?), who’s trying to engineer an escape for them. See, they have a tank full of gasoline, but no truck to pull it. That’s what the escaping scouts were looking for: a rig that could haul their gasoline to somewhere where they could use it as a downpayment on a new life. After some more siegish confrontations with The Humungus, Max lays out a deal: He saw a rig like the one they’re looking for back where he had his run-in with Wez. They give him enough diesel to carry out to the truck and get it started, he’ll get it back to him. Then they’ll give him enough gasoline to fill up his booby-trapped tanks, and he’ll be on his merry way.

This is probably a good point to jump in and talk about some of the other characters. There really aren’t any. I mean, there are plenty of actors with lines, but there isn’t much time or inclination in a movie like this to give each one much more than a name and an attitude. But the one that everybody comes away from this movie remembering is the Feral Kid (Emil Minty). He’s one of the least annoying child characters of all time, owing to the fact that he has absolutely no dialogue beyond grunts and laughter. But he latches on to Max as a role model/father figure, and is delighted to tag along and help, and in the process give Max an opportunity to show some flashes of his human side through his crusty exterior. (He also has a mullet which must have impressed Mel Gibson, as Gibson wears exactly the same ‘do in the first couple of Lethal Weapon movies.)

Anyway. Describing the plot of the rest of the movie (Max gets the truck, drives it back, tries to leave with his gasoline, gets caught by Humungus’ boys and left for dead, makes it back to the refinery and offers to drive the truck for them) doesn’t even come close to doing it justice, because everything is decked out with chases and stunts that make Indiana Jones look like Whistler’s Mother. 1981 was a pretty damned good year for vehicular stunts, actually, with Raiders of the Lost Ark coming out at the same time. But while Raiders‘ stunts (and those of just about every other action movie since) have a whiz-gang appeal to them, those in The Road Warrior coat at least as much energy in grit and grime; not only to the characters run the risk of getting shot, crushed, or otherwise dispatched, they all look like they should get a tetanus shot on top of everything else.

Now THERE’S a hood ornament.

Not that everything is always moving; that’s a filmmaking style that only came into its own from the mid-90s onward, right about the time that every movie reviewer’s spellchecker learned to recognize the word “hyperkinetic.” George Miller had learned an awful lot about the art of directing in the two years since Mad Max, as he presents scenes which are not only compelling in their kinetic and narrative momentum, but which also pauce for purely visually arresting tableaus. That’s yet another feature that inspired so many people to imitate this movie: the imagery is so memorable in its combination of desert landscapes and machinery redesigned for neo-savagery.

But here’s what I think is the single most important feature in the success of this movie, and therefore in the urge to imitate. Think about this a second: a stark desert backdrop. A scruffy antihero with a tortured past. A small community, far from the rule of law, beset upon by savage marauders. Sound like any film genre you know?

That’s right. George Miller managed to reinvent the Western.

Howdy Doody… of the future!

Not the Gene Autry type, mind you. We’re talking the grimmer Westerns of the ’60s and ’70s, populated with antiheroes who bore stubble just like Max’s on their chin. Westerns as a film genre died shortly before The Road Warrior came along, both because of the inevitable ebbs and flows of audience tastes, and because Americans were becoming less and less comfortable with the automatic good guy/bad guy labels that were part and parcel of cowboy-and-Indian movies; the rosy spectacles of Manifest Destiny were slipping off the nation’s nose, as it were. (Yeah, I know — I give myself about a week to really, really regret ever inflicting that metaphor on the world.) The Road Warrior manages to take the most compelling elements of the Western mystique, combine them with the social anxiety of the decade (something which the imitators took further, making most of their settings distinctly post-nuclear), and gave us substitute Indians which, thanks to the fictional milieu, didn’t have any inconvenient historical contradictions to interfere with their role as EE-vil marauders. (Tell me that the last shot of The Road Warrior isn’t a direct reference to the final image of John Ford’s The Searchers. Go ahead. I won’t believe you.)

Which also explains why the Italians were so ready to jump on this particular bandwagon. Not only had their Spaghetti Westerns helped establish the anti-hero Westerns of the previous decades, but because of the Western/Post-Apocalyptic cross-pollination, they already had the elements in place: a landscape familiar to Spaghetti Western audiences, and actors and writers used to tales about stony-faced protagonists standing up to villainous scavengers to protect the struggling frontier village. It’s all from the same factory with just a few die changes; all they needed was some punked-up motorcycle clothing and a few gas guzzlers with grills and spikes attached.

(Yet another sidenote: The Road Warrior makes the gasoline economy one of the driving forces of the plot. Later imitators, wanting to maintain at least the semblance of originality, made water the valuable commodity, or more general raping ‘n’ pillaging. But because they wanted to keep the same visual style as The Road Warrior, they kept the armored gas guzzlers. Which means that most post-apocalyptic movies are chock-full of huge V8′s roaring around a decimated landscape, with no way to fill up their tanks.)

“No more gardening tools!”

Which is why, even though this is a sequel, the details of Max’s past aren’t at all necessary to its enjoyment. After all, no one feels cheated when Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” never reveals his inner demons, do they?

There’s more worthy of analysis here — just delineating the movie’s subtext on the wholesome nuclear family unit vs. the aberrant sexuality of the marauders could take paragraphs (all of the bizarre homoerotic subtleties of the first movie are brought out into the open here, right down to Wez’s cheekless leather pants) — but I’ll leave something for you to discover. It’ll give you an excuse for the repeated viewings that this movie deserves.