With his low-budget revenge
movie, Mad Max (1979), Australian
filmmaker George Miller created one of the most kinetic action spectacles by
choreographing car chases in a way that was unique. They were depicted
viscerally, putting you right in the action. The film was a massive success,
launching the careers of both Miller and its young star, Mel Gibson. The
filmmaker briefly pursued another, unrelated project while turning down several
offers from Hollywood before deciding to make sequel only with much more money
that would allow him to push his brand of visual storytelling to a new level.
The end result was Mad Max 2 (1981)
a.k.a. The Road Warrior, an
unrelenting journey into a post-apocalyptic world that would prove to be hugely
influential, spawning numerous imitations and two sequels that Miller would
helm.
After briefly recapping the
events depicted in Mad Max, we meet
Max (Gibson), a hardened scavenger eking out a desolate existence in the
wasteland. Miller wastes no time launching into the film’s first action
sequence as Max is pursued by three vehicles populated by leather-clad
marauders armed to the teeth and whom he handily bests. This sequence sets the
tone for the rest of the film and serves as an introduction to its style. Like
any good action director, Miller understands how an action sequence is edited
is just as important as how it is choreographed. There is a wonderful economy
of style as he conveys the speed and ferocity of violence in this world. He
also demonstrates a confidence in his ability to tell a story visually with the
first ten minutes devoid of any dialogue save for the voiceover narration that
briefly establishes the backstory of this world.
The first bit of dialogue
comes from a fellow scavenger known as the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence) that Max
encounters. He’s the complete opposite of Max – chatty and high-strung. Max
bests the Gyro Captain and he tells him of a fortified oil refinery a few miles
away. The settlers that populate it are under constant siege by a large group
of marauders led by the muscle-bound Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson). Max’s
run-in at the beginning of the film was with members of this gang – one of whom
survived and goes by the name of Wez (Vernon Wells). The two men will mix it up
repeatedly over the course of the film.
Miller makes a point of showing
just how ruthless these marauders are when a bunch of them intercept two
settlers trying to escape in a vehicle. They are captured and after gravely
wounding the man, rape the woman, killing her afterwards. This scene is
important because it shows how the marauders differ from Max. He’s not like
them. He may be an opportunist out for himself but there is still a shred of
the good man he was in Mad Max.
Max bargains his way into the
settler’s camp and visually Miller sets them apart from the marauders with
their white tunics and body armor, which is in sharp contrast to Humungus and
his black leather-clad bikers. We soon get a proper introduction to the nasty
marauders with a darkly comic scene that sees Humungus announced as the
“Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rollah” by one of his hapless subordinates (Max Phipps)
who foolishly tries to catch a sharp, metal boomerang only to have several of
his fingers lopped off. This scene also provides intriguing insight into the
tumultuous relationship between Humungus and Wez, an impulsive mohawked biker,
and his best enforcer. Miller does a fantastic job of conveying the dynamic of
this gang by the way they act and how their attitude is embodied by Wez. It’s a
fascinating albeit brief window into how they work, leaving us wanting more
because they are such a colorful, outrageous bunch, much like the biker gang
that terrorized Max in the first film.
The settlers are led by a man
known as Pappagallo (Michael Preston) who dreams of escaping their compound
with a tanker of gas to the ocean and he strikes a deal with Max to find a rig
that will haul it. Of course, it’s never that easy as the film hurtles towards
the inevitable confrontation between the marauders and the settlers. Along the
way, Max is befriended by the Feral Kid (Emil Minty), a wild child whose only
form of communication is grunts and growls, and who is the owner of the
aforementioned boomerang. He, more than any of the other settlers, is
responsible for awakening Max’s humanity, giving him something to care about
once again. Despite his best attempts, the setters’ plight affects Max and,
coupled with no other option left to him, decides to help them.
Mel Gibson delivers a
deceptively complex performance as we see Max go from a man that cares only
about himself to a man that helps others. It is a tough journey as he initially
rebuffs the settlers despite Pappagallo nailing what makes Max tick: “You happy
out there, are ya? Wandering, one-day blurring into another. You’re a
scavenger, Max. You’re a maggot. You’re living off the corpse of the old
world.” These words and prodding into his tragic past get to Max and he finally
reacts emotionally – the first real time he’s done so since the film began.
It’s a pivotal scene because it is the beginning of Max caring about something
other than himself. Alas, it is going to take hitting rock bottom for him to
finally come around. Gibson does a good job of showing the inner conflict
playing out over Max’s face in this scene.
