What is it with you, huh?

What are you looking for?

Come on, Max, everyone's looking for something. You happy out there, aren't you? Hey, wandering? One day blurring into another? You're a scavenger, Max. You're a maggot.

You know that?

You're living off the corpse of the old world. Tell me your story, Max, come on, tell me your story. What burns you out, huh? Kill one man too many? See too many people die? Lose some family? You make you something special, does it? Listen to me.

Holy moly. Quite the existential interrogation.

That is a very, very intense exchange. And one in which apparently they toppled a lot of oil drums.

Yeah.

A lot of tin boxes falling off of shelves on this one.

Yeah, yeah, quite a ruckus amid what might be the longest expanse of a single character's dialogue in this very dialogue sparse film.

Yes, we are talking, of course, about what I consider to be one of the greatest films of all time, The Road Warrior, aka Mad Max 2, for those of you who grew up outside of the United States. So Paul, Mad Max, you've seen the first one, I assume, many, many times, right?

Yes, yes.

And I think it was a big hit pretty much everywhere but in the States, which is why they made another one, but in the States nobody knew Mad Max, so they called it The Road Warrior, right?

Yes, for those who had not yet been introduced to the wonders of post-apocalyptic George Miller artistry.

It's amazing, though, when you look at Mad Max, how like Mad Max, the first one feels so much like a... it just feels a lot more grounded in our world, whereas this one is like, they're out there.

Oh, yeah.

The world is in full collapse. The other thing is, so, you know, most of our listeners will have seen Mad Max Fury Road, which was the 30 years later sequel to... and the thing I want to mention is like, you've got Mad Max, Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road, Peridot or Furiosa movie, right? But the canon in those movies is pretty loose. Like, they don't really feel like direct sequels. They feel like further thematic excursions into this world, right?

Yeah, I don't think that George Miller loses too much sleep concerning himself with issues of canon or continuity. I think he has grander ambitions and concerns on his mind. And I think that we are far better for it.

All right, let's just get on it. Let's do this thing. My name is Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And my name is Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is Multiplex Overthruster: Summer of '82.

I do think that one of the things about the Mad Max movies, and I do want to point this out really early on, is that you can tell how far you are in the franchise by the size of Max's shoulder pad. Because the shoulder pad in Mad Max is actually quite demure, right? And you got two of them. And then in Road Warrior, it's only on one side, and it's significantly larger. And then by the time you get to Beyond Thunderdome, it's like a Delta wing sticking out of the guy's shoulder. It's a...

Javi, this is an incisively astute observation.

Let's begin by just telling those of our viewers who may not have caught up with this film recently what it's about. And it's not gonna take long because it's not that complicated a story. Mad Max, the former Max Rakitansky, a former Australian highway patrolman whose family was killed by post-apocalyptic gangs in the film Mad Max, wanders the wastes. A man who his only friend is his dog, and he only wants one thing, and that is survival. Through a chance encounter with a thief, he winds up learning about a refinery in the middle of the wasteland. And because in this world, the only, only commodity that matters is fuel. The juice! The juice! This refinery is under constant siege by the minions of Humongous, the warrior of the wastelands. Max winds up making a deal with the people inside of this refinery to get them a truck that he has seen so that they can haul their gasoline away and escape from the Humongous. He gets them the truck, but then proving that he is not an altruist at all, he tries to get away from them with the gasoline that they've traded for his services. He winds up getting the shit beat out of him. He comes back and agrees to drive the truck with all the juice, all the fuel out of the wastelands for the good guys, which triggers a massive 20 to 30 minute epic war out on the roads of the Australian outback, leading to an amazing twist ending that we will discuss in the fullness of time. But it's really, I mean, it's Shane, this movie, Shane, you know, it's a lone warrior from the wastes comes in, helps a family, gets out. That's pretty much it, right?

It is a study in ruthlessly elegant simplicity.

It really is. And Paul, just so everybody knows, this is our third time trying to record this podcast. We had to start three times over due to technical difficulties. But the first time when I said that I considered to be one of the greatest films of all time, I got a little bit of a response from you. And I'm curious about your own feelings about it. You were kind of like, whoa, I was shocked because I would imagine you would think that too, but maybe you don't.

Well, I hold it in high esteem. How can one not? But I think I was surprised by the more dizzying height, the more grandiose altitude that you placed this film in. That surprised me a little bit because I think, yeah, this is a very fine and important film and one that I hold in high regard. But it also, I think now, unfortunately, and this is all to George Miller's credit as an ever evolving artist, feels somewhat quaint relative to, say, Fury Road.

I think that's a really interesting discussion we need to have because to me, you know, like now everybody loves Fury Road. Everybody thinks Fury Road is the greatest. I actually found Fury Road to be sort of, I did not find Fury Road to be as great as everybody thinks it to be.

The deuce you say.

Yes, I know, I know. I agree that it is a spectacularly accomplished piece of filmmaking, but as a piece of storytelling, I don't think it's nearly as successful as this one. And I think that there's a purity to The Road Warrior in that it is entirely analog. It is not a movie that was color corrected in post with computers. And I find that, for me, Fury Road is so huge in its scope that it actually loses something of the idea of it being a post-apocalyptic world that becomes a fantasy world to me in a way that the more sort of down-to-earth, analog art movie kind of quality of The Road Warrior creates a much different reality that I actually find much more believable. And I would also say that I think George Miller has become a much busier filmmaker in his older age, much more influenced by modern filmmaking. Whereas I think that if you look at every frame composition in this movie, it is a movie that is so considerably designed to fill a cinemascope aspect ratio palette. And I find the directing in Road Warrior to be much more restrained and much more controlled in a way that in Fury Road to me, it's kind of unhinged and it doesn't quite achieve the same effect for me. And I know that I'm in the minority of this, because I know many people have come to find The Road Warrior to look kind of quaint. But these are my thoughts, Paul. Tell me how wrong I am.

Wow, we're going to begin. I'm slightly dizzy with dismay.

Well, let's begin with the bell.

Oh yeah, we should ring the bell.

Yeah, let's ring the bell. Yeah, because we just went into it. Yeah, let's do it. Thank you, Apollo Creed. Paul, how wrong am I? Tell me.

So I completely respect your perspective, even though I respectfully disagree, because I will harbor no disparagement of Fury Road, which I think is a masterpiece. But at the same time, I don't regard the relative quaintness of Road Warrior as a negative in any way. I concede that it is masterful in its constraints, and it clearly is a movie that was made by the skin of its teeth on a shoestring that had been set on fire, and that George Miller is just cramming everything he can into it, and the inventiveness and the resourcefulness and the verve is vibrant and infectious and just wonderful. But yeah, they're very different films and on just orders of magnitude, different scales. And George Miller is a different filmmaker than he was decades ago. So there are definitely clear commonalities, but also just huge contrasts. And I don't think it's fair to necessarily compare one to the other. And you wouldn't obviously have Fury Road or Furiosa without this. But it's one of the more interesting evolutions of a filmmaker and a franchise, because it's rare that we've gotten to see an original whole world created and maintained by a single filmmaker over this expansive time and have it undergo such expansive evolution and growth. But seeing it all come together in this film, which is sort of the prototype for everything that comes later.

Every post-apocalyptic movie after this looks like it is the struggle between people for whom the post-apocalypse consisted of a dick sporting goods exploding versus the people for whom the post-apocalypse consisted of a BDSM sex shop exploding. The one thing you'll notice about this movie is all the good guys look like they raided a sporting goods store. All the bad guys look like they raided a rough trade BDSM sex shop. I think that's how you know the good guys from the bad. And by the way, Max is the perfect middle ground because he is dressed in black leather, but he does have the shoulder pads, right? Which are clearly sporting shoulder pads and he doesn't have studs on. He's not outwardly fetishy, but he is dressed in black, but then his gear looks sporty. So it's a very, you know, it's a real thematic.

I feel like we could do an entire podcast just about the fashion iconography of this film. And the just stunning costume design, which I think has also informed my use of the word quaint because at the time, I think that these my recollection is, and this is something I really was curious to ask you about, was that the costume design, the look, this whole post-apocalyptic mashup of designs and costume elements.

Sporting goods and deviant sexuality.

It was much more, I think, perceived as edgy and rebellious and kind of subversive, whereas now it kind of looks hilarious and adorable.

I feel about this movie the way I do about Psycho and about like Lord of the Rings, you know, unless you're five years old when you see Psycho, you can't ever see Psycho for the first time, because everybody knows the twist. Like when I saw Lord of the Rings, my biggest issue with Lord of the Rings was that everything that's great about Lord of the Rings has already been ripped off so many times by so many people, that for me the movies were familiar to a fault, because I'd seen every single great beat in those movies ripped off by every other fantasy thing that's ever happened since. And I think this is the same thing. And by the way, Blade Runner in some way has the same problem, but Blade Runner has managed to remain much more potent as an object in its own way. But yeah, I mean, it's like you can't see Road Warrior if you've been in popular culture for however many years. You see this movie, it is going to seem quaint, because everything in it has been ripped off by other filmmakers, including George Miller.

