The Road Warrior (1981)
The follow-up to 1979’s Mad Max is called, very simply, Mad Max 2 in its initial release in Australia and other countries where it proved lucrative. However, in the United States, where it was the original was poorly distributed and barely seen by most Americans, it was retitled to The Road Warrior, primarily because would figure, probably rightly, that few people would see a film called Mad Max 2 if they’ve never heard of Mad Max. That alternate title has proven to take hold so that most countries call it by the fuller title, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, to avoid all confusion.
The narration that bookends the film implies that, while it is all set in a post-apocalyptic future in which society’s dependence on oil and other resources eventually led to nuclear war and the subsequent collapse of civilization, the events in between the narration is set sometime in the past (approximately five years after the events of Mad Max). No wife, no child, no job, and no home, The Road Warrior finds the titular hero of Mad Max just living from day to day with just his Australian Cattle Dog ( by his side, in pursuit of scrounging up enough food and gas to make it to the next instance.
His wanderings through the now lawless Wasteland formerly known as Australia take him to a fortified oil refinery where there’s plenty of precious fuel, but a vicious gang of murdering marauders, led by a hockey-masked and muscle-bound leader named Lord Humungus, wants to get their hands on it, giving the residents an ultimatum of imminent death should they not comply with their demands. The colony living there needs to escape in a hurry but wants their fuel. Max (Gibson) strikes a bargain — he’ll secure an abandoned big rig for them to haul their fuel in exchange for as much gas as he can carry away in his car. The problem is that the Marauders aren’t going to let anyone escape without a fight.
Sequels that are better than the original films are few and far between, but The Road Warrior is a prime example of one that is superior, almost without question. It has a better story, more explosive action, crazier stunt work, more adept direction, more gorgeous cinematography, and, this time, a score that actually enhances rather than detracts from the momentum. It’s a much more violent film than the first in terms of showing the actual violence on the screen, though it was meant to be even more so than we see in the finished product, due to the Australian censors requesting several of the more graphic acts to be pared out (an uncensored version of The Road Warrior has never surfaced.) It continues portraying Max as an anti-hero, perhaps even more so in this film as he is no longer bound by his duty as a cop, and is exceedingly reluctant to choose sides in the battle to come, even though he clearly views them as good vs. evil.
As with Mad Max, George Miller makes this simple premise work by being edgy and unpredictable. Characters are fallible, and some you’d think are slated to live at the end up biting the dust before it’s over, and there are a few other surprises strewn about. Although still a motor vehicle western in story, Miller takes less of a spaghetti western stylistic approach than in his previous effort, mixed with story elements from 1953’s Shane (especially in the feral kid character) and 1975’s A Boy and His Dog, going more for the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg way of filming that was rampantly popular in the early 1980s, snatching Lucas’ penchant for taking elements of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films (something Sergio Leone had been enamored with as well for his Westerns), as well as his adherence to Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” blueprint for storytelling, injecting Max into the basic formula.
Miller was surprised to have learned how well Mad Max has translated to different languages and many cultures, each who viewed his character through the lens of their own myths. Miller felt that building on that myth through Campbell’s studies as developed in his “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” would only further the connection with people around the world to his character arc. Not only Max, but each character, from Humungus to the Gyro Captain, would have a rich backstory developed that made them who they are by the time we see them within the film, even though that back story might never be explicitly expressed within the dialogue.
The themes of the film encroach into a well-trod Western territory, mostly in the differential between communities striving for civilization and the uncivilized horde (complete with bows and arrows, while the most notable one, Wez, sporting the Native American hairstyle known as the Mohawk) in the untamed lands, who seek only to exploit those who want to build up their way of life (they wear lots of white, in contrast to the marauders clad mostly in black, with the exception of Max), mostly to enrich themselves for the day. There’s a moment in the film in which the clan at the oil refinery are offered a bargain – life and safety if they just walk away and let the marauders have their fuel. A debate erupts among them on the right path to go, ultimately deciding to fight, mostly because they realize that without a place to call home, they will end up no better than the marauders in the end.
This is also implied by Max, the former cop (if you tack on continuity with the first film) who is now a do-for-self drifter (a la the spaghetti westerns that George Miller uses as inspiration), as well as the leader of the villainous gang, Lord Humungus, who rationalizes that his cutthroat way of life is the only way to survive now and that they’ve all lost someone they loved to the scourge of anarchy. (Originally, Humungus was meant to be revealed as Goose from the first Mad Max, who completely has surrendered to the scum he once took down as an MFP officer, but Miller eventually decided against explaining his origins.) By contrast, Pappagallo (the Italian word for parrot), the leader of the refinery’s tribe, says that they’ve lost much too, like them, but they are still human beings, with dignity – the only difference between them and the garbage outside is that they haven’t given up.
As for Spielberg’s style, The Road Warrior and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out the same year, feel very similar in the way they’re shot with zooming close-ups. Both films also feature extended battle sequences for control of a large truck, though, in Miller’s film, it’s the main set piece of the climax, making it the most important part of his film. Spielberg liked Miller’s work so much, he hired him for his next production, directing the best of the four stories for Twilight Zone: The Movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. And oh what a sequence that truck siege ultimately is, with huge stakes for the film, and for its characters, with nail-biting tension and intrigue, culminating in one of the most memorable narrative turns, followed by one heck of an iconic shot of the battered hero as the film drifts into its epilogue.
To create the look of a post-apocalyptic world, the locale for filming would be a flyspeck town about 800 miles west of Sydney, in a mostly abandoned mining town called Broken Hill. It had been a mining town that for a mine that had excavated all of the known ore that could be extracted, prompting most who had relocated there to move away. The costs for shooting and staying there were, therefore, less expensive (although already the most expensive Australian production to that date), and the run-down nature of the mostly desolate environs fit in perfectly with the “civilization on the decline” nature of the story. As everyone was dressed up in punk-rock hairdos and fetishistic wardrobe, few, in any, would question their appearance on and off the set, especially as the town’s remaining inhabitants worked as extras for the film.
Gibson is as assured a hero as he has ever been, but, with only sixteen lines of dialogue to utter, the real star of the movie is the stunt work, which is absolutely insane. It’s hard to believe stuntmen weren’t severely maimed or killed on the set on a daily basis, given how dangerous and destructive many of the stunts look to be. It’s bonkers, and then some. It might be built on a thin comic book premise, but for all-out action movie fans, it doesn’t get much more thrilling and exhilarating than this.
Miller had conceived of The Road Warrior as the end of Max’s journey, wanting to leave his legacy as a drifter unknown, but its financial success would see him return several years later when a semi-adaptation of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, following a group of kids who live in a post-apocalyptic world, didn’t pan out. He would eventually mold that screenplay into what would become Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
George Miller would also revisit the Road Warrior‘s structure and execution again in Mad Max: Fury Road, which is essentially a reinterpretation of the structure of The Road Warrior with higher production values, more pageantry, and modern thematic underpinnings. It would also be proclaimed by some as the best in the series, and, improbably, even garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Qwipster’s rating: A
MPAA Rated: R for strong violence throughout, brief nudity, and some language.
Running Time: 95 min.
Cast: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Emil Minty, Mike Preston, Max Phipps, Vernon Wells, Kjell Nilsson, Virginia Hey, William Zappa
Director: George Miller
Screenplay: Terry Hayes, George Miller, Brian Hannant