Bruce Spence’s gregarious
Gyro Captain provides the film with welcome comic relief and he plays well off
Gibson’s stoic Max. He, along with the Feral Kid, help humanize Max. The Gyro
Captain talks a good game but is a bit of a scammer only to find a purpose
among the settlers. Wez is Max’s opposite, a wild animal that has to be kept on
a leash, literally, to curb his wilder impulses only to be cut loose when his
primal instincts are needed. Miller sets up the conflict between them right
from the start, having the two men cross paths repeatedly until the exciting
climax where they finally settle things once and for all. Vernon Wells delivers
a larger than life, muscular performance, playing a memorable baddie that is
exciting and scary because Wez is such an unpredictable character.
Mad Max 2 culminates in a much-lauded extended chase sequence as Max drives
a tanker truck through the marauders. The action is beautiful orchestrated
vehicular mayhem as cars and people go flying through the air, metal is twisted
and mangled – all in the pursuit of the precious gasoline. The end result is
one of the best chase sequences ever committed to film. Everything has been
building up to this point and we’ve become invested in not just Max’s story but
also that of the settlers. We want to see them survive.
After Mad Max grossed $100 million at the box office, Warner Bros.’
international marketing division encouraged director George Miller and producer
Byron Kennedy to make a sequel. For the latter, the impetus to make it came
from liking “traditional Hollywood American film, and I want to make those
sorts of movies.” Mad Max 2 was an
opportunity for Miller to work with a larger budget of $4 million – ten times
the amount of the first one, which was made for $400,000 – which allowed him to
have better equipment. This enabled him to stage more elaborate stunts and
shoot in a more remote location with a bigger, more professional crew. One of
his frustrations making Mad Max was
that he made it with a television crew that were used to doing things a
specific way. His new crew, including cinematographer Dean Semler, was more
adept and willing to “give anything a go – it’s crazy but give it a go, we’ll
back you all the way.”
Miller started off with a
basic story and a premise:
“That, suddenly, there would
be no energy. No electricity. So,
people would rush down to their supermarkets and take whatever was left in the
refrigerators. They would find other people already there. There would be
fights. We would have no gas for our vehicles. Very quickly, things would reach
a Darwinian stage where human beings would have to survive as best they could.
Some would, undoubtably, choose a brutal lifestyle, consuming whatever was
left, since no more goods would be
manufactured. But there would be pockets of people who would try to make a new beginning…”
For the marauders that
terrorize the settlers, Miller imagined them as warriors:
“He would, therefore, need a
bike for mobility, and also because it uses less fuel than a car. He would need
to be protected, so he would need weaponry. If he can get a gun, he can’t find
bullets, so he would fashion a kind of crossbow, which he would wear on his
arm. That way, it’s also easier to fire when he’s riding a bike.”
Mad Max 2 was shot in the desert, in and around Broken Hill, a mining town
800 miles west of Sydney during the Australian winter of 1981 over 12 weeks
with 120 crew members, 40 actors and over 80 vehicles.
Mad Max 2 received mostly positive reviews from
critics. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “The
filmmakers have imagined a fictional world. It operates according to its
special rules and values, and we experience it. The experience is frightening,
sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating.” In his review
for The New York Times, Vincent Canby
wrote, “It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive,
occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences
flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.” The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris felt it
was like “experiencing a motorized Stagecoach.”
However, Pauline Kael wrote, “There are perhaps 10 minutes of spectacular
imagery, and if you think of George Miller as one of the kinetic moviemakers,
such as John Carpenter and George A. Romero, he’s a giant, but he’s pushing for
more and he apparently doesn’t see the limitations of the kind of material he’s
working with.”
While it’s true that Mad Max 2 spawned many imitators – a
cottage industry of post-apocalyptic movies – no one has been able to top it,
not even Miller with its sequel, Mad Max
Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but he came close recently with the masterful Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which proved
without a shadow of a doubt that he is still an action movie maestro par
excellence.
Mad Max 2 is essentially a western masquerading as a post-apocalyptic story
with cars and motorcycles instead of horses. Max is a hired gun who comes in to
help a group of settlers defend their land from an army of vicious marauders.
He is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name characters in the
spaghetti westerns he made with Sergio Leone. Both characters are men of few
words who prefer to let their actions speak for themselves. For all of its
gritty action, Mad Max 2 is
ultimately a mythic tale with Max as its iconic hero who we last see battered
but not beaten, refusing to go with the settlers because he doesn’t belong in
their world. He’s the classic uncivilized outsider, much like John Wayne’s character
in The Searchers (1956), still out
there, somewhere, surviving, as the voiceover narration intones with those
classic last lines, “And the Road Warrior? That was the last we ever saw of
him. He lives now…only in my memories.”
SOURCES
“Australian Screen: George
Miller.” 2006.
Barter, Paul. “Still Crazy
After All These Years.” Hotdog. February 2005.
Lofficier, Randy &
Jean-Marc. “George Miller on Mad Max
and The Road Warrior.” Starlog.
September 1985.
Van Hise. James. “The Road Warrior.” Starlog.
August 1982.