Yes, and it has been sent up so many times and become kind of a mean, kind of a cliche and been mocked. But at the same time, I just have to look on it in wonder at the decisions that led to such elements as what I will describe as tactical assless chaps.

OK, I want to bring up a philosophical question before we continue with this. And I hope this does not seem a reproach to what you've just said, Paul. But in truth, aren't all chaps assless?

Yes, but these take on a context.

They're mythological, are they not? Almost heroically assless, yeah.

We'll get to that. I'm jumping ahead because that reveal is a moment of wonder.

Let's not let our wonder deter us from moving headlong into the lack of plot of this movie because it is entirely about the execution. It is a very linear, not particularly complicated movie. So Paul, it starts, you know, Max is in the middle of a chase.

Yeah, we get first after a gloriously metal Mad Max 2 logo treatment, which I just think is a thing of beauty. We get this four by three kind of flashback, history, montage, recap, both of the first film but also of the state of the world and what kind of led to how things are now with a mysterious voiceover and we're like, who is narrating this? Whose voice are we hearing? Ah, stay tuned because it's a doozy. And we are told, you know, men began to feed on men and all these horrors that arose from dwindling resources of...

It really was all about the petroleum, man. It's all about the black gold, the juice, the gasoline.

Exactly.

The machines of man came to a halt because of a nuclear war and they needed their machines and gasoline became the most precious thing in the land.

Yeah, so I mean, there's commentary right there, not subtle at all, which is timely today as it was then. And then we get, I will say, one of the great cuts, I think, in film history from that 4x3 recap history montage to glorious Dean Semmler cinema scope wide screen thrown right into the first action scene. And we have Max and his dog in his...

V8 Interceptor.

Of Doom. And he is running low on fuel, so there is desperation. We're just thrown right in the middle of the action. We're not given any warm-up or set up. And it is just motor mayhem right out of the gate.

He is being pursued by people we will find out to be the minions of the humongous. But right now, all we know is that there's a weird dude in a mohawk who has a twink, presumably his, well, his twink.

There doesn't seem to be any other available interpretation.

And there's no subtlety to it either, you know. And actually, one of the things I want to talk about with this movie specifically is how much it's like there is a kind of homoeroticism of war dogs, you know, sort of men at war homoeroticism, but there's also just regular homoeroticism in the movie. And I wonder if Wes, you know, this mohawk warrior being quite clearly coded as gay, not even coded, he's presented as gay, and also sort of the amount of manhandling, there is obviously the rape of women in this movie and a scene that I found very disturbing. But now I guess my question is, are the villains being coded as gay problematic in this movie, or is it just that they're in the desert and they're lonely, and the men have kind of figured out some shit? I don't know, because the good guys are coded as being very kind of heterosexual. So it's one of the things that I immediately sort of began to think about in this film. I don't know, what do you think?

Yeah, I can't really call it an example of positive representation. Okay, so you agree that the... I think it's more of a question of to what degree is it problematic, knowing that it is. But I think it's a matter of how do we judge that. And obviously we judge it in a different way now than we would have in 1982. And I think it's unfortunate that this probably was not even observed or commented upon broadly in 1982. Because it is pretty overt, but it does bear some scrutiny as a choice that could be better.

You know, Paul, I think that one of the things as we talk about this, you know, it's interesting because I think that you don't question it necessarily when you're watching the movie, you know. It's interesting because when you look at Fury Road, you still have this sort of coding of the bad guys as having a very homoerotic bond with each other. You know, the war boys are these sort of pallid skinheads who are just constantly like all over each other, touching each other, hitting each other and all that. But in this one, there really is such an overt correlation between the bad guys out in the wastelands and how like in their savagery, they've descended into homosexuality. So I just wanted to point that out that I certainly, as much as I enjoy this film, it's something I certainly consider and go, not so good.

Yeah. And I think while we're on that, we also can't escape from our contemporary context, who leads the cast of this film.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Which is also kind of an element of problematicism currently, even though he is relatively muted.

Mel Gibson must have been in his late 20s when he made this movie, right?

He's startlingly young in this film, has very little to say. One of the things that struck me in revisiting this film, because I hadn't seen it in ages, I can't even remember when I last saw it, it's more of an ensemble film than I remembered. And even though it's marketed and positioned as very much being about Mad Max, but he has very little to say throughout the film. And yeah, and it also is, you can't help but look at any film, at least I can't, that he is in now without the accumulation of negative baggage. And just to be clear, I found it difficult to separate the fact that he is maybe not unapologetic because he sort of has made attempts to apologize, but I think an undeniably bigoted, anti-Semitic troublemaker.

Mel Gibson is somebody who has made his bed and he has made his beliefs quite clear. And you know, I got to tell you, I look at this movie and it's almost, I completely hear what you're saying about it being so hard to detach yourself from, but this guy in this movie looks so different from even who Mel Gibson was later on in his career in the late 80s and early 90s when he made Lethal Weapon. You know, and he's such a different human being from the human being I see now, that just because there's so much time has passed, as I was watching the movie and I condemn everything Mel Gibson has said about all of these things, obviously, but as I was watching this film, I just, I literally couldn't remember this guy as Mel Gibson. He was not that guy with the floppy long hair from Lethal Weapon. He's certainly not that hard, this kind of bigoted, weirdly jaded, angry man who now appears in interviews. He's certainly not the guy who was in that monk shot. I mean, he just really feels like a different human being. It doesn't excuse anything, but I didn't quite have the response you did to that because it was so long ago and he looks so different. But you're right.

Yeah. I just felt like we'd be remiss if we didn't kind of recognize that part of the context. But also I think that one of the things that I was gratified for is that this is a George Miller film. This is not a Mel Gibson film. And that he's really one piece of this larger puzzle that Miller constructs. And while there are elements and choices that are dated and questionable in retrospect, it's an amazing movie. But it is very much of its time.

We started talking about the movie and talking about Max fighting the Mohawk warrior and his twink. And it's all about getting to this Mack truck that has been ruined in the middle of the road and getting the gasoline therein. But since we went into these two sort of things that kind of needed to be discussed, let's reset by playing our second sound clip, which will take us back to the beginning of the film just so we can get a little palate cleanser. We have acknowledged the two sides of true ugliness in this movie, the homophobia and the presence of Mel Gibson. But let's reset and get back into our Warriors of the Wasteland mode, shall we? Yes, please. Okay.

I remember a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. But most of all, I remember the Road Warrior, the man we called Max.

Now we're back in our little post-apocalyptic 1982 bubble, when Mel Gibson was an unknown Australian actor and homophobia was just the air we all breathe, so nobody questioned it. So, that's 1982, isn't it?

Yes, and the aforementionedly referenced beautiful dulcet voiceover from that narration of the mysterious narrator. But yeah, so we've had this encounter on the road, this first interaction. Max is investigating then this rig on the side of the road after they've had this hustle with the Mohawk biker.

He is sopping up the gasoline with rags. That's how valuable gasoline is, that there's a leak in the big rig that's been crashing, that's been fighting over. And the gasoline is leaking and Max is literally dabbing the gasoline with rags and getting the muddy gasoline off the road, because that's how precious it is.

Yeah, and that's one of two things that he recovers. The other one, aside from the corpse that he leaves there, which is a really well-executed, bloated, decayed corpse in the cab, it's clutching a small little music box that plays Happy Birthday.

A reminder of the world and innocence that has been lost, dare I say. And it's interesting because Max plays the Happy Birthday song and you see him looking at it. And again, Max, very little dialogue in this movie. He plays everything in a look. And you can see that for a moment he's transported and then he tucks it back into his leather jacket and moves on.

Yeah, moves on and then finds what I want to call a whirly gig, but I believe in the context of the film it's an autogyro, guarded by a snake.

Now, there has been no dialogue in the movie so far, right? And this little vignette with the truck, you know, we've seen a bunch of looks and stuff like that. We've seen Max engage Wes, the Mohawk warrior, in his twink, and some of the other warriors to the wasteland. Max looks at the birthday thing. There is a fade out because this was like kind of the end of a sequence in the movie. And then the autogyro scene begins and it's sort of like its own new vignette.

Yeah.

So he finds this weird like little helicopter thing in the middle of this road nowhere, right? He goes up to it.

My first thought is I want one.

You know, the thing I noticed, by the way, I hadn't noticed before is how the flaps on the gyro have like a Playboy centerfold on them. Like there's actually a naked woman painted on them, which is very World War II, but also very much...

