Mad Max 2: Road Warrior

Mad Max 2 is widely thought to be the better of the three existing Mad Max movies (Rumors of a Mad Max 4 circulate periodically, but so far without credibility.)

Future Dystopian

The original Mad Max movie gave no explanation of how Australia, where the film is set in the near future, degenerated into the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the film. The Road Warrior handles it with a voice-over in the opening:

To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled the cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive.

Civilization versus Anarchy

In the post-apocalyptic world left by the destruction of the great powers, those with access to fuel were the powerful. As we've often seen in the past few decades, when civilization breaks down, strongmen vie for control. In Road Warrior, it is the wheeled gangs, living on the plunder of civilization, that are warring against the few remaining pockets of a gentler society.

For there are a few hold-outs - settlements where people have banded together to provide for their mutual defense, to educate their children and hold back the lawlessness. Our hero Mad Max, wandering the outback with his dog, stumbles across such an outpost. They are protecting a working oilwell from the savage gangs that would enslave them and take their fuel. And they are now surrounded.

Max negotiates a way out for the settlers - he will provide a rig to haul their full oiltanker out of the trap, in exchange for limitless fuel for his own vehicle.

Spectacular chases

While The Road Warrior isn't much for dialog, it set the standard for lavish chases of bizarre vehicles. Punks, thugs and bandits variously driving and riding motorcycles, dunebuggies and assorted four-wheeled chariots against Mad Max in a Mack truck provide one of the most spectacular and thrilling pursuit sequences ever filmed.

Of course, good triumphs over evil and the thugs are confounded. And Max? In choosing to help those who hold on to the vestiges of civilization, the desolate loner of the original movie rediscovers his lost soul. The narrator says it best: "In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past. A man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again."

A classic of post-apocalyptic action.