It’s strikingly clear that George Miller is passionate about the stories he creates. While his initial 1979 Mad Max movie was far from perfect, the concepts were beginning to emerge. It felt like Mad Max just needed a bit more pressure before it became the diamond that it is. Miller’s second attempt in 1981, The Road Warrior, was a far better and much more developed movie. In this version of a post-apocalyptic world, we no longer see beaches or forests like in the original film. The landscape is a wasteland through and through. Society is built purely on winding roads and hand-built mechanics, far removed from the beachside house Max Rockatansky once peacefully lived in with his family. Throughout the first film Max loses more and more: his friends, his job, his home and family, and it breaks him down. He is left alone and with nothing else to lose, and Max decays the same way society and the land around him have been in the aftermath of nuclear war. By the time we see Max in The Road Warrior, both the world and himself have transformed into something unrecognizable against their past.
The Road Warrior feels like the quintessential Mad Max film, whereas the original 1979 movie is something more akin to a prequel. What makes this movie so distinct is how unbashful it is. It’s definitely raunchy and violent at times, but that adds to the world rather than making it a worse film. It’s practically the point of the film, what would happen if the world lost all rules and structure and was overtaken by biker gangs? Not a lot of good, that’s for sure. Max Rockatansky goes through a major arc in the first film, which highlights the change from family-man and cop to vigilante, someone totally disconnected from any societal structure. In The Road Warrior, we see Max viewed as this mythic legend. He’s more of a comic book character than ever, while Mad Max 1 serves as his origin story.
Like the land around him, Max is deteriorating as well. The leather jacket he wears is worn and ripped, and he’s no longer clean-shaven. We see tools like a wrench, a flashlight, and multiple holsters strapped to his outfit, highlighting his need to rely only on himself and have everything available quickly. He’s also gained a white stripe in his hair since the last film, something that immediately stood out to me as a reflection of Toecutter, the main antagonist from Mad Max. His new look is less uniform, and more costume, like how more intricate leather and decorated outfits are often indications of untrustworthy characters. His style highlights his status as an anti-hero prepared for whatever he comes across in the wasteland.
One element that didn’t carry over so well from the original movie were the villains. In a wasteland with no rules and thousands of miles of road in which to play around, a Mad Max movie demands a good antagonist to rival our main character, who loves a battle. Hugh Keays-Byrne’s Toecutter was a stand out from the first film, the leader of his biker gang who was equally as psychotic as he was playful. In The Road Warrior, the big bad is Lord Humungus, played by Kjell Nilsson. Nilsson does a fine job, but Humungus doesn’t exactly get the chance to prove himself as a threat the same way Toecutter does. Lord Humungus feels above his own gang, letting his henchman carry out the work for him in a way that makes his character feel sidelined. Instead, his second in command, Wez, a mohawked, chaps-wearing biker definitely takes the spotlight as far as villains go. Humungus’ gang initially attacks a remote commune to get access to their oil, which they’ve stored in a massive truck. But when the “Feral Kid” whips out his metal boomerang and kills one of their members, it becomes personal. The gang member killed has only been seen riding on the back of Wez’s bike before this, and Humungus has to hold Wez back when he rages in grief, saying “We do it my way. Their fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. Then you shall have your revenge,” before choking Wez unconscious. It’s moments like these that give me glimpses of the characterization I had hoped for.
The world in The Road Warrior has been expanded on much more since the first film, yet the differences and rules of this new society are never explicit. Characters like Humungus are clearly affected somehow by the nuclear war mentioned in the beginning of the movie. We see Humungus’ bald head with stray hairs in clumps. Throughout the film he wears a metal hockey mask and a collar that takes up his entire neck. In a man-eat-man apocalyptic world, it makes sense that these weaknesses would want to be hidden. But while Lord Humungus has clearly risen to the top, the implications made about his character are disconnected from what the film tells us explicitly.
Early drafts of the film included the reveal that Lord Humungus was actually Jim Goose, Max’s old cop partner who was ambushed and burnt alive in Mad Max. Unfortunately, this idea was scrapped due to most American audiences being unfamiliar with the first film. I wish Miller could have found a way to work this in anyway, because it explains a lot of Humungus’ disconnect from Max, presumably trying not to get recognized before he could reveal himself and his motives. I recall watching the movie for the first time and predicting some sort of face reveal. While I never guessed a twist like bringing back Goose, I definitely would have found it effective and it would have made Lord Humungus a better, more interesting villain.
When the movie starts, Max is alone. He’s lost all structure and community, be it friends, family, or a job. His only companion is a dog, who he obviously can’t properly communicate with. He’s a loner who is roped into helping a community only after he believes it will benefit him. Max fends off Lord Humungus and his gang going after the commune, and offers to help get rid of them in exchange for fuel. Mad Max looks out for himself, tries to distance himself from any sense of connection, because all he’s known is loss. If we had seen Max confront his past face-to-face via Jim Goose transformed into the evil that caused all his pain, it would have made for a compelling moment and look into Max as a character. Yet, without this lost plotline Max still tells a story of a man who’s tired of getting hurt, trying desperately, and perhaps even failing, to not succumb to the evil that destroys the land.
There’s definitely an argument that Mad Max as a franchise isn’t supposed to be character or backstory centered, and that what defines them is the post-apocalyptic world, and of course, the cars. I tend to feel pretty neutral about action movies, but I can’t deny the sequences of these modified cars, motorbikes, and trucks all speeding down seemingly endless roads in pursuit of one another are exciting. These chase scenes are clearly a passion of George Miller. It’s the way he’s able to make both the drivers and the vehicles equally compelling characters during a chase that makes them so thrilling. At a certain point you have to just start sitting back and enjoying the visuals and stop trying to make sense of anything. How many times can a car really take being crashed into? Would the explosion really be that big? It doesn’t really matter. All you should focus on are the swarming dust clouds, the wide shots of vehicles swerving in and out, both signatures of a great Miller-style car chase.
The Mad Max movies are rough around the edges, and sometimes disparaged (especially the first one), but this is what makes the movie for me. On the surface level, yes, it’s a movie about cars, explosions, and survival, and if that’s what a viewer wants to take away from it, that’s completely valid. But reducing it just to those labels as a way of dismissing it, is to ignore the purpose behind them. The Road Warrior is a movie about violence and action because that’s the film Miller set out to create, it’s the world he envisioned and turned into reality. Mad Max is a passion project that was given a chance to be expanded on, and George Miller’s passion fuels this movie and its sequels like the gasoline fuels the trucks of the wasteland.