Yeah, but a more explicit take on World War II.

A more explicit, yes.

Yeah, yeah, pinned up on the front of a bomber. That's one of the glories of re-experiencing this film in HD. So we're focused on how is Max going to get through the snake. Of course, he's fearless. He grabs the snake, wrestles it away. But then lurching up out of the sand is...

Yes.

Will come to be known as the gyro captain, who has been lying in wait for who knows how long. Like, how long has he been buried under the sand?

He's been buried in the sand waiting for somebody to come try to kill him.

Exactly. And I just have to say, at this point, given now these two scenes that we've had, I made a note that, you know, boy, people sure love their crossbows and booby traps in the apocalypse. That just seems to be like an over-indexing on these two things.

Well, I mean, when you consider how the shit people do to you to get to your gasoline, I understand the value of the booby traps. I mean, the gyro pilot had the snake on it. He was also waiting in the sand. So he's got Max with the crossbow to the head.

Yes, he's got the drop on him.

He walked to Max's car, right? And Max has his booby trap in his car, but he also has a weapon, which gyro pilot knows the weapon. He says, a fella, a quick fella, might have a weapon stashed away in there. So Max has to hand over. Now Max is the prisoner of the gyro pilot. Also, Max turns off his booby traps. Let's not blow himself up. But Max turns the tables on the gyro pilot by opening the door to his car and releasing his hound.

Yes, and the dog saves the day.

His beautiful Australian blue-heeler.

I don't know that the dog has a name.

No, he's just a dog.

A fantastic dog, sporting a bandana around his neck. So the dog saves the day. Now Max takes the gyro captain hostage for the promise of fuel.

The gyro captain tells Max, if you spare my life, I will tell you about a place where there's an oil refinery, and they have billions of gallons of gasoline. They're refining petrol over there. If I show you where it is, spare my life, because I know that an enterprising fellow like you can definitely get to the fuel. That's the deal.

So we cut to the next vignette. Like another scene.

And again, very little dialogue. And the next five minutes of the film are concerned with Max eating dog food, by the way. He apparently went to Costco and got huge cans of DQD dog food, which is what it's called.

Well, I just want to note, because I'm so amused by this. So first of all, so they go, they find this guarded fuel base in the desert.

They bivouac out on a bluff to watch it.

And Max is not in any hurry. So he has taken his time to basically do reconnaissance, scope things out while he secures Gyro Captain to a tree. And then just very casually leisurely opens a can of dinky deep dog food. And you think, as you would, that, oh, he's going to feed the dog. But no, he opens and he seems to really relish this ancient looking can of dog food that he just digs into with delight. The dog seems remarkably unfazed and not taunted by this, which makes me think this is a regular routine. Yes. And then it is paid off because once Max gets his fill, maybe halfway through the can, then he hands it to the very patient dog, who at this point, I will do anything for this dog.

And the best part is the gyro pilot watching this exchange takes out his own wooden spoon.

Yes, and he carries on him.

The gyro pilot wears a leather overcoat, yellow Long Johns, pink Converse Chuck Taylors, right? And his sort of leather pilot helmet.

With white goggles.

He's got a wooden spoon because who does not just have a wooden spoon at the weight, right?

And he is desperate for his own pass at the Dinky D dog food that never comes. Anyway, so then Max continues to scope out the base, and then we get a mini stunt spectacular that I regard as sort of the anti-mega force.

What's interesting about this is so basically for the next five minutes or so, we are watching the oil refinery and getting the story that the oil refinery is under siege constantly from the warriors of the wasteland, right? And Max is watching the sub binoculars. He's not helping them. But you get the sense that the refinery has sent a group of people out to try to find a way past the warriors of the wasteland, that these people have been captured, are being captured.

Yeah, I mean, we wait till dusk, the suite of cars depart. And this is an interesting thing here that happens because we're sort of waiting for another shoe to drop because we've had these action sequences and now we're getting this sort of very intentional low that's like, what are we waiting for? Mourning then comes and now this base, which is the bad guy base, as opposed to we will later find its good guy counterpart commune compound.

Right.

And he sees Wes there, so mohaw guys there. So this is kind of connecting all that. Once Mourning arrives, he observes then the bad guys launch a motorcycle raid on a hapless, ill-fated, dune buggy driving couple. And it is not good. It is vicious.

We don't see a rape, but a rape is portrayed, if not depicted. They capture the female warrior, the male warrior is tied up and forced to watch. The female member of the refining commune is raped and shot with a crossbow.

Yeah, and this whole time, Max is observing.

Quite impassively, right?

Very impassively. And Gyro Captain also then observes, because he pulls out, he has all sorts of things in this coat, apparently, including a very large telescoping telescope that then Max swaps out for his binoculars to get a better view.

Like an old-timey pirate telescope that Gyro Captain just happens to have sitting around in his coat of arms.

It's very comical in its size, and it's the reveal. But Max is not intervening in this horrible event, and definitely we get the message that in the apocalypse, you have to choose your battles and know your numbers and the odds.

And Max is a neutral, neutral character. He is not lawful good. He is not chaotic good. He is completely neutral. He is out for himself, and he's just, you know, he's got the Gyro Captain as a hostage at this point, but he's not.

Yeah, he's just out for himself and his dog. But then once most of these raiders or marauders leave, and then there are just a couple of them behind with the surviving male member of the couple, the Dune Buggy couple, then he springs into action. It's too late for him to save the woman. He doesn't seem concerned by this at all. Then he gets to the guy who is near death, has been severely wounded, and the guy is first like, oh, you're saving me or something. And Max is like, I'm just here for the gasoline. Completely cold-blooded.

He then takes the survivor guy who makes a deal with him that if I take you back to your people, you give me gasoline.

So this is then when we find out, oh, there's this other camp, this sort of commune of alternate survivors who, instead of being all dressed in black leather and BDSM stuff, they're in a white palette with a lot of sporting goods store stuff and headbands and 80s hair. And it is a more happy, peaceful place.

Max carrying the guy comes in, he's showing that he's surrendered, he brings his car, he actually releases the gyro pilot to go off and fuck off to wherever he wants. Max comes in with this and he's literally holding his weapons in one hand, he's got the guy over his shoulder, he's making sure everyone is he comes in peace.

After being spotted by the feral kid who's toting a silver boomerang.

So one of the best characters in this film is this kid, we don't know whose kid he is, he's called the feral kid and he's literally like a kid with, he's got like the Tina Turner hair, he's got a great perm by the way, his hair looks great. He dresses in furs, in one hand he's got a fur gauntlet that uses to wield a razor sharp boomerang.

A gleaming shiny silver boomerang.

And we will see this at work in a few minutes, it'll be phenomenal. So Max makes first contact with the leader of this camp and with the incredible Virginia Hay, who was the Zahn, the blue woman in the car escape. And in this film she is just the archetype of Amazonian female beauty. She is like in all white with the massive shoulder pads, the feathered hair, the bandana. She's just gorgeous. I mean, what a gorgeous woman she is.

She is absolutely magnificent. She is deserving of a name. She's only referred to in her credits as Warrior Woman, which is a tragedy. But so Max brings the guy in, he lets them know the woman didn't make it, but he saved him and he's here for his gas because of the deal.

And it is here that we meet the leader of the commune, of the oil refinery commune, who is named Papa Gallo, or Papa Gallo, which means Father Rooster in Spanish and in Italian. But more importantly, what you realize is that Mick Jagger survived the apocalypse and leads these people. This guy is such a likeness of Mick. He's got the thick lips. He's got the weird British floppy hair. I mean, I was literally sitting there going, wow, I guess all the money that he earned from Tattoo U did not shield him from the apocalypse.

I will say, one of the... It's not fair to call it an oversight, but something that I felt probably unintentionally teased by the possibility of was that this commune felt like they also were a band, but we never see that manifest. And I felt like that was something that this movie is sort of crying out for. Once you see all these characters, you're just waiting for them to pull out a keyboard and guitars and jam. Like, that's what they want to do.

And you're waiting for Papa Gaio to just throw his arms back and his chest out in that kind of Mick Jagger chicken walk and just start singing Start Me Up. A song, by the way, that's about gasoline. So, you know, it makes complete sense. This was around the time when Mick and Keith weren't getting along and Mick had gone solo once or twice. So my headcanon is this was Mick's first tour of Australia. And Mick was just touring on his own with his own band. You know, Warrior Woman was probably, she was either the lead roadie or the shockingly edgy female guitarist. I'm not sure. And they just got stuck out in the middle of nowhere in a refinery.

I desperately crave this bootleg recording. So anyway, now Max has got this all figured out. The problem is the dune buggy guy dies.

And Papagayo says your deal was with him when he died. Your deal is over. So now you're a prisoner and we own your car. And Max is not a happy camper.

