Apocalypse... Pow!

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE ROAD WARRIOR Directed by George Miller

Screenplay by Terry Hayes and George Miller, with Brian Hannant

THE VERMIN HAVE INHERITED THE EARTH . So proclaims the spray-painted graffito on a truck sprawled by a desolate stretch of road in this low-budget Australian thriller. At first horrified glance, moviegoers may be convinced that the vermin have also inherited the movie industry. In The Road Warrior, cars crash, somersault, explode, get squashed under the wheels of semis. Skinless bug-eyed corpses hurtle toward the screen. A mangy dog sups at a coyote carcass. A deadly boomerang shears off fingertips, creases a man's skull. That's entertainment? As a series of isolated incidents, no; our nerve endings have long since been numbed by the movies' aimless carnage. But as garishly precise daubs in George Miller's apocalyptic fresco, they add up to exhilarating entertainment--and a textbook for sophisticated, popular moviemaking.

Like its predecessor Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior is set in the postnuclear future. The world has been totaled; civilization is a white-line junkyard; the only amenity is staying alive. Where there was high culture, now there is only car culture. In one of the film's first images, an automobile breaks angrily through one side of the truck that has been holding it; this is the caesarean birth of the new mutant marauders. They race across the scarred landscape on stripped-down motorcycles, killing for fuel, raping for fun, going to hell at 80 m.p.h. In a jerry-built fortress, the more admirable survivors have assembled an oil refinery--but, surrounded by the marauders, they cannot escape to use their precious petrol. Into this version of cattlemen vs. homesteaders rides a scurvy Shane: Max (Mel Gibson), once the leader of a vengeful highway patrol, now a misanthropic me-firster. For the technical challenge, Max makes an uneasy pact with the refiners. He will help them break through the cordon of marauders and speed them toward their image of paradise: the seacoast, 200 miles away, and peaceful freedom.

The outline suggests a standard scenario of Armageddon aftershock. Bikers have terrorized many a decent citizen in movies over the past three decades. And the sociopathic superman has emerged to defend them in distinguished westerns (John Ford's The Searchers) and easterns (Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo). What Miller has done here is create a milieu as dense and tangy as Tolkien's Middle Earth or Celine's demimonde. This is Australia as the Down Underworld, where character is revealed in the gradations between good and awful. Drawn in vivid cartoon strokes, this menagerie can be funny or heroic or scary.

One good guy is a dog, Max's gray-eyed mutt companion, fearless and faithful. Another one literally erupts out of the earth. This is Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence), a deranged parody of the World War I aerial ace: scarecrow skinny, gaily clad, sporting a James Coburn smile with advanced caries. This would-be gallant is given to abrupt whinnies and wistful meditations on the good old days: "Remember lingerie?" The refiners are led by Pappagallo (Mike Preston), who carries the weight of his predicament with swaggering dignity, and Feral Kid (Emil Minty), an eight-year-old who growls in anger, purrs with pleasure, performs backflips into burrows and wields the demon boomerang. His counterpart in the marauders is Wez (Vernon Wells), a Feral Kid gone wrong. War-painted and Apache-coiffed, Wez has a mind that performs acrobatics of sadism and a scream that sounds like stripped gears. But Wez is a Muppet compared with his leader, the lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), "warrior of the wasteland, the ayatullah of rock-and-rollah." The Humungus malevolence courses through his huge pectorals, pulses visibly under his bald, sutured scalp. He is the meanest, strongest man left in the world. But Max is the best.

When our anti-hero appeared in Mad Max, he was an amoral vigilante with baby fat. Since then, Gallipoli has made Gibson an international star: he is more mature and authoritative; his moon face is cratered with character. In 1979, when Mad Max was released, George Miller was a 34-year-old M.D. who had edited his first feature on a kitchen table. Max surprised with its cinematic canniness, but Warrior astounds as a sequel superior in every respect. Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur: Wez's rain dance, a fiery crucifixion, a vision of Max flying supine over the outback. Miller keeps the eye alert, the mind agitated, the Saturday-matinee spirit alive.

Later this month The Road Warrior will begin snaking eastward across the U.S., driving hard to become the first hit of the summer season. It deserves that eminence. While laughing at the characters or sweating out the melodrama, moviegoers will get an intuitive lesson in the director's art: evoking emotion through technique. If the film is a commercial success, George Miller will find a productive future in Hollywood. But on the evidence of The Road Warrior, his future is now. --By Richard Corliss

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.