Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Saw Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It was a fun little dystopia. The absurd premise is that somehow world war 3 has broken out and gasoline and oil have become extremely scarce. Because of this for some reason cars become more popular. Indeed entire gangs now seem to exist solely to drive around and use up as much gasoline as possible. Strange. Anyway, the film does some commendable slight-of-hand to hide this inherent absurdity and it works more or less.

Although the film is set in the future, the story is very fable-like, very clear-cut good vs evil. The characters are even color-coded: the noble, kind-hearted villagers are clad in white robes and plastic football shoulder-pads while the evil gas-guzzling gang dresses in fetish-y black leather straps, their leader entirely nude but for some leather thongs, and the main antagonist evidently being a homosexual biker. The gay thing is meant to make us uncomfortable and in this it succeeds with me, but not for the reasons the film intended. Anyway, this bit of regressiveness aside, the color-coding clues us in to the nature of the titular Road Warrior. He's the hero but is wearing black.

This fact redeems the film a great deal for me. Early on, he shackles a snivelling, skinny, ugly but emphatically intelligent man and leads him around on a chain leash. This image of the brutish leading the clever is not a nice one, but we are meant to understand that Max is not exactly a wholesome character. His moral ambiguity is meant to assuage our own discomfort with our own dubious choices. We imagine ourselves making the necessary tough choices needed to survive in the apocalyptic desert and then are able to recontextualize our own cruelty as a necessary tough choice. This is ultimately a feel-good movie.

Anyway, the film is a merry little romp, delighting mainly in car chases and fanciful road-fights. The gangsters leap from car to car like pirates on the high seas. There's Star Wars-inspired worn and dirty sets that seem real and there's 70's-era stoicism. The kindness of the villagers is meant to seem like sweet naivety, but that's the price we pay I guess.