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The "white-line nightmare" expanded, grunge into folklore. A scrawl of graffiti à la Apocalypse Now states the post-apocalyptic situation, "the vermin have inherited the earth," a landscape not just medieval but Martian. With nothing to do in the wasteland but roam and crash, petrol becomes more valuable than water. Surrounding the refinery homesteaders are motorized marauders "like angry ants, mad at the smell of gasoline," their leader is a sunburned weightlifter (Kjell Nilsson) whose hockey mask barely conceals a warped skull. All the grudging savior (Mel Gibson) wants is a full tank to keep "living off the corpse of the old world." Hell on wheels in the Outback, George Miller barreling for maximum graphic impact, a stupendous symphonie métallique. Between the bygone memory of a music box and the dubious utopia of a beach postcard, a barbarian order raised on dog food. Flamethrowers atop stockades, bound hostages like hood ornaments, sandy panoramas speckled with blood and oil and rust. (Amid these granular textures, the shock of the bright scarlet from the warlord's velvet-lined revolver case.) "A piece of history. Would've been a shame to blow it up." Farrow's Hondo (or Endfield's Zulu) painted over by Russolo, Ruscha's Standard Station as a barricaded oasis, "not self-service, no." Magua and Mowgli turn up, the former a Mohawked bruiser in leather (Vernon Wells) and the latter a whooping enfant sauvage wielding a razory boomerang (Emil Minty). Woozy from an explosion, the hero is carried aloft by the gyrocopter pilot (Bruce Spence) in possibly the film's most evocative shot, a lyrical blur of the celestial and the infernal. Miller marshals all of his action sweep and genre acumen for the feverish mutation of Stagecoach that is the climactic spree of stunts. "Reflexes. Yeah, that's what you've got." The subsequent inflation of Thunderdome is concurrent with the witty diminution of Kramer's Diesel. Cinematography by Dean Semler. With Mike Preston, Virginia Hey, Max Phipps, William Zappa, Arkie Whiteley, Steven J. Spears, and Syd Heylen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |