Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was The Empire Strikes Back of Mad Max franchise. Miller had created a grimy and twisted tale of “Osploitation” in 1979, but 2 years later he came back to the silver screen with a bigger and more robust story. Instead of simply doing more of Max and his police days, he shows what the world has come to since Mad Max dropped his bars and went off his merry way. To put it simply, it’s a story of gasoline in a world of chaos and how the powerful need it to survive. Oil has always been a staple in the world, but in a world where new production has gone to pot, gasoline is the currency of a crumbled world.

The film starts out with a narration and a montage of black and white photography, telling us the story of Mad Max and how the world got to this point. Everyone is split off into factions trying to survive, with the good banding together into wagon train like convoys and villages, while roving bands of pirates try to steal and pillage to get what they want. Sort of rebooting the franchise in a way, the narration describes the forces of the world fighting themselves to a standstill as their fuel sources gave out among them. Now it’s years later and the rest of humanity is holding on by the skin of their teeth and doing what they can to survive.

The introductory chase of the film re-introduces us to loner Max (Gibson) and his dog (simply named dog) as they are hounded by the Mohawk wearing Wez (Vernon Wells, most notable for playing opposite of Arnie in Commando) who will become his nemesis throughout the film. Getting away from the Mohawk’d freak, Max meets up with “The Captain” (Bruce Spence) and decides to rob a fuel refinery where a band of common folk are banding together in order to make their way to a better life up north.

However, Wez and his boss Humungus (Swedish body builder Kjell Nilsson) decide THEY want the fuel too. Max tries to barter his way into the camp of the commoners surround the refinery, but each time he does he ends up getting deeper and deeper into the conflict between them and the Humungus. Sooner or later Max is forced to choose a side. Tear through the poor folk trying to move north and steal their fuel, or band with them against the roving pirates of The Humungus and his men before it’s too late.

The Road Warrior is a gleeful, violent, and plain FUN film from start to finish. The movie is incredibly simple despite it’s Hollywood trappings (get fuel so you can better yourself), but Mel Gibson just steels the entire film as he is finally coming into his own personality. Miller gorges himself on the post apocalyptic insanity of it all, moving from savage humans to humans actually regressing to a more savage point, insomuch that they barely resemble themselves any more. It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s just pure high octane explosion filled fun, making it the one film that EVERYBODY thinks of when they think of Mad Max.




Rated R by the MPAA




4K Video: Video:

Looking at The Road Warrior it’s blatantly obvious that the 4K remasters for these films were well worth the wait. The Road Warrior was shot with a distinctly hazy and brown look to it, with a strange fish eye type looks that has outer edges of the shot looking softer than the center. That being said, the HDR application and the extended detail levels are quite pleasing to the eye. Max’s greasy face is better looking than ever before, and you can see every bit of sweat dropping off The Humungus’s heavily muscled body. Colors are a bit more vibrant and warm, and the overly lit blu-ray is tamed a bit with the darker look of the 4K UHD’s expanded color palette. Overall it’s a good disc that stands head and shoulders above the Blu-ray, but is stylized enough to not really go into super glossy and shiny like other films can do.








Audio:

The use of a Dolby Atmos track made me raise an eyebrow as The Road Warrior reminds me a lot of Mad Max, in that it really wasn’t a massively spacious and bass heavy track. It was good, but I was correct too. The Atmos mix is really an enhanced 5.1 track that adds some layers to the top end and the surround usage, as well as some boosted bass levels, but isn’t a revelation to the ears. The nuances and directional shifts are nice, making it a slightly more light and airy track, but overall it’s simply a nice evolutionary change to the mix, and luckily the original track is included for purists.







Extras:

• Road War: The Making of The Road Warrior
• Audio commentary by director George Miller and cinematographer Dean Semler
• Introduction by critic Leonard Maltin

Final Score:
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It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but The Road Warrior is still the pinnacle of the series in my humble opinion. Mel Gibson was just really starting his Hollywood journey, and Miller had really enhanced the post apocalyptic world and crafted the crazy insanity that the world had dropped to by this time. It was no longer a car chase movie, but a full on blockbuster style film that turned it into a legendary classic film. There are definitely rough edges to Miller’s work, but it is the peak of his career and probably the best of the Mad Max movies he’s done. The 4K UHD gets a stand alone release as well as inclusion in the Anthology boxset, and is also the ONLY film to have any real extras on it. Definitely a must own.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Max Phipps, Kjell Nilsson, Vernon Wells
Directed by: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Brian Hannant, Terry Hayes
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Core), English DD 5.1, English DD 2.0, French, Italian, Spanish Japanese DD 2.0, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian DD Mono, German, Spanish , Japanese DD 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: R
Runtime: 95 minutes
Blu-Ray Release November 16th, 2021

Recommendation: Great Watch