The Road Warrior Reviews

Director George Miller, whose MAD MAX set new standards of kinetic, visceral excitement, surpasses himself with the sequel. The film is set in a savage, post-apocalyptic world devoted solely to the pursuit of gasoline with which to fuel surviving vehicles. Max (Mel Gibson), whose wife and child were killed in the previous movie, has become an alienated drifter. He is led by the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence) to a small oil refinery populated by the "good" people under the leadership of Pappagallo (Mike Preston). Their precious encampment is continuously besieged by an army of grotesque, nomadic desert rats led by a massive bodybuilder known as the Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), who wants their gasoline. In one of the most spectacular chase scenes ever put on film, Max and his comrades fight off a series of vicious high-speed attacks from a convoy of bizarre vehicles. Miller brings every visual trick in the book into play, creating a stunningly detailed, vibrant new world that never ceases to amaze. He pulls all the fresh and original elements of MAD MAX together, and straightens out his earlier muddled narrative style into a strict linear plot that rips along at a breathtaking pace. In addition, THE ROAD WARRIOR has a connotative richness unusual for an action film, drawing equally on cinematic history (Max's relationship with The Feral Kid echoes SHANE), classical literature (the film is replete with references to the Iliad), and myth (Miller was a devotee of scholar-guru Joseph Campbell long before his work on myth and the heroic tradition became inescapably trendy during the late 1980s). Perhaps needless to say, this is the film that made Mel Gibson an international star.