40 Years Ago Today: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Described in simple terms, Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has endured as such a popular film (and as such good Star Trek to boot) for forty years because -- at its beating heart -- it concerns the psychology of two great leaders; two larger-than-life men who take very different paths in life.  

One man, Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) exemplifies experience and, through his friends and crew mates like Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy), also wisdom.   

When Kirk doesn't acknowledge his experience, his "first best destiny," he fails.  When he remembers "why things work on a starship" -- such as relying on the advice of rational Mr. Spock -- he succeeds.  It's that simple.

The other great leader is Khan (Ricardo Montalban), a "prince" of superior resources, vast intelligence...and a soul twisted and corrupted by years and decades of obsession.  

Khan is a mirror-image of Kirk.  His ego and intelligence may be considerable, but he has little practical experience captaining a starship, and -- unlike Kirk -- he explicitly ignores the advice of his people, namely the wise-beyond-his-years Joaquin (Judson Scott).  Khan is Kirk out-of-balance, only with ten-times Kirk's strength and an unquenchable compulsion for vengeance.

Thus The Wrath of Khan is a essentially a 105-minute showdown between these two men, and a sustained, even intimate duel between their contrasting, mirror-image personal characteristics.  The spaceships and other high-tech trappings are but a colorful backdrop for what is, in essence, a very old human story.  

Above, I noted that both of these men are "larger-than-life."  Indeed, Kirk and Khan might even be described as paragons of  the human animal, and the way that the film mythologizes them, appropriately, is to connect both Kirk and Khan to the annals of human history, specifically to great literature of years and centuries past.  

Producer Harve Bennett has termed this quality Nicholas Meyer's "literate" approach to the Star Trek universe, and he's dead right.  

Again and again Meyer transmits to us important information about Kirk and Khan (and their lives) by contextualizing them in terms of great works of art such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, and, of course, Herman Melville's Moby Dick.   

Khan's light reading: Moby Dick, King Lear and Paradise Lost.

 These particular books actually appear in the film themselves, in characters' hands and upon bookshelves.  

Passages from these books are quoted regularly by Kirk and Khan too.  

So, this is a future world deliberately linked to the present, and to the past as well.   Past is prologue,  history is real, and art tells us important things about ourselves and our human nature.

By carefully and purposefully forging this connection to the human experience as recounted through literature, The Wrath of Khan provides the audience -- citizens of the twentieth and twenty-first century -- an acute understanding of Kirk and Khan,  these "men of the future" (of the 23rd century).  

Thus these characters are not remote strangers to us. Rather they are part of a continuum of human experience (there's that word again...), and so we can ably identify with them.  We all know about Joseph Campbell and "The Hero's Journey," a template which so many films have adopted by now that ennui has become the inescapable result.

Delightfully, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan tweaks that approach.  Meyer's insistence on connecting Kirk and Khan to great literature simultaneously makes the characters sympathetic and recognizable, and elevates their tale to the realm of heroic poem.  But he doesn't walk us through all the stereotypes we now know by heart from Campbell.  He doesn't need to.

It's amazing to consider that The Wrath of Khan cost approximately one fourth of The Motion Picture (a film I resolutely admire, by the way), yet it is the lower-budged sequel that fans seem to consider "epic."  In large part this sense of grandeur is due to the explicit connections  Meyer makes with historical literature.

It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times: The Heroic Poem of Admiral James T. Kirk.

A heroic entrance.

In the case of Kirk, Meyer connects the great starship captain to a dozen or so Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester written between 1937 and 1967,  and also Charles Dickens' 1859 chronicle of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities.  

In terms of universe and set-up, the Forester novels are likely of paramount importance.  Gene Roddenberry always stated that the tales of Captain Horatio Hornblower, an English sea captain, were instrumental in the creation of Kirk.  

To wit, Kirk and Hornblower share many common individual traits. They are both part of a benevolent military hierarchy, either the English Royal Navy or Starfleet Command.  Both are also commanding officers: "men alone" making decisions of life and death on a dangerous terrain, whether the ocean or outer space.
  
Seizing on the Hornblower allusion, Meyers presents Star Trek fans with the most nautical, jaunty version of the outer space mythos yet presented.   More than ever, Kirk plays the role of introvered Hornblower in The Wrath of Khan, proving an "unhappy and lonely" man with an overweening, overdeveloped "sense of duty."  