And so now Max is kind of screwed and he's basically taken hostage. But unfortunately, it's pretty bad timing because that's when the bad guy, Desert Marauders, arrive.

The Desert Marauders, they're pretty pissed off that our guys once again sent the team out to try to find their way out through them. You know, so they're here to deliver kind of what one would call a warning.

Yeah, they have a differing worldview that they are assertive about in their in their belief. And that it includes tying hostages to the expansive front grills of their vehicles.

It's an interesting thing because there's a lot of motifs that you see recurring then in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And then Fury Road that you see in this sequence specifically, one of them is people tied to the front of cars, like basically crucified in front of cars. Yes, that shows up again. And the other one is in all of these movies, there is somebody who is on a crane or on a hook. In this movie, it's the car mechanic and he's attached to some rig. He's clearly paralyzed from the waist down. So he's kind of wheeled around in this rig that includes him being on a crane so he can go up and down. In Thunderdome, you've got Master Blaster and you also have a character who's kind of girded around on a crane. And then in Fury Road, the youngest brother of Immortan Joe's children is one who has severe deformities and is entirely sort of carted around on a hook and a crane as well. So you're really seeing the development of this kind of like things that George Miller feels will be part of any apocalypse, i.e. people in cranes and people hooked up to the sun.

And here we basically get the prototypes of that. And we also get our introduction. We've met Wes, but Wes is merely a subordinate, a lieutenant.

Let's roll the clip because what better introduction can we give this character than the one he's given in the film? Shall we, producer Brad?

Greetings from the Among Us. The Lord Among Us. The warrior of the wasteland. The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla.

The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla. What an 80s thing to say, right? Because as we all know, this movie was made two years after the Iranian hostage crisis. Or a year after, I think.

Even though we're seeing this in 1982, this is a 1981 movie.

And it was probably written during the hostage crisis when the word Ayatollah entered the vernacular in a huge way. So, now, Humongous, they're pissed off about us trying to keep escape. They want the gas. And Humongous delivers what I think is a very reasonable overture to the refinery commune. Producer Brad, shall we hear quad number four?

Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror.

Now, and one of the reasons we're dwelling on this part of the movie so much is this is like about as much dialogue as there is in this film. So, the humongous basically says, leave the gasoline, walk away, you get safe passage. Walk away. Spare your life. There will be an end to the horror.

Yeah, yeah, because of you.

You. Yes, you've been causing it. You have caused the violence, the pain, humongous. You have a weird double thing going on here, Mr. H.

This whole sequence is wild, and it's the first time we bring our two forces to face off against each other. And just to be clear about what he's referring to about too much violence, too much pain, and the horror that there needs to be an end to, leading up to this, we get some amazing things. First being, randomly, I call him Mohawk Guy, but Wes, he spots a rabbit out of the corner of his eye, crossing the desert, trying to flee what's going to happen, and he whips out his wrist-mounted crossbow and just nails that rabbit ruthlessly. Feral Kid is watching this, is not pleased, especially once they start torturing a hostage, beating a hostage, again, clad in his magnificent, assless chaps of doom. Feral Kid then strikes with his boomerang, with his razor-sharp boomerang, and brutally kills...

Wes's twink. He's going after Wes. Wes gets out of the way, and the twink gets boomerang right to the forehead.

Not grazing, not a... It goes way, like, through the skull, into the guy's brain.

Yeah, I like to call this death of a twink, which I think should be either an opera or a ballet, I'm not sure, but... You know how you always think those should have been a ballet of Megaforce and a musical of whatever the other one was? This should have been a ballet, I think, too. This is my contribution. So now two things are going on. Wes is pissed off, and Mungus has to mollify him, which is putting him in a sleeper hold.

Because now it's like, oh, who knows what Wes is going to do now that he's lost his beloved companion of torment.

I believe the term, the actual technical term for this guy is catamite, isn't it?

It escaped me with the brain cells that were destroyed by the silver boomerang. So the humongous has now made this offer, and then there is a debate among...

No, but wait, wait, wait. So humongous makes his offer, but because there has been some razor sharp boomerang foo, the herald of humongous, the guy who gives the ayatollah speech, you know, the feral kid throws the boomerang away, he tries to catch it. And in trying to catch it, he realized the feral kid wears basically a furry baseball glove because when he tries to catch it, his fingers are slashed off by the boomerang. And the great part is all of the warriors of the Wayside just find this hilarious. They just laugh at it. Oh, poor dude just lost his fingers. Ha ha ha. Okay, so there you go. By the way, another thing that you see in a rolling theme in the Mad Max movies, starting with this one, is that your clans of the Wasteland all have heralds. Oh, yes. You know, there's this guy, there's the Ayatollah guy in Thunderdome. Auntie Entity has the guy who says, it's dying time is here. Yeah. The guy who's the announcer of Thunderdome. And in Fury Road, this is up all the way to like literally a dude playing a flaming electric guitar on a truck that's entirely built of stacks of Marshall amps. But the villains all have these very operatic kind of heralds who go to them. There's a real sense of like the world has descended into a real feudal fantasy kind of reality.

Javi, I'm so glad that you struck upon this important observation because it begs a question. And I'm curious if you have ever contemplated this. What would your life be like if you had a hero to just announce you into meetings? When you're going to get groceries? Just any everyday occurrence? Or even just like when you need to go to the bathroom or emerge from the bathroom?

I don't know, Paul. I would love to hear yours. Greetings from Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

Funny you should ask.

Writer, producer, seminal web blogger.

This reminded me of a recurring dream that I used to have. I am half Chilean, half Dutch. But I grew up in South Texas, about as far south as you can go on the border of Mexico, surrounded by the glory and splendor of Mexican-American culture, including mariachi music. And I had this recurring dream for a stretch of time that was unreasonable, but I was not complaining about, where I was accompanied in my everyday life with a mariachi band that would play me in and out of rooms. And I just thought, that is a life goal. Like, how awesome and amazing would that be to just be accompanied through life by your own mariachi band, to play you in and out, wherever you go.

The thing is, now I can only imagine your post-apocalyptic mariachi band, where like they're basically wearing leather, but they're like mariachi costumes, so they're made of leather, you know, and the instruments are all rusting and, you know, whatever.

And the trumpets would spit flame.

Yeah!

This is giving you so many life goal ideas.

I imagine my Harold being more like Norrin Radd. I imagine him being like the Silver Surfer, a little less pompous, a little humbler, a little more self-effacing, a little bit more like stoic, you know. So now there is a debate because some of the people in the commune are in fact tired of all the violence and horror and want to strike a deal with Humongous, and that leads us really to clip number five, shall we, producer Brad? Wow. What exactly in Humongous' presentation of himself makes anybody think that his word is worth as much as a pitcher of warm beer?

The timelessness of this sociopolitical commentary is maybe my favorite thing in the whole movie. It's way up there.

It's interesting because the guy who says, I'll talk to this man, he's a reasonable man. That guy is coded as military. He's wearing sort of a military helmet. He's got this weird coat with medals on it. And you get the same that he is, Neville Chamberlain.

Who we've just seen has splayed hostages on the front of grills who they're torturing. It's so hilariously absurd that there is a faction in this commune compound that is so delusional.

And desperate. This is part of their desperation. But they're delusional. And it's that social commentary that there's always going to be somebody who's going to fall for that shit.

And this is driving Papagalo like nuts, that he has to deal with these morons.

Yes. Makes thought they were just going to be like the craft services people for the tour. And then it turns out that they're like villagers with opinions and shit.

But meanwhile, while this debate is happening, Max bonds with Feral Kid, who has been admiring Max and who bestows upon him, and again, beautiful payoff to the setup, he bestows upon him this magical thing to Feral Kid, who has never seen or heard anything like this in his life. It is beyond the scope of his primitive imagination, the music box.

Yes, and it's kind of amazing. The way the actor who plays the Feral Kid sort of looks at it, and you see, again, it's that moment where you see, like, this kid does not have a childhood. He's literally a feral kid. He's never seen anything like this. It's a wonderful scene.

It is beautiful. And then just as the community is about to fracture in this debate, Max, in a spasm of clarity and sort of self-preservation, steps forward with a proposition.

Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that had hauled that tanker. You want to get out of here? You talk to me.

I mean... First of all, the score of this movie is amazing. Also, written by Brian May, not the Brian May of Queen, but a different Brian May, but a beautiful, like, just propulsive, very simple, but so potent, you know?

I will say, I noted this at some point, the score's a little all over the place. Not that that's a bad thing, given the film, but when it punches...

When you say all over the place, do you mean, like, I mean, I think the score is very over the top. I think it's very on the nose, in a good way, though.

But when you say all over, what do you mean, like, I feel like it takes some digressions and discursions, musically, that sometimes don't all quite land or feel cohesive to me. But then again, what the film is, I feel like it has license to do that.

