The Road Warrior
Especially in the wake of “Grindhouse,” with car chases staged for their own sake, it’s exhilarating to see George Miller’s action masterpiece, a sequel to the ultra-low-budget (but still brilliant) “Mad Max.” (In Australia it was released in 1981 as “Mad Max 2″; in the U.S. it came out a year later as “The Road Warrior” because the original had not been seen here.) Miller stages car chases that the fate of humankind will turn on, at least humankind as it exists in the post-apocalyptic Australian outback. Which, if you find yourself in the Australian outback after the apocalypse, is the only humankind that matters.
Mel Gibson stars as Max Rockatansky, a former highway patrolman whose family was slaughtered in the first movie. Now, he’s cast adrift, driving aimlessly and picking fights with the hooligans who rule the roads. Their supremacy, though, is tenuous, contingent on their ability to procure the world’s most precious commodity: gasoline. The success of “Mad Max” afforded Miller a much bigger budget, allowing him to etch a post-apocalyptic wasteland more convincingly. Plus, we get to see how society has devolved since the first movie, when anyone could fall victim to roving gangs but some semblance of civilization remained. In “The Road Warrior,” it’s a free-for-all. The police force is a distant memory, and Max drives the last remaining “Interceptor” cruiser.
Miller’s pace is relentless, his action superheated with tension and kinetic energy. He uses “wipes” to transition between scenes more evocatively than even George Lucas. The score, the pace of the editing, everything propels the movie relentlessly forward. The story is beautifully simple: Max stumbles upon a refinery guarded by a dwindling number of ordinary men, women and children. They are beseiged by the villains, clad in outlandish S&M gear (some are openly homosexual, although it appears to be a choice driven by the scarcity of women, as in prisons). After tangling with one of the nastiest bad guys, a Mohawked psychopath named Wez (Vernon Wells), he agrees to salvage a rig that will help the good guys drive out of the wasteland to safety. (I had to look up Wez’s name; people rarely refer to each other by names, and in the credits the monikers of important characters are mostly descriptive, like the Gyro Captain and the Feral Kid. Conversation has become a relic of a kinder, gentler time; the Feral Kid doesn’t talk because he doesn’t need to. He growls.)
“The Road Warrior” is a gearhead’s paradise. Octane is king. Miller conducts a symphony of collisions: steel against pavement, flesh and more steel. Movies like this are why movies were invented.