The Road Warrior | Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence

The Road Warrior | Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence | WOW

DVDs:

The Road Warrior

	The Road Warrior Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence Warner Home Video, 1997 average customer review:based on 191 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Unique and Marvelous.

I first saw this movie over 20 years ago and didn't like it because I didn't like any of the characters. Flashforward two decades and I now like at least six of them. That tells you the way time builds human understanding. As a kid I assumed that the world was a good place, but now I know it to be equal parts good and evil. Few films showcase this eventuality more artfully and powerfully than the Road Warrior. This is an amazing production and I truly envy you if you've never seen it before.

The Road Warrior is both entertaining and deeply enlightening. There is more truth in its portrayal of human nature than a million self-help books and a hundred Hollywood movies. Civilization's veneer is thin. Without police and a government we would revert to shameful behaviors and attempt to survive by any means necessary. Max and the Gyro Captain are great but I still think that the feral boy character steals the spotlight from everyone else. The movie also tells us much about the nature of friendship along with the way we quickly bond with others in times of need. If you haven't seen it please do.

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WOW

So it is the future and gasoline is like gold. Well this is obviously dated because when I fill up now I feel like I am paying a gold bar for a tank. Besides that, most of the places now do not allow you to pump and then pay, because so many people are stealing from the pumps. They call these "Driveoffs" and we need a guy like the one Gibson plays in this movie to chase them down!

The nice thing is in this movie is that on these roads you do not have to worry about a speed limit. So yeah, sorry peoples but the radar detector you just got would be worthless in this film.

The part that is not realistic is of course the roads themselves. C'mon peoples everywhere you go they are always having detours due to construction and road repair, in reality if this kind of thing played out, you would get a flat tire from all the potholes and debris that would fill up on the road over time. I mean really where are the streetsweepers? You have to be realistic even in a Science Fiction environment, but hey no problem, it is still good.

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Impressive transfer

I have always been a fan of this and the original Mad Max movies. I was pleasently suprised with the quality of the transfer to Blu-ray fo rsuch an old movie. It had it's poor quality moments, but they were far out-weighed by the quality cheesey-ness of the films story. Loved it!

A fight to the death for gasoline

The second film of the trilogy is getting off the banality of the first one with its rape, infanticide and vengeance. Here we get to a world that is a real war to the death of one tribe against another and there is no law anywhere close. It is war for survival hence for the only thing that has some value in this desertic world where you can only move safely in motor vehicles, hence with gas. A fight for a tanker of gas, that's what the stake is. Mad Max gets on the side that controls the tanker in order to get gas for his car and he manages to serve them in a way and be accepted, though he tries to go away on his own when the service is finished. But he gets wrecked and has to be brought back by some accessory to the action who has some kind of unidentifiable flying object, some kind of ancestor of the chopper. So he will be the hero of the essential part of the film, the chase after the tanker. We will follow it with anxiety especially since a tanker like that is a bomb on wheels. The successive attacks against the tanker will be creative and some people will die on both sides and the driver will be seriously endangered by the attackers, to the point that he will not be able to avoid the final crash. And surprise, surprise, the tanker will not explode. The good old valueless gas had been transferred to the school bus in which the women were traveling. But the wreck of the tanker will incite the attackers, or what's left of them, to go away. Strangely enough they will not verify the content of the tanker and will not be able to think that the gas was somewhere else: these attackers are barbarians somewhere, hence they are intellectually retarded. And the final leg of the migration to safety could start and Mad Max could disappear in a mirage in the desert like some sand on a wind. Entertaining but in no way too intellectual: you will not get any nightmares nor headaches. Just funny after all. But that kind of chase will be imitated galore in the coming years after 1981. And that's probably one reason why it became cult: it was one of the very first films to work on the technique of shooting and editing such a chase.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

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