That's the definitive difference between this film and Mad Max, and it entirely favors the sequel. And so, before it even starts its plot, The Road Warrior has already overleapt its predecessor to become an honest-to-God myth we are positioned decades after the events we're about to watch unfold, and invited to think of the film as a legend happening in real time. He is the Road Warrior, a spirit of loss and tragedy roaming the wasteland until he has boiled away the last of his self. It's in this world that our narrator positions Max (Gibson), "a shell of a man a burned-out, desolate man". And since a car in the desert is nothing but an immobile oven if you can't make it run, the meager resources of gasoline still remaining have turned into the most precious substance in the Outback. In the long term, even the spare framework of industrial civilisation remaining in that film has rotted away, and the machines left behind by the world's collapse have become the fetish objects of the humans left.
In the short term, that led to the sagging, tired Australia of Mad Max.
MAD MAX 2 COVER SERIES
The film starts with a series of impressionistic snatches of imagery from Mad Max, from the end of The Road Warrior, and from news reels, with an aged narrator (Harold Baigent) recalling how all the civilisations in the world collapsed following a global war which avoided using nuclear weaponry (that favorite crutch of the post-apocalypse set), but still managed to leave the world in a pile of shit, by tapping all the resources available.
MAD MAX 2 COVER MOVIE
And it is surely the single best post-apocalyptic movie ever made - and in its wake, there were a shit-ton of post-apocalyptic movies that copied its "leather daddies in the desert" aesthetic without a tenth of the inspiration or success - and as much respect as we should give to the exemplar of any genre, that happens to be one for which I have totally disproportionate affection anyway. At any rate, I'd have a hard time scrounging up anything that's wrong with it where it has limitations in its character writing and acting, it patches over them with its very particular tone, and it has not other limitations that I can speak of. In fact, The Road Warrior is such a perfect sequel that it also happens to be damn close to a perfect movie in and of itself. It is both "more of Mad Max", and "more than Mad Max", as beautiful an example of a filmmaker getting to do more of the same thing only with more resources and experience and as a result creating something that's better in almost every way than its predecessor (we'll get to the hedge in that "almost" soon enough). It greatly expands upon the world established in the first film without any contradiction it replicates the elements of the first movie that were most successful without simply repeating them. Structurally and as a story, it follows logically on from the circumstances of Mad Max, but it is entirely self-contained in its arcs, and can be readily appreciated with no more background than that provided in an opening montage including some footage from the earlier film (as is neatly attested to by the film becoming a hit Stateside and a star-making vehicle in the American film industry for Mel Gibson, despite most Americans having no clue what went on in Mad Max). So now we can comfortably talk about the thing.Īs I was saying, The Road Warrior is surely the perfect sequel. Mad Max and Mad Max 2 look very similar Mad Max and The Road Warrior can be quickly distinguished and leave no room for any confusion. But that is not the reason I shall hereafter refer to the movie as The Road Warrior I have far more boring pragmatic reasons. Including the present author, though I've only ever actually watched the film in prints that show the title as Mad Max 2 (the currently in-print DVD and Blu-ray have it as such). It was called, in the States, The Road Warrior, and that is how those of us who grew up in the States have learned its name. prepared to release the sequel into the United States in 1982, the company (correctly) felt that marketing the film as a sequel to a movie that few people had heard of and fewer had actually seen would be commercial suicide, and so they retitled it, based on the film's dialogue. The film is known by that title everywhere in the world except for North America the original Mad Max had received a virtually invisible release in 1980, the victim of immensely poor timing, with its distributor American International Pictures in its final death throes at exactly the same time. And if you'll let me pause on that very ebullient sentiment, a note on usage.
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