Geek Movies From The Summer of 1982 - The Road Warrior

Here we have the post-apocalyptic movie entry for the Summer of 82.  The Road Warrior stars a young leather clad Mel Gibson.  A Mel Gibson years away from making it big in Lethal Weapon and years away from revealing himself to be the complete nut job we all know him to be now.  But first he is starring in the sequel to 1979’s Mad Max.

In short the summary of the movie is that Max befriends, well as one would in that time, a group of survivors who are living at a gasoline refinery.  Hence they have the most important resource and the bad guys want it.  What they really want is to head to utopia with all their gas and Max is their best chance to get past Humungous and his group of crazed bikers.

I watched The Road Warrior for the first time while doing research for these articles.  In fact this was the only movie of the 8 I haven’t seen previously and some of the others I haven’t seen for 30 years.  Don’t know why my Dad never rented it back in the day and I never came across it on TV.  I guess I never really had any motivation to watch it I guess.

So while on a recent camping trip while waiting for my wife and son to join me I popped The Road Warrior in the RV’s DVD player and proceeded to watch it for the first time.  Well I have to say that I found The Road Warrior to be quite enjoyable.  There wasn’t much of a story going on and in fact it was pretty simple to follow.  With an action movie you do not want to get bogged down overthinking a complex story you mainly want to watch mindless action and see the good guys prevail over the bad guys.

I loved watching the action with Mel Gibson taking on the crazed bikers.  It was pretty cool and the chase through the waste land with the tanker truck was pretty awesome and really intense.   A major plus for this movie is that you didn’t have to see the first movie to know what is going on in The Road Warrior. 

So is this a perfect movie. Well no it isn’t but that is not what the makers of The Road Warrior had intended.  What they intended was to make an entertaining action film for the action movie fan to enjoy.  I have to say I was thoroughly entertained and glad I watched this movie albeit 30 years later.