In 1981, a sequel to Mad Max was released called Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It did well at the box office, it made around 24 million dollars in North America which was decent back in the early 80s. Today inflation rates affect the film industry tremendously. Anything under 30 million dollars is considered a box office failure, even 50 million. Mad Max 2 was a low-budgeted film, produced at around 3 million in American money.
I wrote an essay on this movie for a class that focuses on the philosophies in films back in college. George Miller and Mel Gibson teamed up for all 3 Mad Max movies, they were even going to make a fourth Mad Max movie and release it back in 2004. But it's now either on hold or cancelled due to the Iraq war. I know you may find what I'm about to say to be quite repetitious and annoying, but I am quite serious about protecting my original works and more. So if you wish to publish or use this on some other websites, ask for my permission first. I'll always say this every time I post an essay or something of mine. Especially the portfolio that is displayed on my site, these are not to be republished or redistributed in any forms.
Anyway, have fun reading the essay.
Civilizations, Wars and Desires
In our world, we have always had wars all through the history of humankind. We always are fighting to accomplish our goals by having wars. Why must we have wars? What do we achieve in wars? Do we have wars to become more civilized? Why is it so important to be civilized? Is it really necessary for us to kill the others to get what we want? Do we start wars to get what we desire? Does it make any sense or is it completely illogical? Examples will be taken from George Miller’s The Road Warrior, the sequel to Mad Max starring Mel Gibson reprising the role of Mad Max.
In our civilization, there is an advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in the society of mankind. It is marked by the progress we have achieved in the arts and sciences and our extensive use of record keeping, which includes writing. Complex political and social institutions have strong influences in our civilization. A lot of different nations have different forms of government including democracy, communism, socialism, and more. We live in a country that is mixed with socialism and democracy, but it has been said that taking a page out of communism is how we formed our health care system. So we may have a touch of communism in the way we run our country. We are, no doubt, a mixture of democracy and socialism. War is when we are in a period of conflict, it usually take place between nations. Wars are being fought everyday for all different reasons. Our desires are the deep-seated wishes for what we don’t have. In many wars, the underlying goal is to achieve our desires.
George Miller has directed all of the Mad Max movies, the newest of which is the fourth Mad Max, slated for release in 2004, with Mel Gibson reprising his role. Apparently, the Mad Max series is has somewhat of A cult following; each film has lot of car chases and has a lot of noisy action. I did, however, find the Road Warrior a very interesting film because it displayed several fascinating concepts about civilization and war. People in the movie acted out in such a beastly manner that I actually thought they were real animals, not human beings. By contrast, they had enough intelligence to drive a car; this was bizarre thing to see since they were really a bunch of dimwitted fools. It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, but the good guys were still displaying manners that could be compared to an animal. The people were very uncivilized because they have survived by killing or fighting the other people to get food and/or other necessities. In this movie, it is all about oil, nothing more. This is purely a war over oil, and this is simply history repeating itself. At the end of the movie, it was all sand, not oil. The people’s desires were unfulfilled because they wanted the oil but they got sand instead. Mad Max’s primary goal in the movie was to get the oil to get his car running, but he got into all kinds of awkward situations where he had to fight off all the thugs in order to get what he wanted and help the good guys out. But Mad Max was really a selfish person himself because he was ungrateful when he asked for the oil. He really only wanted it for his own benefit, but he ends up having to help the people get what they want. The other thugs wanted to have a war in order to get the oil too. So that led him into the war between the more civilized people and the bad seeds. In the end, he did come close to achieving his primary goal, but it wasn’t what he expected and would be useless since it is not what he needed. One thing I noticed about the Mad Max films is that they don’t really end, they just keep going on and on. That is probably why we are getting another sequel added to the series. This movie is one of the best films to make people feel very grateful for living in a highly civilized society. This movie showed a very realistic side to how people really are and that nuclear wars are the surest way to end our civilized society and force us to start all over again by starting a very primitive civilized society. The bad guys instigated the wars because they had a desire to conquer. Just like Adolf Hitler had the desire of dominating the world.
If people disliked this film, I can understand why. The general population will think it’s just a no-brainer action flick with cheesy one-liners. But myself, I think this is one of the best films yet to touch the silver screen that has many messages hidden in the no-brainer action scenes. It is disguised so well that you cannot think of it because it is not trying to get you thinking, you have to discover the messages yourself. The scenery in this movie is a bleak looking world, suffering from the after effects of previous wars using weapons of mass destruction. The underlying messages in this movie are not easy to see and so many people will see it as a no-brainer action flick for many years to come.
There is a fair amount of provocation in this film and I always like to see provocation in movies because it can send people messages, some of which can be quite important. What we see on the screen may be just a moving image made from waves of lights, but we also can fill it with messages that actually make an influence on our society. Civilization and war are simply a standard in our society and have always been throughout the history of mankind. It’s in our blood, regardless of what the peace activists say. They still have it in their blood. We achieve goals by having wars; there have been many wars that had a lot of illogical reasons behind them, mainly because they were usually started by evil monsters such as Adolf Hitler. We get involved in wars for very logical reasons such as stopping monsters like Adolf Hitler. We do this so that we can keep our society highly civilized. The Road Warrior sends us a powerful message on civilizations, wars, and desires. The world is not the problem, it’s us.
Written by Paul Moreau
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without the original author's permission.
Copyright 2003 Paul Moreau. All rights reserved.
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