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Before Fury Road! THE ROAD WARRIOR Midnights This Weekend at The Tivoli

By Tom Stockman | April 22, 2018

“My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember the Road Warrior…”

THE ROAD WARRIOR plays midnights this weekend (April 27th and 28th ) at the Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar Boulevard) as part of their Reel Late at the Tivoli Midnight series.

In MAD MAX(1979), director George Miller showed us a eerie Australia on the verge on some kind of apocalypse. Biker gangs roamed the desert roads raping and pillaging as they pleased, while a small group of cops did what little they could to keep law and order. Small communities still existed, shops were operational, and institutions still had some sense of organization, but when THE ROAD WARRIOR picks up the story, civilization as we know it is gone, and thugs in fetish biker gear do as they like. Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), driven mad by seeing his wife and child slain, drives alone in his suped-up Pursuit Special hunting for what little petrol remains in the world.

It seems he has as little humanity remaining as the mohawked crazies he routinely smashes off the road and executes, until a man known as the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence) brings a nearby oil refinery to Max’s attention. When he investigates, he finds a close-knit community desperately trying to protect what is rightly theirs from a huge gang under the command of a leather-masked brute known as Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) who are laying siege. Max enters the refinery carrying one of their injured, hoping to trade the man for fuel. When the mad dies, so does Max’s hopes of getting out there any time soon, and soon the community is turning to Max for help in the hope that he can retrieve a gas tanker capable of carrying their valuable load and lead them to safety.

THE ROAD WARRIOR’s reputation as the one of the greatest action films ever made is not to be taken lightly. Good action should be clear, coherent and, of course, exciting, and the climax of the film, which takes up nearly of a third of the running time, is one of the greatest set-pieces ever committed to celluloid, really unmatched until Miller himself filmed the long-awaited MAD MAX FURY ROAD 36 years later. It’s basically one long chase scene, as a variety of cars and trucks converted to be bigger, faster and stronger try to take down the tanker. The stunts are performed so perfectly that it will make you wonder how certain shots were filmed without any fatalities. It works as a western too, with Max playing the role of the silent stranger who unwittingly becomes the hero. It may have the slimmest of plots, but THE ROAD WARRIOR is pure energy within a fantastically realized world and you’ll have the chance to see it again on the big screen when it plays this weekend midnights at The Tivoli.