Look, there's a lot of this movie that feels pretty seamy in terms of, you know, like, I don't mean see me like this, Reputable, I mean, see me like you see a lot of seams show in this movie. Like you said, this movie was made up for a shoestring on fire, although compared to the original Mad Max, the budget was priceless.

Everything's relative.

You know, but, you know, it's interesting, which, by the way, the actor who plays Toe Cutter, the villain in the first Mad Max movie, came back to play Immortan Joe and Fury Road, so that's kind of amazing. But it's interesting because, yeah, I mean, it's maybe George Miller's third movie. It's an incredibly ambitious movie, especially for an independent Australian film. And you are seeing the development of his aesthetic and the development of a lot of things. And it doesn't all fit in together perfectly, you know.

But the plotting here of this twist, this pivot to a plan, because they have this compound, it's hoarding this gas, this precious commodity that the raiders, that the humongous want to get, and they want to also live, and can they have their cake and eat it too? And so that's the proposition that Max makes them, is that he can connect those dots. He can do that in exchange for his freedom. This is again, not out of any altruism, generosity or solidarity. It is purely out of Max's ruthlessly focused self-preservation that this is the calculation he's made, that the only thing he can bargain with, to get his freedom, to get his car back, and as much juice as he can carry, that's what he's proposing.

And this is the rig, this is the truck that he saw at the very beginning of the movie. So the movie is cycling back to, that plant does pay off in a really good way. And what Max is suggesting is basically here, if I bring you this truck, you can take your tank of gasoline and just, you know, fuck off to wherever you want to go. He doesn't exactly explain how they're going to still fight off the warriors of the wasteland, but at least they'll have a way to transport their gasoline out.

So they agree, this kind of unifies the community sentiment around this plant, and they load Max up. He has a crossbar across his shoulders. He's carrying four tanks of gas to go refill that tanker cab. Max and the dog head out at night on foot. At a certain point, he stumbles into a ravine, is nearly discovered by Wes, because he's having to cross through enemy territory. Feral Kid has been following Max, because he's clearly just found his role model of his dreams. It distracts Wes with a wolf call and then joins him, and then they go and catch up with Gyro Captain. But the narrative efficiency, the construction of planting seeds and then letting them sprout and connecting dots and not letting Lucens linger, but everything intentionally reconnecting and reconnecting. We have last seen him handcuffed to a tree that he is now somehow uprooted and dragging along with them in the desert. So Max catches up with them, then makes him carry the gas tanks for him, which is hilarious. They return to his camp and find that some other hapless marauder had set off the snake booby trap in an attempt to steal the whirly gig. And at this time, they did not have the skills that Max did, so it worked on them. Max then takes a single shotgun shell. He recovers off the body.

It's really cool, by the way, that he literally just has the one shell. Max has this amazing sawed-off shotgun, and you think, oh, this is an action movie. He's going to have infinite cartridges. He scavenges the guy's body, and he finds one rotten cartridge and one good cartridge, which, by the way, somehow offends really good guy enormously that Max is scavenging. He's like, you know.

Well, and also that Max is a fraud, and that had been wielding this and threatening this sawed-off shotgun that had no shell. Yeah, which is great. That reveal is fantastic.

Again, I know Fury Road is the greatest film I've ever made. Everybody loves it, and I'm an idiot. But let's see, the thing that I see in this movie that I find really poignant and interesting about this apocalyptic land is that in Fury Road, Morton Joe literally lives in a mountain that's been hollowed out that has all sorts of technology and devices and machines and shit. Literally, these people kill for a shotgun cartridge. I guess that sense of desperation exists to me in a much more tactile way in these earlier movies than in the later on ones. But I want to point out another big thing in these movies that starts developing in the sense that barter and contracts in barter are sacred. The entire second movie is all about barter town, where the slogan is, break a deal, face the wheel. And again, you see this developing through the Mad Max movies that the sense of society has gone back to the sort of feudal, atavistic state where a contract between two people is sacred and if you break it, the consequences are dire. So that's just, again, the prototypes here, it's so cool to see it developing.

Yeah, this world is so much simpler and smaller than it...

And transactional.

Yes, and transactional. Then it becomes later. The worldview, though, is so depressing because it posits that basically you don't have any value in and of yourself as a human being. Your only value is what you have to bark with.

Which, by the way, is also very much what Fury Road is about. I mean, it is very much about the idea that the end of civilization is one where everything becomes transactional, which is not unlike living in late capitalism.

Yes, it's a slippery slope from one to the other. Then we get one of the most joyful revelations, which is that the autogyro can actually fly. Like, it actually works. It's not just this weird prop. It takes off. So they take the whirligig to the stranded truck.

Which is two days away.

Yeah. They're able to get it running again. And Max then takes it back through hostile territory. And of course, is spotted by Wes, who is still enraged with the fury of vengeance, and then leads an attack on him.

Another great action scene. Look, a really interesting thing about this movie is that basically there is one action trope here. And it is cars fighting cars. And Miller is so good at varying the lengths of these fight sequences. You start with a big action scene, but it's not that big. Then you have driving the Mack truck back is a bigger one. But it's not huge. But it gives you a sense of you've seen the siege of the compound through the binoculars at a distance. And this scene lets you see what it's like because Wes follows Max all the way back to the compound. And it gets very swashbuckling, you know? Wes actually infiltrates the compound. And you know, you see the glory of his assless chaps once more.

You hit the nail on the head with swashbuckling because this is a pirate movie.

Yes, it is, right? It's a total pirate movie. I had the exact same note in my notes about it. It is a pirate movie.

And the truck trailer is a pirate ship. And then there are these marauders that are raiding it. And the way that these action sequences are staged, it is like ships at sea that are raiding and boarding and attacking each other. And I love that about this. I just completely love this. It's a pirate movie on a set on the Sea of Sam.

Not to mention, one of the things you notice, especially during the sequence when Wes gets into the camp and he's flying around and he sort of swings around in some of the chains and stuff like that to get away from people, you notice two things. One of them is, wow, Waterworld did not have a single original thought in its filmic body at all. Everything in that film is ripped off from here completely.

Which by the way, I believe also shot by Dean Semler.

Oh, quite well, I might add. By the way, I cannot say it enough. The cinematography, the use of shot composition in this aspect ratio in this movie is phenomenal. This movie doesn't have a lot of coverage. A lot of the scenes play on masters, they play in wonders. And the thing I love about, there's two things in the way he directs this movie specifically. One of them is he lets master shots play. He composes them beautifully, they look like paintings. The use of color is phenomenal. You see it in Fury Road, notched up to 11 because he's got the access to color correction and computerized coloring, which makes the palette explode. But you really see also in this movie just how it works just in a natural environment. And the other one is that George Miller has this shot that he uses in a lot of his work, which is this very epic sort of push-in, you know? You see it in all of the Road Warrior movies, you see it in Witches of Eastwick, even in Lorenzo's Oil he does it once or twice. So it's interesting because you really see him as a director using very small bag of tricks, but using it so effectively. And that's why I think the movie is so controlled and he has such a control of how he directs that he doesn't do a lot in terms of like making it cutty, cutty, cutty and, you know, getting a lot of coverage and all that. But every frame in this movie is a painting and they're beautiful.

Yeah, another critical thing that you mentioned that cannot be overappreciated is that for a movie that is ostensibly as simple and straightforward as this and has repeated chase sequences and sort of pirate attack sequences on the road, the lack of redundancy or repetitiveness in how the sequences are designed, engineered, executed is remarkable. So I want to take a moment to appreciate the fact that, so as Max is trying to get through hostile territory to get back to the compound of our glam rock band, he spots them, leads an attack, he uses his wrist crossbows to take out a tire. Thankfully, the truck has plenty of tires so he can spare one. But then he boards the rig, then humongous spots them, and then we get to see him do the sort of ritual loading of his Magnificent Revolver with the whole case and the red velvet case and everything. Max, though, has a shotgun, which now we know has a shell, but it misfires, which is a great twist. Then the humongous shoots the engine block, but it keeps going because it's apparently...

Humongous' gun isn't just a gun. It's like a revolver Charles Bronson would use in one of the Death Wish movies. And it has a scope, and he keeps it in a wooden box with his last 12 shells that he's got left, or his last 12 bullets. So him taking out one bullet to take out the engine block of the truck is a big deal.

Yes, it's a big deal, a big gun with a big bullet. Max just keeps going. He is unstoppable. He is just completely focused on getting to where he's going. He's trying to get the truck there, also fighting off Wes, who attacks him in the cab. Max makes it into the settler compound or towards it as another tire blows. Meanwhile, autogyro captain shows up and then launches an aerial attack in the form of dropping a snake.

A snake.

