Mad Max 2 1981

This is a much stronger vision compared to the first one, which is probably because of the bigger budget. The camerawork is cleaner, the action and scale are much bigger and the worldbuilding is more compelling. I like that it borrows a lot from steampunk, industrial and metal aesthetics, which leads to cool designs (the cars) as well as some cheesy, dated ones (a lot of the costumes). The major weakness for me continues to be the bad overacting, uninteresting characters and boring story, which are all staples of typical B-movie trash, but here they’re not really executed or elevated in an interesting way. As a result I’m just not that invested when there’s no action, which is basically the entire beginning/middle section. I also don’t agree with some of the filmmaking choices. For example, the opening montage is this really inelegant, unnecessary exposition recap and the John Williams-esque score does too much emotional handholding, nor do I think it fits the film as a whole. When your movie looks like this, I’m looking for something aggressive and nasty, not something that reminds me of Star Wars. Overall, it’s somewhat recommendable for its visionary worldbuilding and well executed action scenes, but when Fury Road does all of that and fixes all of those aforementioned problems, you can’t shake the feeling this has become somewhat obsolete.

5.5/10

Dusty crash-ups, smeared make-up, hockey masks and butt cheeks in the desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland of distant Australia. Is there anything more quintessentially Mad Max than that lineup? Following hot on the heels of 1979's low-budget original, The Road Warrior (as it was dubbed in America) ups the ante in every sense. Bigger and louder. More visually ambitious. Conceptually tighter, with taller fireballs, scrappier-looking vehicles and a more appropriate (read: super-speedy) pace. It's a solid '80s action movie, released when the world was still trying to figure out what, exactly, that meant.

Max himself might say a dozen words from start to finish - the epitome of the strong, silent type - but his sawed-off shotgun speaks volumes and his grizzled exterior is betrayed by the guilty grin he has for two unlikely cohorts: a fiercely loyal stray dog and a feral, fur-clad young boy. The kid seems redundant, really, given how well Max's pairing with the dog works, but neither relationship feels force-fed or strained and they each have a slightly different role to play in the simple, no-frills story.

Not that anyone is out for high art here. We're all after the crazy bondage outfits, the massive action sets and the twisted metal aftermath. Plenty of that to go around, especially in the quarter-hour of total, unhinged vehicular madness that concludes the whole ordeal. It's stupid and fun, visceral thrills with only the loosest of story beats; the bare minimum necessary to move us from one smoldering pileup to the next. I think my knowledge of / appreciation for Fury Road hurts it, though.

A step up from the original in terms of bigger budget, action sequences, set pieces and stakes... but that's it! We get the full on dystopian setting. I appreciated the documentary intro at the beginning explaining the apocalypse but it felt like lazy exposition at the same time.

What The Road Warrior ultimately lacks is an emotional core and interesting characters. The first movie at least had that. Max barely speaks and is emotionless in a lot of situations, I liked him better in the first. There's so much potencial with the character that's left untouched. Can't connect to any of the other characters either, they're too underdevelopped. I did like the boomerang kid and I thought he would serve as the emotional piece to Max but we don't really get any of that. The gyrocopter dude was an odd addition, he belonged in another movie.

There's more action than the first, but not that much more, it's mostly in the third act. I was bored for at least half of the movie and the generic story doesn't help. The villain was much better in the first, I thought we were getting some kind of origin story or explanation for why he looks weird but nothing. I found the score to be agressive but that's probably just me. A weird choice to do some sped-up action scenes, it looked awful.

I'm very disappointed overall. I prefer the first and why even bother with this when we have Fury Road?!