He Lives Now Only in our Memories: THE ROAD WARRIOR (1982)

OK, let's see if I can write the opening narration of The Road Warrior entirely from memory:

"My life fades. The vision deepens. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos, broken dreams, this wasted land. But most of all I remember the road warrior, the man we call Max. To understand who he was you have to go back to another time, when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel.

Gone now. Swept away. For reasons long forgotten two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze that engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing, their great machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Men began to feed on men. A whirlwind of looting; a firestorm of fear.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare; only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. And in this maelstrom of decay ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max; the warrior Max. In the roar of an engine he lost everything. He became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland.

And it was there, in this blighted place, he learned to live again..."

That was solely from memory, and it's accurate as far as I know. I quoted this opening passage for two reasons. First, to prove that I love The Road Warrior as one of my very favourite films. And second, to show how damned elegant the film is and how it elevates the story of Max from a weird cult action film (1980's Mad Max) into a grand postapocalyptic myth.

The beginning of George Miller's The Road Warrior (known outside North America as simply Mad Max 2) is easily one of the most interesting and engaging introductions to any genre film. The narration quoted above is read over a collage of stock footage of human atrocity and various shots from Mad Max to set the stage, to orient the viewer to the world they are about to enter. At the end of the last line (...in this blighted place, he learned to live again...") the screen fades to black and the gut-punching dinosaurian roar of an engine fills the soundtrack, and the camera pulls out of the engine intake of Max's V8 Interceptor and pans across to reveal Max at the wheel, now in glorious scope widescreen (as opposed to the titles and opening stock footage in the standard academy 1.33:1 ratio).

Miller has dropped us straight into the furious, violent world of Max's postapocalyptic wasteland, all that remains of humanity following the global collapse of civilization after some unnamed disaster. The third film in the series, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, identifies the apocalypse as a nuclear war, but in The Road Warrior we are left to come to our own conclusions -- in our current age it could easily be the end of oil and global warming. The setting is universal enough to always appear to be part of the zeitgeist. What happened is besides the point of course; Miller's film is not a message movie, it is simply concerned with telling a thunderingly kinetic narrative on a canvas of classical myth.

And the opening sequence following the prologue is, naturally, a car chase, with Max (Mel Gibson, in a magnetic lead performance) eluding several punks from the 'Humongous' gang of roaming wasteland scavengers. And this ain't no CGI. This is the capricious, torturous scream of metal on metal, real stunt drivers doing genuine stunts, a showcase for the immersive texture that authentic stuntwork brings to a film, something far more adrenalizing than pixellated substitutes vectorized together by a team of computer nerds could ever hope to be. As the first sequence demonstrates, The Road Warrior is one of the all-time great vehicular stunt films.

A great example of lean cinematic narrative, too, is this opening. With no dialogue and a simple directorial style, Miller shows us that Max is completely alone, that he exists solely to find gasoline to continue driving the wastelands, that he is a force to be reckoned with, and that his car is his lifeline. It also sets up a plot point for later in the film. Like I said, economic.

Speaking of economic, it's not until about 10 minutes or so in that we get the first line of dialogue, cult Australian actor Bruce Spence (who later turned up in The Matrix Revolutions and The Return of the King extended version) as the Gyrocaptain hopping rodent like on the scalding hot desert sand, thinking he's got the drop on Max. The tables are soon turned, of course, and the Gyrocaptain drives the story proper into gear by introducing Max to a remote oil refinery that is guarded by a ragtag group of survivors lead by the strong-willed Papagello against the Humongous, led by the Lord Humongous and his henchman Wez (who Max encountered in the opening), desperate to possess the precious juice.

The Road Warrior unfolds as an action film version of the classic, enduring lone hero myth, whereby a wandering hero reluctantly aids his fellow humans and in so doing causes the rebirth of a part of his world. With very few lines of dialogue, Gibson builds a magnetic screen character, carrying Max from the bleak ending of the first film, driving aimlessly after slaughtering the killers of his family, into the logical place he would be in this film. As the opening says, "a burnt out, desolate man."

That a seemingly unsympathetic, unfeeling character becomes an attractive screen hero is a testament to Gibson's performance, the spare but effective writing, and Miller's careful direction. The story takes Max on a journey, forcing him into helping the survivors escape the Humongous and the wasteland and, however reluctantly, transforming him into the saviour of this lone band. Even if we haven't seen the first film (and I hadn't when I first saw this second installment), we get the sense that Max is scarred and hurting inside, that his seeming indifference to fellow humans is a defence against ever having someone precious taken away again. And so a laconic, mean bastard like Max becomes a sympathetic hero that we root for. It really is extraordinary how The Road Warrior pulls this off.

The film is elevated considerably by a unique and memorable cast of supporting characters. Vernon Wells creates one of the great screen villains in Wez, formidably built, growling in a low monotone, mohawked, and outfitted like all the outlaw gang in post-punk uniform scavenged from the "corpse of the old republic." The Lord Humongous, leader of the gang, is a hockey-masked gladiator with a build like Schwartzenegger. The Gyrocaptain is the film's sole comic relief, a jumpy, quirky character who takes an incredible amount of punishment from Max and still bounces back wanting to be his partner. Then there's the Feral Kid (Emil Minty), a wild child who survives in the wasteland by hunting with a razor-sharp boomerang, and who views Max as a father figure. The community in the refinery has several notable characters, including the mechanic that seems to spend his time hanging in a sling from a mini-crane and his slightly dizzy assistant; a war-helmeted, eccentric old man; a gorgeous amazonian warrior woman (who, confounding cinematic cliche and our expectations, does not become Max's new love interest); and Papagello, the strong-willed, articulate leader.

The Road Warrior builds steadily, deliberately to its astounding final setpiece -- a 20-minute chase sequence with Max at the helm of a huge tanker containing the prized gasoline, pursued by the outlaw gang, with Wez at the head, aching for blood. It's one of the great sustained action sequences, a thunderous, unrelenting crunch of car stunts and violence, ingeniously and imaginatively staged, sharply and coherently edited, and brought to life with exhilarating stuntwork. It ends the film with cathartic, satisfying bombast.

And the coda of the film cements Max as a mythic hero, the terrific final shot a pullback from Max while the narrator intones "And the road warrior? That was the last we ever saw of him. He lives now only in my memories." As a bookend it works effectively to give a sense that this is a story that has been told to us as Homer told the story of Odysseus, and that it is a tale that will be repeated through the generations.

The Road Warrior scales heights that few action films do. The recent Blu-Ray release of the film is stunning in its clarity. Small details are now visible, such as a vein pulsing on the head of the Lord Humongous, and the whole movie has a more film-like appearance. It's a significant upgrade to the old laserdisc version I own, and is highly recommended to fans of the film. Curiously, the title of the film on this print is Mad Max 2, and it appears to have a few seconds of additional gore, so perhaps this is an international version that was cut in North America.

The Road Warrior stands easily among my top ten favourite films.