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Perfect Movie II: George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR

 Mel Gibson. George Miller, Warner Bros., 1981


Today, I watched two movies on BLURAY, George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR and Arthur Barron's JEREMY. A post-apocalyptic chase movie and an early-'70s coming-of-age romance. Not an expected pairing. I just bought a new BLURAY player. A friend sent me a box of movies. ROAD WARRIOR & JEREMY were the two about which I felt most excited.

And yet.

JEREMY may be a straight coming-of-age teen movie, but THE ROAD WARRIOR, in its way, also deals with childhood's end. ROAD WARRIOR begins with b&w news footage, repurposed from WW2, to stand in for WW3, showing the audience the failure and annihilation of the adult world, civilization. Shifting to the present, the desolate landscape roamed over by fanciful machines driven very fast by men in costumes, men with dyed mohawks, men in bondage wear, Miller shows us a world of people brutalized by and shocked out of humanity, other than in the most base, narcissistic, infantile way. Tribes out of Golding, though man-size, range across the Outback, scavenging, preying on one another for increasingly-scarce gasoline, for new vehicles to drive very fast, wasting gas, in order to attack other tribes and take their gas. To drive very fast and waste gas - it's childlike behavior. 

It's all short-term gain, brute survival, what-I need-right-now. It's wasteful, self-sabotaging, the way unsupervised, unregulated, entitled kids can behave. It's no accident that both Max and the Feral Kid respond to the music maker as they do, or that their responses are so similar. 

In ROAD WARRIOR and each movie thereafter, Miller brings Max Rockatansky, who used to be an adult, in fact an authority figure, a cop, face to face with a situation requiring he abandon his self-centered, self reliant life, no matter how much he says it's about his self interest. In ROAD WARRIOR, unknowingly driving the decoy allows the tribe to escape north and prosper. Max doesn't come across entirely unhappy knowing he served a bigger purpose. 

MAD MAX 3 sees him saving kids, who establish another new people, a step back toward the civilization he cannot rejoin. In FURY ROAD it's pregnant supermodels, but the point is the same. Max has to put away childish things long enough to give other people the chance he denies himself. 

Whether you buy that or not, THE ROAD WARRIOR remains one of the best action movies I've ever seen. I had not watched it in about 30 years and it more than stood up. The later films evolved a Apocalypse Gothic aesthetic, but ROAD WARRIOR, a relatively low budget followup to MAD MAX, looks and feels so elemental, so skeletal and stark. I forgot that. Those later movies look great, and FURY ROAD IS great, but they're both still ringing changes on the sequel. As a franchise, MAD MAX reminds me of THE TERMINATOR, where the first movie has been eclipsed by the second to the point that all future films owe more to it than its predecessor.

These notes aside, I can't imagine what else I could say about THE ROAD WARRIOR others haven't, and more than once. They're called storied movies for a reason. Like ROCKY HORROR, I know it's a film I love far too much to be objective. I can only try to find different ways to praise it on each successive viewing. People will never see me complaining about it.

Which makes it like JEREMY in another way. It's perfect. 

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