The Road Warrior
There are a lot of loud, whining engines in THE ROAD WARRIOR. There are people being killed, maimed and immolated. Of the characters who survive this tale, very few come through without scars.
It’s a post-apocalyptic nightmare where hope fights despair. The irony of Max’s character is that even though he’s one of the good guys, he’s probably the most desperate of the lot. This is the tale of Max’s pain and how he rose above it to become a legend.
This is not the same Max we saw in MAD MAX. This Max has been poisoned by tragedy and loss, and the anger of the past has refined into a tiny hard ball of self-involvement. It seems fitting that civilization fell so soon after Max suffered his losses–almost as though when Max lost his place in the world, the world changed to find a new place for him.
THE ROAD WARRIOR touches on one aspect of the end-of-the-world scenario that has always fascinated me: if the world ends, how many of the survivors will know how and why it happened?
These people don’t have time to contemplate that–the once-civilized world has become an enormous hunting ground where the prize is the precious little bit of gasoline that remains. With the world in shambles, the only things left for most people to do are eat, make love, drive really fast, and die. In the midst of all these lost souls, one small group has manufactured hope by restarting a refinery and producing enough gasoline to allow them to escape to a better place.
THE ROAD WARRIOR is so far removed from the fallen civilized world it replaced that we don’t even get a sense that any of these people even remember what the world was like before. We haven’t got a clue what any of them did prior to the fall. (Yes, we know Max was a policeman, but we know that from MAD MAX–it’s never really touched upon, here.) In THE ROAD WARRIOR, the conflict has been distilled to an abstraction, with the good guys as desperate in their Hope as the bad guys are desperate in their Despair.
It catches you up from the beginning, rocking your screen and your sensibilities with high-speed stuff that, for once, isn’t mindless. How long can you survive in a world where people are willing to kill you for whatever gasoline remains in the tank of your car? You bet you’d run, and run fast and hard. It’s a horribly Darwinistic world where the desire to hold on to some small facet of the past drives people to lives so pointless they don’t even bother to ask why they’re living this way. Heaven help you if you actually want to take the tools of the past and use them to build a real future.
