After the strenuous production of Mad Max was complete, director George Miller and producer Byron Kennedy began post-production on a small homemade editing machine in a friend’s lounge (alongside editors Tony Patterson and Cliff Hayes, who came and went from the project). When piecing together all the disparate pieces of slice-of-life drama and vehicular carnage they had spent years planning and shooting, Miller could only see mistakes. For a year, Miller was confronted with his perceived failures as a filmmaker, noticing all of the faults and flaws that would naturally come with a green crew and a minuscule budget, but it was enough to convince him that the film business just wasn’t for him.
However, Mad Max’s release saw it become an almost immediate sensation in Australia: a critical and commercial hit that eventually began to pick up steam around the world, finding audiences in places Miller had never expected. This success eventually opened Miller’s eyes to the different ways audiences responded to Mad Max and the various cultural reference points they brought to it.
“I realized, Wait a minute, something else is happening here. In Japan, they said Mad Max is a lone rogue samurai. A ronin. They said, “You’ve watched a lot of Kurosawa movies, obviously.” And I said, “Who’s Kurosawa?”—I probably shouldn’t say that. And immediately I watched everything that he did, and of course they ended up in the second “Mad Max.” In Scandinavia, they said, “He’s like a lone Viking!” And the French said that “Mad Max” is like a Western on wheels. That nailed it for me.”
– George Miller
Mad Max was an exciting piece of exploitation cinema, and this fact soon became clear, and the roots of its success went much deeper, as Miller soon realised he had tapped into something universal, with a character archetype that could traverse across cultures and narrative boundaries. His theories and ideas eventually became solidified when he came to America and met directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who introduced Miller to the work of Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, a monomyth template that was common around the world and which Lucas had consciously replicated in Star Wars. With this knowledge, and with an understanding of the mistakes made, George Miller decided to return to the wasteland with a sequel to Mad Max, Mad Max 2 (called The Road Warrior in the US).
After the original’s success, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was made with a much larger budget of between 4 and 4.5 million Australian dollars. This gave Miller, Kennedy, and their new co-writer Terry Hayes, a lot more creative freedom from the pressure to make something that would more reliably make back the money entrusted to them by local investors and business owners. Now they had free reign, emboldening them to express themselves creatively and fearlessly. If Mad Max was made to ride the wave of B movie exploitation, Mad Max 2 was made to push the limits of what they were capable of and to tell a universal, one-of-a-kind story.
Miller’s understanding of monomyth and shared narratives across cultures saw him broaden his cinematic palette, bringing new films into Mad Max’s filmic tapestry. The chariot races of Ben-Hur are perhaps the most famous example, with gladiators clashing atop vehicles and battling for freedom but there’s also the scale and majesty of Lawrence of Arabia, the evergreen relationship between innocence and violence from the classic western Shane and an emphasis on the elements pulled from Akira Kurosawa, with Max now modelled after Toshiro Mifune’s lone warrior from Yojimbo.
The result is a film that is not only more mature in its selection of influences but is also a story that explicitly positions itself as a piece of myth-making, carrying on the tradition of the lone wandering hero but with a distinctly Australian slant. The film’s opening minutes establish this new tone and mission immediately with an opening narration that recaps the first film establishes how society collapsed further, and also frames the entire movie as a sort of fairytale.
Here, Mad Max finds the element that allows it to continue forever, these are stories told around a campfire, fables shared throughout the wasteland of a man named Max, a road warrior, their reliability, believability, or chronology less important than the lessons and they teach and the morals they impart. Through this lens, Miller and Kennedy can push the series into a far more heightened and surrealistic world, mostly ignoring continuity in favour of grander, more fantastical imagery and ideas that allow them to explore bigger ideas and emotions on a grander scale.
In many ways, The Road Warrior operates as an adult fairy tale about a man coming out of a wasteland to help a small community from an evil gang and in so doing, finding a way to regain a small piece of his own humanity. Gone is any inclination of law and order that existed in the original, this is a world run dominated by impulses and survival instincts, with a narrative structure sanded down completely. The fat of Mad Max is gone, this is a lean, efficient, simple story that gives way to Max’s path to redemption.
This is all aided by a more heightened visual aesthetic, using more vibrant colours and an incredibly striking contrast between the deep blue of the sky and the orange of the Australian desert to establish the world as a vast, uncaring, and neverending purgatory for the damned and insane. I would say about half of the film’s production value comes from the way that Miller and cinematographer Dean Semler film that horizon, because there just aren’t many movies where there is quite literally NOTHING as far as the eye can see. The wasteland is palpable in every single frame of this film, and it makes the coveted oil refinery feel that much more like a safe haven.
That higher production value is of course most noticeable in the series-defining aesthetic, an aesthetic that would come to define what post-apocalyptic would mean in popular culture. Each costume and vehicle is a ramshackle combination of scrap, garbage, and whatever material can be scrounged up from the wasteland. It gives the film an immediately striking look and allows each character to stand completely on their own, with every part of their costume design implying history and an inner life. Everyone in Road Warrior just looks so damn interesting, with so many little absurd details littered in every frame which hints at a wider world existing just outside the lens of the camera. And while in future movies these costumes and vehicles become more artistically designed, there’s an appeal to how truly thrown together everything looks in Road Warrior, with the costume department recycling whatever they could find in second-hand clothes stores.
The star of the show is always going to be those vehicles and here Miller really gets to push the envelope of what was expected of a car chase, with the third act’s battle for the tanker laying the groundwork for the vehicular warfare that is associated with Mad Max and that so many action films try to replicate. It’s a huge step up from the original film, with all manner of insane-looking cars, even more dangerous stunts, incredibly destructive crashes, and now a flying machine, but I think the biggest upgrade is how Miller has expanded how to convey story and character through all of the carnage.
Each action sequence in The Road Warrior is a thrilling, communicative web of character detail and narrative texture that uses every single crash, cannon roll, and gunshot to further the ideas of the story and dig deeper into Max as a character. Mel Gibson famously only has 16 lines through the entirety of The Road Warrior, a number that Gibson himself tried to keep as low as possible. Instead, we come to understand Max through the actions he takes, the way he interacts with his vehicle, the ways he interacts with others, and the pieces of scrap he collects along the way. Miller teaches us about Max through these set pieces, bookending the film with a lone survivor scrambling for gas and a man working as part of a community. It’s an actualisation of Miller’s stated goal for Mad Max, to make a silent movie with sound, and here he accomplishes it flawlessly, charting the journey of a selfish, self-loathing survivor as he manages to claw back some semblance of the humanity he once had.
It’s the small moments of character that make Max feel like a true, living breathing person, like gaining a smile at the discovery of a small music box before forcing it back or tossing his dog the remainder of his food. Just through Gibson’s eyes and the way he interacts with every little prop, we can see Max as a man hiding behind his own walls, trying desperately to guard himself from the world around him. For all the talk about the crazy stunts and cars, I think The Road Warrior is heralded as an action movie landmark because it so thoroughly understands how its genre can tell its story like no other genre can. It’s entirely visual, a ferocious myth encased in metal that manages to elevate everything the first movie did, further it, and add its own flavour to the hero’s journey melting pot. It’s a truly one-of-a-kind action spectacle and one of my favourite movies of all time.