Just as he's about to take a deadly shot at Max, which is hilarious. Max then makes it into the compound, but he brings Wes and a couple of raiders in with them. Then our fearless leader, Papagalo, is shot in the leg, who's manning the defensive flamethrower on the tower. Max then has to take over the flamethrower defense as Wes is running rampant, but then Wes manages to escape as then autogyro captain lands. Then, of course, now the feral kid has something else to be fascinated by.

The whirly jig. I want to point something out there. There's something really interesting in this sequence, which is at one point, Wes headbutts a guy. There's a guy who's clearly not Wes's equal in the compound. He's struggling to load his crossbow. Wes literally just comes up and headbutts him. When Wes headbutts him, there's a flash cut. Literally on the impact, it cuts to white very briefly. Then we come back and it doesn't quite match, but it's a cut to white. It's interesting. George Miller, one of his tricks that he uses, which I just want to reference, Twilight Zone, the movie, which came a couple of years later after doing this, sort of George Miller was recruited to be part of that. A team of directors said that the sequences in the Twilight Zone movie, he did Nightmare at 20,000 feet, which is Twilight Zone, the movie, a movie that is problematic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that three people were killed in trying to get a shot in this movie. In spite of that, George Miller's sequence in it is phenomenally great. John Lithgow doing the role that William Shatner played in the original. The reason I bring it up is because there's one shot when John Lithgow opens the window in the airplane and is face-to-face with the gremlin. And Miller does a huge, very, very quick snap zoom into Lithgow's face. And he had the makeup department rig up eyeballs that would actually inflate and pop out of his face. Okay? And when you watch the movie, you see it, and it's just a flash. And it's the same as the flash cut with his head butt. So, you know, I just think it's a really interesting thing how George Miller, his style is so personal and so distinct to him that you see kind of so many things that then keep showing up later, you know. And also the eyeballs also call back to the corpse in the rig at the beginning of the movie, which is a shot cut with eyeballs like sticking out. So, this movie just, you so clearly see the development of George Miller's style. And it still feels like the style of a master craftsman in this film. So it's just great.

Again, I'm so glad you pointed that out, because it's easy to appreciate George Miller for the big things he does. But just as important are the very small things he does. Like that, like that little minute attention to detail of sneaking a frame in there to have that subliminal effect that is visceral and is very low tech from a filmmaking standpoint, but really effective and really smart.

I would also say that, you know, since we're talking about George Miller's oeuvre in general, this is a guy who's like literally goes from this to Fury Road. But then in the middle there, you've got Babe, which he produced the first one, directed the second one. You've got the Happy Feet.

Babe 2, Pig in the City, which is like The Empire Strikes Back of Babe.

By the way, a movie that also leans shockingly heavily into BDSM imagery, which I don't even want to get into, but it's yeah. And of course, a movie called Lorenzo's Oil. You know, you've got Witches of Eastwick somewhere in there, which is I don't think his favorite film that he's made. But then you've got Lorenzo's Oil, which is a beautiful movie about courage in the form of just two parents trying to save their child. If you like these movies, like please go check out George Miller's other work. He is an incredibly varied and interesting filmmaker. And the last movie he made between Fury Road and Furiosa, which was not entirely a successful film, but a huge swing is a movie where Idris Elba plays a genie. It's called that, what is it? Ten thousand years of misery, a billion years of solitude, two years of not being happy. It's got some name like that.

A longing.

Ten thousand years of longing.

Three thousand.

Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful movie. And again, not a movie that always connects, but the swings are so big, it is absolutely worth your while to see a real director just take some chances.

Three thousand years of longing, also with the great Tilda Swinton.

Three thousand years of longing, yes. Yeah, the great Tilda Swinton, I might add. Yes. So here's what happens. Everybody now thinks, what's going on?

We're about to get to what I think is my favorite scene in the film. I'm so excited about this. This is among my favorite clips in the entirety of Multiplex Overthruster:. Oh, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Indeed. I put it on the same mantle next to the scene in Megaforce on the plane.

Uh-huh.

That we previously.

You like it in blue and you like it in red.

Because it is such an unexpected delight and turn into pure comedy genius. But yet is.

Can you tee up what's happening in the scene though?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Let me have this.

Rhapsodize, please. I beg you.

But it also is completely, cohesively, organically of the moment. Yes. And of the characters.

And of the world.

And reveals unexpected depths and dimensions to both in the most. Agreed. Delightfully surprising and unexpected ways. I love it. So in this scene, the warriors have been kept at bay, the marauders, Wes has escaped, Otto Gyro Captain has landed, is now sensibly going to join them. Max has delivered the rig as promised, but it is damaged. And that leads to a natural question that then unfolds a blossom of answers and interplay.

So obviously our characters don't have radios. So Papa Gallo or Papa Gallo, as I call him, because I pronounce it properly, has been wounded. He's on a tower. He's got a guy and his guy is screaming across the compound to the mechanic. And the mechanic has a guy who then is talking to the mechanic. So it's like we're listening to a game.

So like the geography of the scene is immaculately expressed. It's so clear where every different character is and the distance and what's happening and why this scene has to then play out in this game of telephone the way it does. I love every moment of this.

I mean, let's hear it.

How's the rig? The rig! How is she?

Got a cracked timing case cover and it's broken a couple of teeth off the timing gears.

Got a cracked timing case cover and it's broken a couple of teeth off the timing gear?

The radiator's damaged at the core.

The radiator's damaged at the core?

It's got a cracked water pump.

It's got a cracked water pump?

And a fractured injector line.

It's got a fractured injector line! Well, what does all that mean? Yeah, okay, but what does that mean? What does that mean?

24 hours.

24 hours?

They've got 12. You've got 12!

My face is so happy.

And you lose so much by not seeing the expressions, because the guy who's repeating for the mechanic is just this amazing-looking dude, and when he goes, Okay, he's got this big smile, I mean, it's just, it's joyous.

Obviously, the accents add an enormous potency to the comedy. It's just...

It really does.

Delightful. And just the care to say, this is how we're going to do this scene, how we're going to play it, and the simple thing, but just to have that much fun and delight in it, it is a ray of sunshine in the middle of this desolate wasteland.

I think one of the nice things about this movie is that it does take occasionally a moment of humor. It takes a moment of violent humor sometimes, you know, but it's like it does have layers to it. It's not just a grim slog through this post-apocalyptic world, and I think that really works in its favor. You see so much inventiveness in how different things in this world are portrayed. I really think it's also clever.

And just having the opportunity for a moment of levity executed that well, but that also is completely germane to things we need to know, and the characters need to know. I marvel at that stretch of 45 seconds.

But in this moment, everybody thinks Max is a hero. He's brought them the rig, and they all greet him, and one woman even gives him some fresh shotgun cartridges as a gift, which is, you know... And this is when Max kind of lets them know that he's not a hero, that he's just here for the gasoline. He's mean to the feral kid. He literally, you know, says goodbye, kid, whatever. He's not nice to anybody, and he's about to go. And this is where we hear the clip at the beginning where Papa Gallo is saying, like, you know, we need you to drive the rig, and you're being an asshole. And Max is like, no, I'm not being an asshole. I made a deal with you guys. I'm not your goddamn hero. Uh, which is amazing. Again, the character staying very true to himself.

Yeah, this whole sequence is so interesting. There's several things that happen in quick succession, but it is this opportunity. Like, Max is given an on-ramp to essentially rejoin civilization, be welcomed by the community. Virginia Hayes' warrior woman, you know, or Zahn from Farscape, says, I was wrong about you, because she had been skeptical, and she apologized. She says, I'm sorry. And yeah, Max is now gets to reassert, redefine his identity, if he so chooses, with the full support and embrace of this entire community.

Yep, he can become one with civilization once more.

But he doesn't seem to want it, or doesn't seem to feel worthy of it. Meanwhile, Humongous is setting bodies on fire.

There's a great sequence that happens now, because Max has rejected this, he's gathering his shit, he's about to leave, right? And Humongous is threatening the community, and it starts with one of the most, I mean, literally the first shot of Humongous standing against the dusking sun could be a shot out of Gone With the Wind, it's so beautifully composed.

Yeah, and we get a double dose of second act montages. So there's this kind of what I call this nightmare rain montage of the bad guys all preparing for battle. As Humongous has declared, nobody gets out of here alive. And meanwhile, like Max is broken out another can of dog food. He's just eating dog food. He's out of there. He's already checked out in his own mind. Then we cut to a companion montage inside the compound as they are all prepping for their battle for survival and escape.

So you get the sense that they're going to try to drive the rig out through the Warriors.

Yes, that they've got the rig. It's going to be on their own and they're going to go for it.

And by the way, what we find out is that the reason they want to escape from this refinery is that 2,000 miles away across the continent of Australia, there is a beach where civilization is starting up. And well, one of our characters says it best what the allure of this beach place is.

