Mad Max 2
War. War never changes.
This doesn’t seem to be a an actual sequel to the last film. It doesn’t matter, the plot is just a coat hanger to display those characters and their chase scenes.
Max is a Man with No Name, roaming the wasteland. He does his trademark “breaking so that both enemies shoot themselves” and gets the leaking Big Rig gas. Wez and his twink boyfriend rage in the background.
He roams some more and finds the gyrocopter, with his captain hidden in the sand. The captain is captured, and he remains a prisoner all the way, until they fetch the Big Rig later.
To avoid death, the gyro captain leads them to the gas town. “Town” might be too much, it’s about 30 people extracting and refining gasoline protected by makeshift barriers. On the outside, controlling the desert, there’s Lord Humongous and its war dogs.
After am attempted escape, a couple are caught: the woman raped and killed, the man barely survives. Max fetches him and takes him into town, in exchange for gas. Another Humongous attack is repelled, and they start thinking about their options. They have a school bus and a tanker trailer, but no rig to pull it. Max will get that Big Rig for them, in exchange for his car with as much gas he can carry. A win-win situation.
Max catches up with the Gyro Captain (who is dragging the log he was chained to), and forces him to drag the gas instead. They get to the gyro, fly to the Big Rig, and Max releases the captain. They both go the same place, but Max drives through Lord Humongous camp, catching some flak and forcing some enemy vehicles into the stronghold.
Those include Wez, but he escapes. The rest are taken care of, with minimal casualties. They did get the Rig, the crippled mechanic on the swing can fix it in 12 hours. Max is showered with praise, but he fulfilled his bargain and wants to leave. Not even compliments and insults can make him stay. The gyro captain is perfectly integrated, after seeing there is a young girl.
Max tries to drive through the camp, but rolls his car over an hill. Badguys kill his dog and take his gas, they cannot kill him because the booby trap goes off with an enormous boom. It’s so big, the smoke plume is seen from the gas town, and he gets rescued by gyro.
The final escape is now, Max recovers enough to drive the rig himself. The plan is to have the rig act as bait to pull the Lord Humongous away from the town while the bus and the rest of the cars escape the other way around. The rig soldiers will sacrifice themselves for a worthy cause.
Max is one of them, and the final chase sequence ensure, where all hell breaks lose. Suspense to the end. Humongous tries to play chicken with Max, but his Big Rig obliterates everything, turn over a corner and crashes. Only then can Max know it’s filled with sand, he was the perfect decoy since he didn’t even know about that deception!
The gas was taken in the school bus. The Gyro Captain survives and joins the bus, and so does the Feral Kid, the future narrator of this folk tale. Max, as usual, rides into the sunset, an hero to another downtrodden town somewhere.
I love all the little details: Max goes probably half the movie with an empty sawed off shotgun, and when he tries to use the only shell he has, it’s a dud. He only fires it 3 times with some heirloom shells the gas town dudes get him. Lord Humongous has a revolver with a scope, but only uses it in special occasions, storing the bullets in a velvet case.
After 3 or 4 views, you can see the speed up scenes, but it’s still very suspenseful to see the last chase scene (and the rest of the film too). There’s now a Fallout TV Show too, wheels within wheels, within wheels.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.