Car-Fu

I know, I know. "We get it, Oliver. You like fucking action movies. Let's do something else, okay?"

Fuck you, reader I just made up. You're my least favorite reader. Not only have you just insulted me, but you've insulted The Motherfucking Road Warrior, one of the all-time best action movies.

The 1980s were a whirling dervish of pastel colors and Duran Duran, but if we got anything out of it, it's the four great action movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, The Terminator and The Road Warrior.

Between those four films, The Road Warrior is the one with the most dirt on its knuckles. When I mentioned it to my dad, he said "that shit is nasty", and I've got to hand it to the old man: that's the perfect way to describe the film. Although he'd say it with a grimace and I'd say it with a smile.

I chose to write this review because I watched my copy of it yesterday and when I started trying to talk to people about it, I could barely find a person who had seen it. So, in the interest of enticing you morons to watch one of the best films of the 1980s, the plot:

It's a quarter past the future and some janitor was dusting the big red button on a doomsday device. Now Australia has been turned into a wasteland (waaaakka wakka wakka) ravaged by evil gangs in search of gasoline to continue their dominance. If you have a car, you have life. If you don't have a car, if you can't keep moving and savanging, you die. The rules are very simple and implicit. Like so many mysterious drifters in so many westerns, Max is a man with a past and a grumpy disposition. He doesn't like or have much use for people. He stumbles upon a gasoline-rich community under siege from the brutal gang The Humongous and through a series of escalating events, finds his fate inexorably tied to theirs.

Now, ideally the whole film would be Max battling his way across the wastes, just trying to find enough gasoline to make it to the next gallon, fighting the gangs for it along the way and encountering strange folk. Like The Road but with more nitro-cars.

I came to this conclusion after watching it this last time. The best scene in the film is the opening scene, where Max silently battles the marauders for the gas leaking out of a destroyed car. The high-speed chase shot from a camera on the hood of a car in that lovely widescreen, the tight, breathless editing. That shot of Max drawing his gun, standing off against the raiders as they both desperately eye the gasoline leaking out of the ruined vehicle. Scenes like that is what action movies are all about.

Silence. Let the visuals tell the story. Action speaks louder than words.

And it's those action sequences that are so glorious. The cars aren't just a prop to push the action scenes forward, they're the lifeblood of these characters. If there's one skill you need to master in these wastelands, it's driving stick. In the old west you used a gun to keep yourself alive, but now we have these marvelous ballets of roaring engines and screeching tires.

And George Miller avoids the biggest mistake made by so many car-centric action films: he never makes the cars the combatants. Despite most of the action being fought with cars, they're nothing more than guns with engines. Max always has something dynamic to do in the chases. He never sits there, dead-eyed and sipping his coffee. Whether the doors are being ripped off his car or the raiders are trying to pull him out of the driver's seat, he's never the static center of car-porn.

The Road Warrior is to car chases what The Terminator is to foot chases, what Raiders of the Lost Ark is to fist-fights, what Die Hard is to shootouts, and I can't help but feel like that sells all those films short. It's so marvelous and perfectly paced. It's so exciting and original, it's vision of society after the collapse of civilization so dark and gritty and functional.

Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I'm biased because I can't wait for the bombs to drop and to tie a cowcatcher to the front of my Geo Metro.

11/10