Specifically, Kirk -- now in middle age -- has accepted a post as planet-based admiral, an act of loyalty to his command structure that clashes with his personal (and sublimated) desire to once again command a starship.  "Spare me your notions of poetry Doctor, we all have our assigned duties,"  Kirk says to Dr. McCoy.

Throughout the film, the audience sees Kirk fighting this interior battle.  Should he put the needs of the command structure (Starfleet) ahead of his own personal needs (to fulfill his "first best destiny" as Enterprise's captain)?  He tries to convince himself he should, largely using his advancing age as a rationalization or excuse.  

"Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young," he tells Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Sulu (George Takei) and Dr. McCoy (De Forest Kelley) after the Kobayashi Maru simulation.

McCoy accurately notes that Kirk is "hiding" behind "rules and regulations" and during the events of the film, Kirk comes to understand that his experience is indeed something that is needed at sea, or rather in the final frontier.  His experience is the key to defeating a menace like Khan.

If the Hornblower saga provides Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan its nautical coloring (down to the use of a bosun in some sequences, and shots of torpedoes being launched from the ship...), A Tale of Two Cities provides the majority of the film's useful information about the enduring Kirk/Spock friendship.

In A Tale of Two Cities, two men -- Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay -- become intertwined against the volatile backdrop of the French Revolution.  Literary critics have theorized that Carton and Darnay actually form part of one larger whole: the psyche even, perhaps, of author Dickens.  In the end, Carton -- a man who has wasted his life -- goes to the guillotine and his death for "the better man," Darnay.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock is the Carton figure, going to his noble death so that Kirk -- the Darnay figure -- may live on.  Now, of course, Spock has not lived a wasted life like his literary predecessor.  Spock is a brilliant, wonderful being, no doubt.  

And yet, examined more closely, we can detect that Spock has, in some fascinating sense, "wasted" at least one important gift: his human heritage.  It was not until The Motion Picture and his encounter with V'Ger that Spock came to understand the benefits and wonders of human emotion and human friendship.  

"Jim, I should have known..." Spock admits, lamenting V'ger's inability to understand "this simple feeling" (friendship).

A Tale of Two Cities: Message, Spock?

So no, Spock's life is not a waste in the sense that Carton's surely is, but Spock has not exactly lived a full "human" life, either.  

Accordingly, both Carton and Spock sacrifice their lives for friends (Darnay and Kirk), and -- in that final act of martyrdom -- "redeem" themselves.  Carton saves a better man; and Spock makes a "human" decision to save his eminently worthy shipmates, and specifically Kirk.  In both cases, the decision to die a noble, selfless death defines these flawed men.  Sacrifice is the act which allows them both to transcend their mortal errors.

It should be noted, as well, that A Tale of Two Cities was originally titled "Recalled to Life" and ends with Carton living on, in a sense, but only in spiritual form...envisioning a future in which his noble sacrifice bears remarkable, personal fruit (the birth of Darnay's son with Lucie.)

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock -- in some spiritual form (his katra...) -- goes on too.  He mind-melds with Dr. McCoy and is literally, in The Search for Spock, "recalled to life."  

But for here and now of Star Trek II, McCoy -- in the film's coda -- suggests Spock's spiritual immortality.  "He's not really dead, you know.  As long as we remember him."   

Similarly, it is not hard to imagine Spock's death as the impetus that brings Kirk together with his love, Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch) and his son, David (Merrit Buttrick).  Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way in the end, but as the events of The Wrath of Khan unfold -- before sequels set in -- it was certainly a valid speculation.

That Spock narrates Star Trek's famous introduction as a coda in The Wrath of Khan -- from beyond the grave apparently -- further enhances the idea of a "spiritual" Spock living beyond the material world (as was the case with Carton) and continuing in some "other" form.

Again, literary scholars have frequently suggested that Darnay/Carton forms a complete psyche, forms the basis for Dickens' "way" of viewing the world around him.  Likewise, Star Trek scholars have suggested the same thing about Kirk/Spock and also about Kirk/Spock/McCoy.  Specifically that -- taken as a whole -- the perspectives of Kirk and Spock (or of the aforementioned triumvirate) offer viewers a complete entity (Id/Ego/Superego) through which the world might be perceived and insightfully understood.

At film's end, a "lens" (representing Spock) is shattered.

In a beautiful touch, Kirk is given in  a pair of 400-year old spectacles, or eyeglasses, by Dr. McCoy early in the film, and we eventually see (after Khan's defeat) one "lens" shattered, broken.  

This is plainly because Spock is dead, and one of our ways of "perceiving" the universe -- one part of the Kirk/Spock psyche -- has been destroyed.  We can no longer "see" through that eye.  Kirk's glasses -- our glasses -- are damaged, and that's a great, symbolic touch.

In terms of specifics, Star Trek II is also book-ended by element of A Tale of Two Cities, with the opening and closing passages of Dickens' book proving crucial elements of the thematic undercurrents.  Near the beginning of the film, Spock gives Kirk A Tale of Two Cities for a birthday present, and Kirk reads aloud the first line.  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Spock's Sacrifice: It is a far better thing I do...

At film's end, as Kirk contemplates his friend's noble death/sacrifice, he recites aloud  the closing line of A Tale of Two Cities.  "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.  It is a far, far better rest I go to, than I have ever known."

Spock's sacrifice has thus resolved two problems in the narrative.  First, it has resolved Kirk's existential crisis, which is reflected in the opening, introductory quote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and given him a new lease on life.  

And secondly, Spock's sacrifice has resolved Spock's lifetime crisis, the fact that he "wasted" his life on the Vulcan way, instead of fully embracing his human heritage.  As I noted above, his final sacrifice (echoing clearly Carton's) erases the mistakes of his life span.

In life, Spock was always forced to hide and cover his human half.  He could not rest for fear of being  discovered (and taunted...) by Dr. McCoy and others.  Every day, Spock had to fear  that his cool Vulcan mask would slip and he would be exposed.  What the last line of A Tale of Two Cities suggests is that in embracing humanity -- and in embracing sacrifice/death -- Spock has done "a far better thing" than he ever did.  In death, he can finally find a "better rest" than he ever knew in worrisome life.

Surely, this is the most elegant and beautiful use of literature in a science fiction epic yet put to celluloid.  We learn everything we need to know about Spock and Kirk, and where they are emotionally and personally in their lives at this point through the book-end quotes from A Tale of Two Cities.  

Because film is primarily a visual medium, Nicholas Meyer also utilizes some terrific film grammar to make the point about Spock's sacrifice bringing a second life to his beloved friend  

In one instance, Meyer artfully cross-cuts between the birth of the Genesis Planet (forming in what's left of the Mutara Nebula) and Kirk desperately running through the corridors of his starship to say his final farewells to his old friend.  As Kirk's eulogy for Spock notes, the half-Vulcan's death "takes place in the shadow of new life." The lovely, if haunting images show us that dichotomy.

Yet it is not merely Genesis itself that represents this new life.  Spock's sacrifice is the thing that gives Kirk his second lease on life.  After Spock's sacrifice, Kirk feels "young."  He is no longer worrying about his life that "could have been...but wasn't" (as he declares with resignation in the Genesis Cave.).  Contrarily, he is musing on Spock's axiom that "there are" -- in life -- "always possibilities."

In other words, in direct defiance of Star Trek's TV-styled origins, Captain Kirk's viewpoint has changed and evolved.  He has suddenly -- for the first time in his life -- "faced death" instead of "cheating his way" out of death.  Spock has made Kirk realize just how valuable his life is; how valuable his remaining years truly are.  By facing death and acknowledging his mortality, Kirk is in a position now to no longer fear his own mortality.  At last...he can live.  

Again, I should stress that this realization would not be nearly as meaningful or resonant without the guidepost of Dickens' work; without the comparison of Kirk and Spock to Darnay and Carton and their own literary journey.

Better to Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven: The Tragedy of Khan Noonien Singh

Better to Reign in Hell (on Ceti Alpha V) than serve in the Federation.

We have seen how Admiral Kirk in The Wrath of Khan is tied explicitly to the literature of Dickens and Forester.  

His opposite number, Khan, is also defined largely in terms of literature in the film.

The first such work to consider is Paradise Lost, written by John Milton in 1667.  

