7/1/2023 0 Comments Mad max 2 cover![]() So now we can comfortably talk about the thing.Īs I was saying, The Road Warrior is surely the perfect sequel. Mad Max and Mad Max 2 look very similar Mad Max and The Road Warrior can be quickly distinguished and leave no room for any confusion. But that is not the reason I shall hereafter refer to the movie as The Road Warrior I have far more boring pragmatic reasons. Including the present author, though I've only ever actually watched the film in prints that show the title as Mad Max 2 (the currently in-print DVD and Blu-ray have it as such). It was called, in the States, The Road Warrior, and that is how those of us who grew up in the States have learned its name. prepared to release the sequel into the United States in 1982, the company (correctly) felt that marketing the film as a sequel to a movie that few people had heard of and fewer had actually seen would be commercial suicide, and so they retitled it, based on the film's dialogue. The film is known by that title everywhere in the world except for North America the original Mad Max had received a virtually invisible release in 1980, the victim of immensely poor timing, with its distributor American International Pictures in its final death throes at exactly the same time. And if you'll let me pause on that very ebullient sentiment, a note on usage. Decades later it still comes on like gangbusters, offering a visceral oomph quite unlike anything else.Mad Max 2 is, maybe, the perfect sequel. Time hasn't diluted The Road Warrior's impact. Miller directs scenes of hell-for-leather roadside anarchy with galling flair, bringing together a dream team of collaborators – from the gritty cinematography of Dean Semler (who also shot Phillip Noyce’s classic Dead Calm) to composer Brian May’s pulse-pounding score. Mad Max 2 is the sort of film he was talking about. In director Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood, which chronicles the perverse highs and pulpy lows of Ozploitation cinema, Quentin Tarantino remarked that Australian film directors “manage to shoot cars with a fetishistic lens that just makes you want to jerk off”. ![]() ![]() Slouched back, observing the locals argue about whether to leave or stay and fight, Max says: “You want to get out of here? You talk to me.” The scene culminates with a classic line. Thirty minutes in there is a magnificently bizarre sequence in which Humungus, seeking the camp’s oil, addresses the crowd while two victims are tied to the front of one of his henchmens’s cars, positioned like a horrible alternate take from Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris. Almost one third of it is devoted to an epic chase scene involving Max, a semi-trailer and an army of highway ruffians. As one character puts it, the film is about war and survival. He is then introduced to a camp of desperate people harangued by an evil overlord, a buff, mask-clad, Bane-like villain called Humungus (Kjell Nilsson). Men like Max.”Ī nomad wandering across a landscape perverted by lawlessness and despondency, Max, who in a former life was a police officer, meets a flamboyant bug-eyed misfit Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence). ![]() “And in this maelstrom of decay ordinary men were battered and mashed. “The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice,” the narrator says. Voiceover narration overlaid on to a black-and-white newsreel sets the scene for Road Warrior, based in a grim future where civilised society has been replaced by a wasteland of people either fighting for fuel or protecting their supply. Hopefully the similarities end there and Mad Max: Fury Road – the belated fourth instalment, slated for release mid-2015 – won't trigger comparisons to the ill-fated Star Wars prequels. Like 1983's Return of the Jedi, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome digressed into derivative exotic settings. Like 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, Road Warrior extended the film's universe in dramatically and technically interesting ways. Like 1977's A New Hope, it started strong with Mad Max. Structurally the series bears similarities to the original Star Wars movies, which were released in the same period. The Mad Max trilogy concluded with Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, which featured a delirious performance from Tina Turner as an evil queen. The plot isn’t sophisticated but, given the cyclonic energy with which Miller moves images, characters and set pieces, it doesn’t need to be. ![]() All these years later Road Warrior moves like a bat out of hell and stands alone – like Max lit against a crimson sunset – as a foot-to-pedal road movie without comparison. ![]()
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