You have to come, sonny. This is where we're going. Paradise. 2,000 miles from here. Fresh water. Plenty of sunshine. Nothing to do but breathe.

Nothing to do but breathe. Suddenly this guy turned into Nicol Williamson from Excalibur, didn't he?

Breathe. I will admit, in my first hearing of this, I thought he just said nothing to do but breathe. Which I thought, oh, breathe the lovely ocean air on the beach. But no, it's not quite that innocuous. But yeah, it's this temptation of Max, where they are trying to lure him, not just to join their community, but to accompany them to paradise, which I think we can only surmise from the expressions on Max's expressionless face that he considers very dubious. These guys are delusional. The thing they're headed towards probably does not exist at all. And they don't understand why he's not all in, like why he's not on board. Like, this is a great deal and great offer. How could you not do this? And they push him too hard and he pushes back. As Farrell kid is watching, then tries to stow away with them, but then is rejected. Max kind of becomes overly hostile to the kid in order to try, I think, to push him away. There's another really funny little moment that happens within this, where we cut to Whirligig guy who is...

Trying to seduce the sort of cheerleader. In this camp, there's warrior woman, and then she is the opposite of her. It's like the cheerleader girl who just looks...

Yeah, and he's trying to sneak away with his new main squeeze that he is sweet on from the compound and saying, yeah, we can just take off in my Whirligig thing. And she's tempted, but then has second thoughts because her allegiance is with the community. And I can only surmise with her crazy hair. She has some of the best hair in the film. So anyway, Max then finally gets ready for depart. He's gotten the juice that was owed to him. He's all packed up, ready to go. He says goodbye to the gyro captain, departs, and of course, immediately, Wes pursues.

Yeah, he gets his ass handed to him really hard here, doesn't he?

Yeah, and this sequence is brutal. Somehow, night suddenly turns to day in a cut, like maybe passage of time. Wes hits the nitrous on his vehicle and runs Max off the road. And Max's magnificent cruiser, heavy cruiser...

His last of the V8 interceptors is destroyed...

.is total, and this is a violent, distressing wreck. And then it gets worse.

And it gets worse. Go ahead and tell us how bad it gets, buddy, because I can't even talk about this.

I feel like we need a John Wick disclaimer trigger warning, because not only do they destroy Max's car, as a brutalized...

Just say it, just say it. I can't take it any number...

.of the wreckage with his loyal dog, who is remarkably unscathed, and then stands to protect him against the marauders. They kill the dog with a crossbow.

And it's really interesting, because you can see them raping a woman, but you can't see them shoot the dog. Like literally, it's kind of amazing, like the double standards, and yeah, it's off screen.

Thankfully, we are spared that, at least, but it's just gut punch after gut punch. And then they're trying to steal, they try to steal his gas.

But that's what we have planted very early in the movie, Mr. Furshadow and Gavarado.

Another magnificently well-executed payoff to a setup. And we've been told that Max's car has been loaded with a lot of juice.

Yes.

And it goes really big and blows the shit out of them.

It goes real hard.

And then Wes leaves, because presuming that they're all dead.

That Max has died in the booby trap explosion. But what's interesting is, this is literally the moment where Max loses everything. We have shown Max as being very cold. He does not want to attach to community. He does not want to attach to people. He literally is the one guy who's okay being the scavenger, doesn't want to be part of a group. And in his attempt at escaping from a community, escaping from responsibility, he has been brutalized horribly. In fact, he's only saved by...

He literally ascends. He is...

Yes, yes, Whirligig guy comes to get him, yeah...

.arrives like the angel Gabriel and lifts him up out of the wreckage, takes him aloft on the Whirligig, back to the compound.

And what's interesting is there's a commonality between this scene and the sequence in Gladiator. When Maximus is ridden all the way back to Spain wounded and he's seen his dead family and his dead farm and he's sort of taken, and it's that same shot where his head is sort of stationary in the frame and under him you see the earth moving. And you really get the sense that this is a person who's transitioning from one life to the next. I mean, your ascension metaphor is a very apt one because he is now going from being that loner, and just as Maximus is going from being a family man and a general to being at the bottom of the rung, Max is transitioning from being this complete loner to being somebody who's lost everything and has to attach to community, which is a really sort of interesting way of portraying that, again, with no dialogue, with very little of anything else.

He's brought back to the compound. He is a wreck. He is battered. He is stumbling, bloodied. Feral Kid is there to help him, brings back his clothes, leads him out as Papagalo is laying out the plan, which we kind of know is probably futile, but then a battered, bruised Max stumbles forward and says this.

It's all the same to you.

I'll drive that tanker.

Yeah. Now he's ready to assume the mantle of community and responsibility.

He's become that white knight that he never was. He's going to try to drive this tanker out and try to help the good guys survive. And it's phenomenal. And this leads to... Now, Paul, the sleight of hand that happens next is just beyond comprehension. Our heroes gear up. They've got their tanker ready. They've got all of their chase vehicles ready. They're going to punch a hole through the warriors with a wasteland.

And basically Act 3 is just a big chase. Action sequence.

Just one humongous chase.

It's phenomenal. So the forces have faced off, humongous. At this point now has Wes on a chain leashed onto the hood of his vehicle behind the hostages on the front.

Because even for this world, Wes has some serious impulse control issues.

Feral Kid sneaks aboard and is welcomed aboard the rig by Max. Instead of being pushed away, they take off. And they have air support in terms of ETS drop molotovs as the armored tanker heads out. And then there's a very smart strategic reveal in terms of how the civilian convoy splits off in another direction from the armored tanker, which is the prize for the humongous.

They know the humongous is going to put all his resources going after the tanker, so the civilians literally just leave on their own.

And so that sets things in motion. Meanwhile, some of humongous' forces then go in to take the compound, which of course is booby-trapped to explode.

Is booby-trapped?

Like, what is not booby-trapped in this world? Seriously. Now that the chase is underway, Wes is unchained. And now, in addition to crossbows, and now Molotov cocktails have been introduced to the mix, and grappling hooks. Now we're getting escalation of the pirate ship chase warfare action.

And also blow darts with pressurized air. Now, what's interesting to me about this entire sequence, and I don't know how much detail, I mean, it's literally the entire third act of the movie, is this epic chase. But what's great about it is, you know, the good guys have a certain amount of cars, the bad guys have a certain amount of cars. There are a lot of shots of these cars going into the horizon, and it's beautifully shot. But to me, what's interesting is, you start the sequence thinking the good guys are going to win. Because they're the good guys, right? And the movie just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And Paul, what was the turning point for you in the sequence show? You realized they're not going to make it.

Well, one of the big shocks, I mean, not really a shock, but...

It's a shock.

We see Zan's shock.

For me, it was, yeah.

Warrior Woman dies pretty horribly.

Yeah.

And it's taken out because there are some defenders on the tanker, like his gunners. And she's one of them. It is, that is like, oh no, this is bad. We see some of our heroes fall, and she has pulled off the truck. Finally, Max's shotgun works when it needs to, but more tires are being taken out, and the tanker is boarded. Once the tanker is boarded, this sequence gets so insanely awesome.

Yes, it does.

He is outnumbered. It's him and Feral Kid in the cab, and they're closing in on him.

The pincer is just closing on Max. For me, when Warrior Woman dies, I'm like, I don't think they're going to make it, and then it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, and it's beautifully done, because in a Hollywood movie, you think, well, they're going to surely pull out somehow, but no, and then it gets worse, because then Rurligig guy comes to the aid, and you're like, okay, great.

He's got Reinforced Air Support. Papagalo comes in to help in this incredibly gorgeous vehicle, and I'm like, what is that? I want to just study that thing that he's driving. It's the coolest thing. They are both taken out. Papagalo is killed, like, unquestionably. It's not like, oh, maybe he's going to make it. It's like, no, he is killed.

No, it's like Humongous puts a trident in his back. I mean, it's not going to happen for me.

It is just shocking, and the autogyro is shot out of the sky. It crashes, presumably killing our pilot hero. Wes then gets thrown, is fighting, grappling with Max, is thrown into the front of the truck, and then there's this wonderful suspense sequence where then Max's only chance is if he can reload the shotgun, and there is one shell precariously balanced on the front of the hood of the truck that he cannot reach, so he has to send Feral Kid out over the dashboard to try to reach it. And oh my god, this is terrifying and intense. Then, Wes, who we think has been thrown over the front of the hood and maybe run over, reappears because he's been clinging for dear life.

And one of the best shot cuts ever. Oh my god, like literally, Wes just literally comes up from over the hood, he's like, ah, you know, and the actor Vernon Wells, who we also know as Mr. Igoe from Inner Space and as John Matrix's nemesis in Commando.

