I decided the other week to fill in one of the holes in my filmography and watch The Road Warrior, which I somehow missed seeing. I feel like I missed a few classic movies in the following manner: Too young to see it when it came out (I was 8 in 1981), too many other things to see to bother watching it when I was a teen, and it seemed old, trashy  and hard to get when I grew up. Thank you public library!

Now I saw Mad Max: Fury Road in theaters and absolutely loved it. It was much, much better than I had expected it to be, and watching The Road Warrior it was obvious that the director had seen and loved it, too. This was the film to which Fury Road was the homage. I mean the parallels between Immortan Joe and The Humungus, and the chase of the big rig are all too obvious to be worth re-hashing. In general, I feel that Fury Road did a wonderful job of staying true to the feel of its source while also elevating it to heights of spectacle and madness that just weren’t possible in 1981.

The one thing that really bothers me about The Road Warrior, though is that I felt the ending suffered from a terrible case of anticlimax, almost as though the writer really could not tell whether Lord Humungus or Wez was supposed to be the “real” antagonist for Max. It seems obvious that the roles were originally envisioned in such a fashion as to be analogous to Darth Vader’s and the Emperor’s relationship to Luke, in that Darth Vader was to be the more personal antagonist, with the Emperor being the ultimate power. In that light, it makes sense that Luke must defeat (not kill) Darth Vader first in order to ultimately defeat (again, not kill) the Emperor.

But in The Road Warrior it is curious that the ultimate death of Humungus happens so quickly. It makes sense, in that Mad Max turns the tanker around and Humungus doesn’t know about (blind hills can be dangerous, kids!) But the fact that timing such a collision would be almost impossible, and that there is further no evidence in the film that Max planned it, really made it feel like the director simply ordained that Max would win. Max is driving a rig, Humungus a car, and Humungus dies. Very unlike the death of Immortan Joe, who is killed more or less in hand-to-hand combat. Killed by a trick with a chain and a car, yes. But killed much more by planned physical violence. Humungus’s death is pretty much an accident. Having Wez die in the same accident — while distracting Max on top of it — only amplifies the anticlimax. The whole thing left me feeling unsatisfied.

I’d love to hear anyone else’s take on it. What was here that I missed?