The Road Warrior 10 Things That Still Hold Up Today

The Road Warrior: 10 Things That Still Hold Up Today

After setting the first Mad Max movie in a dystopian near-future, George Miller dived headfirst into a post-apocalyptic wasteland for the sequel.

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George Miller introduced audiences to a dystopian near-future and turned Mel Gibson into a movie star with 1979’s Mad Max. After that movie became a sleeper hit at the box office and Miller had the freedom to follow it up with a sequel, he went a step further and plunged Max into a gonzo vision of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

1981’s The Road Warrior has been widely praised as one of the greatest action movies ever made, filled with breathtaking car stunts and masterfully staged battle sequences. After 40 years and countless imitators, the Mad Max sequel still holds up as an entertaining spectacle of a fictional future mired in chaos and bloodshed.

10 George Miller’s Vision Of A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

The apocalypse hadn’t quite happened yet in the first Mad Max movie. The 1979 original took place in a more or less familiar world in which natural resources are dwindling and humanity is getting more and more violent.

In the second movie, Miller took that sci-fi dystopian vision to the extreme by jumping forward to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where those natural resources have dried up completely and law and order is a thing of the past. As a result, some characters sport bizarre costumes and headgear to protect themselves from the unforgiving environment. In addition, vehicles are less designed for comfort and more for survival.

9 Impressive Car Stunts

Just like all the other Mad Max movies, The Road Warrior is a breathtaking showcase of vehicular carnage. The movie’s action scenes are filled with impressive practical automobile stunts that recall classic car chases from Bullit and The French Connection.

A crack team of stunt drivers put their lives on the line to capture Max’s chases with the Marauders. Miller doesn’t shy away from the action as he films these stunts with an intimacy that is both exhilarating and frightening. The CGI-heavy action sequences of today’s blockbusters don’t hold a candle to the kinetic realism of in-camera stunts.

8 Great Visual Storytelling

George Miller’s acclaimed filmmaking style – especially in his action movies – is marked by his use of visual storytelling and minimal dialogue. If a plot point can be expressed visually as opposed to using exposition, then Miller will avoid spelling it out.

In The Road Warrior in particular, Miller tells as much of the story visually as possible, resulting in an action masterpiece that can be understood in a foreign language or with the sound on mute. He later used the same technique for Fury Road, which expertly conveyed the antagonistic relationship between Furiosa and Max with almost wordless fight scenes and silent glares.

7 Western Overtones

In the original Mad Max, Max was a cop in a crime-ridden dystopia. In the sequel, he’s a lone wolf grieving his wife and son’s murders. George Miller used this setup to helm The Road Warrior as the quintessential post-apocalyptic western.

In The Road Warrior, Max is reimagined as a Man with No Name-style spaghetti western antihero roaming a lawless frontier, reluctantly doling out vigilante justice. Miller took two familiar genres and combined them into something unique.

6 Dean Semler’s Landscape Photography

Italian western filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci used the Almería province of Spain as a shooting location to double for the American frontier in their spaghetti westerns. George Miller instead used the vast desert landscapes of the Australian Outback – particularly Broken Hill – to bring his western-inspired wasteland to life.

Miller’s cinematographer, Dean Semler, was noted by critics for his gorgeous widescreen photography of the sun-drenched vistas of Australia. These shots are still just as dazzling today as they bring to life a fantastical reality where violence is rampant, water is nowhere to be seen, and the barren desert is as empty as the souls that ride across it.

5 Mel Gibson’s Nuanced Turn As A Man Of Few Words

In the first Mad Max movie, Max had very little dialogue, but his wife and son were still around in the early scenes, so he talked to them. The second one takes Max’s economical dialogue to the next level, as Mel Gibson has just 16 lines in the whole movie. Just like in the first movie but even more so, Max’s limited dialogue forced Gibson to convey most of the character’s grief and anguish through facial expressions alone.

4 The Shock Value Of Max’s Dog’s Death

Although he travels by himself in the wake of his wife and son’s murders, Max has a canine sidekick in the early scenes of The Road Warrior. Max’s pet Blue Heeler sits in his passenger seat, filling the emotional void left by his family’s murders. Midway through The Road Warrior, this dog is killed by a crossbow-wielding Marauder.

This gives Max the same motivation as John Wick, and just like in John Wick, the death of an adorable dog gets the audience behind the hero’s brutal quest for revenge. The killing of a dog is always going to be more horrifying for audiences than the killing of any human.

3 Brian May’s Orchestral Score

George Miller brought back composer Brian May (not to be confused with the Queen guitarist) from the first Mad Max movie to create the score for the sequel. Whereas the first movie utilized brass compositions and mechanical sounds, the second movie is more closely influenced by the grand, operatic quality of western music by legendary composers like Ennio Morricone with instruments like bass and cello. These orchestrations went a long way toward making The Road Warrior feel like a post-apocalyptic western.

2 The Explosive Finale

Just ahead of The Road Warrior’s final act, there’s an all-is-lost moment in which Max is hopelessly defeated by the Marauders and left for dead. This sets up a suitably large-scale climactic set piece for one of the most celebrated action movies of all time.

As an injured Max hops on the rig, embarks on the ride, and contends with Lord Humungus’ army-on-wheels, George Miller indulges in an elaborately staged battle sequence set across a convoy of speeding vehicles. This climactic fight delivers a cathartic release for audiences, who have witnessed Max be abused, beaten, and nearly killed for 90 minutes.

1 The Framing Narrative With The Feral Kid

At the end of The Road Warrior, Max has successfully defeated the Marauders and the settlers are free to establish the “Great Northern Tribe.” The final scene reveals that the story is being told years in the future by a grown-up version of “The Feral Kid,” the tribe’s new leader. Since the fabled Road Warrior disappeared after saving them, he now lives on in legend.

This framing device is a great way to end the movie because it shows the lasting effects of Max’s heroic actions. It also establishes that the Mad Max cinematic universe is being told in the form of myths from the future, allowing for narrative experiments like movies starring Tom Hardy’s Max and the upcoming Furiosa prequel.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/the-road-warrior-ten-things-still-hold-up-today/

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