But it's super intense. And then meanwhile, one of the reasons Max needs to reload is because the humongous is basically embarked on a game of chicken against like head on, ramming speed, brace for impact, ships at sea, battle, climax moment, Max gets the shotgun shell from Feral Kid, but he basically crashes through Wes into the oncoming humongous' car, crashing through both of them, but at the expense of toppling, overturning the tanker and wrecking it. And then we get one of the great reveals, the great reveal of the film.

Oh my God. Before we talk about the great reveal of the film, because we talked about the sleight of hand, I want to say that there is one shot in this movie where one of the bad guys, his car, he flies out of his car and he literally tumbles from one end of the frame to the other through the air, and it is a beautiful shot, and it's like one of the iconic shots of this movie. But basically Mad Max has crashed through the humongous' car, humongous is dead, Wes is the first thing that hits the humongous' car, so he's gone. He has joined his catamite in homophobic heaven, and the truck is overturned and we see sand coming out of the tanker truck, and that is where we learn that warrior woman, papa gallo, everybody, I mean, I don't know how many people knew, Max certainly didn't know, papa gallo knew, warrior woman probably knew that all of the tanks of gasoline were hidden in the civilian convoy and oil drums, and the oil tanker was a feint to get the warriors to the wasteland away from them so the civilians could escape with their new leader, by the way, who is? Wurlicik guy! Papa Gallo is dead, and Wurlicik guy somehow is shown driving the bus, and he is actually called their new leader.

As we are told, first thing, before we get to this, and I love this, I think how this movie ends and ties everything up is a thing of beauty. Narratively, story-wise, character, everything is great, but what I love is this misdirect, because as I'm watching this movie, because we don't know the plan, and we've also been teased by things like, oh yeah, we're going to go to this beach paradise. You're like, this doesn't exist. These people are delusional. Oh, this is a reasonable man. We can negotiate with them. These people are delusional. So when the tanker truck topples over and spills out sand, a natural thought is, did Max just go through all this for nothing? Did they not actually have this huge reserve of gas? Was this all a delusion? There's this moment of that until then you get the reveal that, oh no, of course, this was their bold gambit. And it's brilliant. And it is all told to us in narration, which gives us the other great reveal of the film, which is a wonderful gift.

But before you get there, I want to say, Max had literally been grappling hooked to the back window of the truck. Max finally frees himself from that. He walks out. He's leaning on the tanker, looking at the sand pouring out of the tanker, like son of a bitch. The Whirligig guy comes up to him.

Yeah, he's who survived.

Yeah, he survived in the Whirligig.

He's having to drive the Whirligig. He has to drive it.

Yeah, he's having to drive the Whirligig. And they have this moment where Max sort of looks at him, and Max is like, son of a bitch. And the other guy's like, son of a bitch. It's like, that's this world. And then Whirligig guys somehow rejoins the civilian convoy and all that. And then we get to the... I'm sorry to preempt your conversation, but it's a great reveal. I want to hear you talk about it. Please give it to me.

And so began the journey north to safety, to our place in the sun. Among us we found a new leader, the man who came from the sky, the Gyro Captain. And just as Papagallo had planned, we traveled far beyond the reach of men and machines. The juice, the precious juice was hidden in the vehicles. As for me, I grew to manhood.

I mean, the simplicity, just the epicness of it. And that final shot of Mad Max just standing in the road in the middle of the night, you know, just, oh, it's beautiful.

You can make a case that this could be the greatest closing narration of all time in any movie.

And Paul, who's giving this? Who is this mysterious narrator?

He's the future! He grows up to be this incredibly eloquent statesman and leader because of the role models he had in this movie. The contrast between the destructively mundane, corrosive narration in Blade Runner that was inflicted on us to the just soaring heights of the bookend narration of this film and how much one adds to the film and elevates it versus the other one detracting from it and submerging it. It's so stark to me, but I love this ending so, so much. It's classically handled.

So yeah, Paul, I don't know. Any final thoughts on The Road Warrior? What are your thoughts?

The greatness of George Miller cannot be denied in any decade.

I'm in complete agreement with you.

While this is a relatively primordial incarnation of his artistry, smaller in scope, it stands among the most influential films from this summer in its lasting impact and iconography.

I can't disagree. Producer Brad, what are we doing next? Yeah, go ahead.

Let's talk about budget.

Yes.

This is the 12th film we've seen. Let me list the movies and then tell me where you think this ranks in terms of budget. So we've seen Rocky III, Poltergeist, Star Trek II, Grease 2, ET, Firefox, Blade Runner, Megaforce, The Thing, Conan, Tron and The Road Warrior. And we've talked about it before and I'll give you the boundaries. Blade Runner has been estimated at 30 million and ET is at the low end with 10.5 million. Where do we put The Road Warrior?

This is a fraction of ET.

Yeah.

The Road Warrior budget was four million dollars.

Wow.

Can you imagine that?

Staggering. Stagger.

That's amazing. By the way, it's such a beautiful use of resources. So, producer Brad, what are we seeing next week? What are our choices?

Box office first.

How did it do?

We are seeing this out of sequence. This movie opened in the US the week before Rocky III. So this is May 21, 82. And it opened at number four with three and a half million. And the top three movies that week were Conan the Barbarian, Dead Men Don't Wear Clad and Porky's.

Porky's from the director of A Christmas Story.

We skipped the movies from June 16, 1982 to watch The Road Warrior. The movies we skipped were Young Doctors in Love, Midsummer Night Sex Comedy and Kenny Rogers in Six Pack. These movies opened at number two, number nine and number ten with ET still number one at the box office.

Makes total sense. I mean, ET went on to become the highest rated, the highest box office film of all time, so that's legit.

This film was worth catching up on and including.

Yeah, I'm glad we went to the third-run theater and watched this one instead of going to see Young Doctors in Love.

Although I kind of would like to see that. I haven't seen it since...

Go enjoy yourself.

So our next episode, we're going back to July 23, 1982, and we're getting deeper into the sour and further from the genre films. Here are your options. Oh, God. We have The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It's a film adaptation of the Broadway musical starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. We have The World According to Garp, Robin Williams, Mary Beth Hurt, Glenn Close and John Lithgow, and it's directed by George Roy Hill. And I'll say this movie, and we'll just move on quickly. We have Zapped, the teen comedy starring Scott Baio and Willie Ames and Heather Thomas.

Burn It with Fire.

Yeah, that's it.

Those are the three.

So, best little whorehouse in Texas, I believe, had its premiere here in Austin at the historic Paramount Theatre, which is where I got my first job right out of college for three years. That was my home.

I am flummoxed. I don't know what to do here. I'm a...

World according to Garp, I have to say, given the cast, yeah, that's... But I'm very torn because I feel adrift, venturing outside of my genre comfort zone.

I've seen World According to Garp a number of times. It was on the movie channel a lot when I was a kid. I didn't see it in the theaters. And that is one depressing movie. I don't think we need to do that. I think let's...

Sally's become even more of an icon over the years.

You know what? Let's do the best of the horror house in Texas. One of us is from Texas.

I think that's what we got to do. Just a small question.

Go on.

What's the following weekend? Mr. Brad, what's the following weekend?

Let's see. Do you think maybe this weekend we go to the Whirly Ball instead of going to a movie?

I think our time machine can do one weekend at a time, and I think you're locked into one of these two movies.

Pick one. You horrible man. Best of the horror house in Texas.

It's going to be the horror house. Dolly Parton.

Yeah, Dolly Parton. She's a saint. We got to talk about Dolly.

It's going to be a fountain of joy. Here's the thing. I don't think I've ever seen it. I will admit that. I don't think I've ever actually seen that movie.

I think in that way, I am like you and I like this about us. But our Best of the Horror House in Texas rigidity will end this week and we'll have to just live with that stain upon our souls. It's going to be amazing.

You know what?

The more we talk about this, the better I feel about it. I do want to restate, producer Brad, you're a sadist and I hate you, except I love you. Paul, I cannot wait to discuss the Best of the Horror House in Texas. Oh, I can't. Actually, I can't wait quite a bit. Yeah, but until then, our friends, we will see you next week in line at The Multiplex. So Paul, I have a list I want to read to you if that's okay.

Of course, regale me.

Yeah, this list is called Here to Four Unknown Siblings of Mad Max. So we have Resentful Roger, Upset Ursula, Testy Ted, Seething Steve, Vexed Vanessa, Taciturn Tony, Angry Amy, Irate Irving, Furious Fred, Indignant Ira, he's a bad one, Raging Ron, Flaming Fiona, Vitriolic Victor, Savage Serena, Bad Bob, Annoyed Alan, Passionate Patricia and finally, Cnipchous Carla.

Javi, where is Persnickety Paul? Paul? End of line.