1981: THE ROAD WARRIOR

What’s it about?

Mel Gibson is a drifter in a brutal post-apocalyptic Australia where transportation equals survival. He gets a tip from another drifter about a source of limitless gasoline -- a settlement with a working oil well. (And apparently an on-site refinery?) When he arrives, he finds it already under siege by a gang of sadistic marauders.

Gibson manages to get himself taken prisoner by the settlers, who he learns want to haul away the vast quantities of gas they’ve stored up to a place on the coast where they expect to find civilization. He cuts them a deal -- he’ll find a rig big enough to escape with their tanker in exchange for his freedom, his car, and all the fuel he can carry. But after Gibson fulfills his part of the bargain, circumstances cause him to stick around to help out with the escape as well.

Is it any good?

THE ROAD WARRIOR is a rare kind of sequel -- one that’s not only better than its predecessor, but also more distinctive and memorable. In fact, if you’ve never seen the movies, then most of what you think you know about MAD MAX (1979) is probably actually from THE ROAD WARRIOR.

MAD MAX is one of those classic science fiction movies that I watched as a teenager and didn’t really like very much. There are a lot of these, but unlike many of the others my opinion of MAD MAX hasn’t changed very much in the intervening decade. One problem I have with the movie is that it’s really barely science fiction at all. It takes place in a future Australia where the crime rate is high and the cops are consequently pretty brutal. But that’s about the extent of the speculation. Some folks refer to the world of MAD MAX as “dystopian”, but I honestly don’t think we see enough of it to make that kind of judgment. In fact, one of the few moments of cultural or political import is the release of a criminal by the cops because of a due process violation. That hardly seems dystopian to me.

Dystopian or not, one thing that MAD MAX clearly isn’t is post-apocalyptic. The movie’s version of Australia doesn’t look like the nicest or most luxurious place to live, but society seems to be largely intact and there’s no hint that any extraordinary disasters have ravaged the planet. But some time between the end of MAD MAX and the beginning of THE ROAD WARRIOR, some global cataclysm does occur.

In some ways, the change is bizarre -- Mel Gibson’s character seems to have walked out of one movie and into the next without being affected by whatever wars and famines have been raging around him. In other ways, the change makes sense -- the devastation of the outside world is a melodramatic echo of Gibson’s own feelings at the end of MAD MAX. But the change makes all the difference to the two movies (along with a huge increase in budget and a tighter story that relies far less on the idea of justifiable homicide).

MAD MAX is a revenge story -- sort of. I say “sort of” because only the last twenty minutes of the movie are about the revenge part. Up to that point, it’s a series of increasingly nasty standoffs between Mel Gibson’s police officer and a gang of lawless thugs. After a lot of dancing around, the thugs eventually commit the biggest error a movie character can commit -- they mess with Mel Gibson’s family.

I’m not really a big fan of revenge movies since nobody really ever wins. Even if you believe in the concept of justifiable homicide (and I don’t), killing off all the bad guys doesn’t really fix anything. Usually that’s partly the point of such movies, but MAD MAX doesn’t really seem too interested in examining anybody’s motives or the consequences of their actions. Like in old westerns, there’s a sense that even though the bloodshed achieves nothing, it’s necessary nonetheless to get “justice”. Frankly, the whole movie is just kind of a bummer.

THE ROAD WARRIOR, on the other hand, has an almost redemptive story. Gibson’s Max starts out the movie the same way he ended MAD MAX -- grim, friendless, hopeless, and alone. (Though he does pick up a dog somewhere.) His interactions with the settlers are not exactly groundbreaking -- he acts the same predictable way as hundreds of fictional mercenaries-with-a-conscience have before him -- but at least the arc allows for some character growth. It’s true that he doesn’t agree to help the settlers escape until after his car’s been wrecked and his dog’s been killed by the marauders outside the town -- in other words, not until he’s lost everything once again. But this time, instead of taking justice into his own hands alone, he returns to a community of people with whom he has common needs.

The escape itself is pretty exciting as well. Gibson and a handful of others drive the fuel tanker in one direction (knowing that the gang will follow them), while the rest of the settlers escape going another way. The budget for THE ROAD WARRIOR was supposedly ten times that of MAD MAX. If that’s true, then it’s clear where all the money went -- right into stuntman salaries and vehicles to be destroyed. The final chase takes almost the whole last third of the movie and is suitably epic. If anything, the odds seem stacked too severely against the good guys, and several sympathetic characters are dispatched in casually gruesome ways. Director George Miller isn’t above ratcheting up the tension by having Mad Max send a child out onto the hood of the speeding rig to retrieve a shotgun shell, either, so that’s the kind of action we’re dealing with here.

Escape with the rig ultimately proves impossible -- the gang are too many and the defenders too few and too exposed. But there’s a neat moment when they finally bring the tanker down and discover that it’s full of sand instead of fuel. It’s not exactly clear whether Gibson knew this or not, but the movie seems to hint that he didn’t know. I really like that wrinkle in the ending, since it seems to confirm Mad Max’s misanthropy -- even these nice settler folk have taken advantage of him and tricked him into risking his life for a tanker full of sand. But of course, the tanker’s real mission was to serve as a decoy that would allow the rest of the settlers to escape. The defenders who stayed with it must have known they were going on a suicide mission, so whether it was full of gas or sand was irrelevant to them.

THE ROAD WARRIOR is also the movie that codified a lot of the weird look of post-apocalyptic stories. A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975) did some of it first -- like the barren desert settings, the constant fighting over scant resources, and some of the whips-and-chains weirdness -- but THE ROAD WARRIOR revels in such details to a far deeper degree. And, being a worldwide blockbuster that made Mel Gibson into a star, it popularized them far and wide. In fact, THE ROAD WARRIOR was much more successful outside of Australia than MAD MAX was. In most of the world, it was called simply MAD MAX 2 -- despite making little reference to the events of the first movie and having arguably a completely different setting, it was apparently always meant to be a direct sequel. But since few people in the U.S. had seen MAD MAX by 1981, the title was changed for American distribution. As far as I know, the movie is still just called MAD MAX 2 in most of the world, but since I’m American I will keep calling it THE ROAD WARRIOR instead. It’s a better title anyway.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

One final note. Most of the movie holds up these almost thirty years later, but one exception to that is perhaps part of the depiction of the murderous gang. In MAD MAX, there are vague but repeated suggestions that at least some of the bad guy bikers are homosexual, or at least bisexual. These same suggestions return (in even greater force) in THE ROAD WARRIOR -- despite the fact that this is an entirely different murderous gang. There is no doubt that there’s at least one out and proud homosexual relationship among the marauders, and the rest appear to be enthusiasts of various flavors of what the personal sections in newspapers used to call “alternate lifestyles”. I’m not sure what the intention was in 1979 and 1981 -- if the audience was supposed to be further repulsed by finding out that the bad guys are not only murderous, but also appreciate punk fashions, experiment with bondage gear, and are tolerant of homosexuality. But watching the movies now, it has the weird effect of making the gangs somewhat sympathetic. There were moments when I could see them as practically surrogate families for each other, providing a supportive environment for lifestyle choices that weren’t likely to be accepted in square society. Of course, they’re still sadistic and evil rapists and killers, so that feeling never lasts too long.