Mimicking the structure of Virgil's Aeneid, Paradise Lost's  numerous "books" (chapters, essentially) concern the War in Heaven and the expulsion of man from the Garden of Eden (a topic also covered in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).

"Space Seed," the Star Trek episode that introduced Khan (Montalban), ended with the former tyrant happy to go into exile, far away from the "paradise" or Heaven-like utopia of the United Federation of Planets.  Specifically, Khan asked Kirk if he had ever read Milton.  After Khan's departure, Kirk quoted Lucifer's famous line from Milton -- upon being cast into the fiery lake of Tartarus -- that it was "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan dramatically furthers the comparison between Khan and Milton's fallen angel, Lucifer.   Because of a catastrophic orbital shift, Ceti Alpha V has literally become a Hell -- an arid, hot desert world populated not by demons, but "monsters" like the Ceti Eel.  

If you recall your Milton, you know that Lucifer was cast to Hell in the first place for attempting an insurrection in Heaven, and that was also Khan's crime in "Space Seed:" attempting to take command of the starship Enterprise. Kirk (as God?) cast Khan down to Hell in response to this act.

 

Explain it to them! Khan is Ahab and Lucifer.

 

Of course, that banishment was neither the end of Khan nor the end of Lucifer.  

In Book 2 of Paradise Lost, Lucifer and his "rebel angels" (the makeshift, genetically-engineered crew of the captured Reliant in this case) learn of a new world, a new Eden being formed exlusively for man.  

Once more, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan strongly reflects this idea, as Khan and his rebel followers depart from Hell (Ceti Alpha V)and make for a new "paradise" created by the Federation. This new "world" is the not-yet formed Genesis planet, a miracle of sorts -- no less than "the power of creation" -- which promises an end to "cosmic problems" such as "hunger" and "over-population."  Khan wants a stake in that new Heaven.   He wants Genesis.  Whereas Spock's sacrifice gives Kirk a new beginning, Khan seems to believe that the Genesis Device can literally give him a similar second chance, an opportunity to rule a world of his own making.

On a general level then, Khan is to Lucifer as Kirk is to Hornblower.  Khan and Satan are both tragic figures...men who have lost everything.  They are both depicted as charismatic, magnetic personalities who are highly narcissistic and overconfident. 

It is also frequently stated that Hell is so painful a place because those doomed to eternity  there must cope with the enduring "absence of God."  Khan seems to bear a grudge against Captain Kirk, similarly, because of Kirk's absence over fifteen years.  "Admiral Kirk never bothered to check on our progess," he notes with anger.

In very specific terms, Khan is also a reflection of the Captain Ahab character in Herman Melville's great American novel of 1851, Moby Dick.  

As you will recall, that book told the story of a wanderer named Ishmael, and his fateful voyage aboard the whaling ship, Pequod.  The vessel was captained by Ahab, an obsessed man who had lost one of his very limbs (a leg...) to his hated  nemesis, a white whale.  As Ishmael soon learned, Ahab was obsessed with hunting down and delivering his revenge upon that whale...at the cost of everything else.

On no less than three occasions in Star Trek II, Khan recites or echoes dialogue from Moby Dick, specifically Ahab's dialogue.  

In the first instance, Khan  charts his obsession.  "I'll chase him around the Moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom, and around Perdition's flames before I give him up," he tells Joaquin. 

In Moby Dick, in Chapter 36, Ahab had similarly said of Moby Dick: "I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round Perdition's flames before I give him up."

No further explanation needed there.

In the second instance, Khan spies the Enterprise (limping away to the Mutara Nebula) and shouts.  "There she is!  There she is!  Not so wounded as we were led to believe..."  

In this case, Khan's excited utterance is a deliberate echo of Ahab's more ocean-bound exclamation "Thar she blows! Thar she blows!"  In both cases, the point of obsession (Enterprise or white whale) is visually recognized, and the final pursuit engaged.

Finally, upon Khan's looming death, he willfully quotes Ahab's last, vile words in Melville's novel.  "To the last, I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."  

Even with death approaching, Khan cannot cut loose his obsession with Kirk; as Ahab went down forever attached to his quarry, the white whale.

What's so interesting about Khan, however, is that -- unlike Kirk, perhaps -- he quotes literature that provides a pretty negative didactic example.  He doesn't learn from it. 

If Khan truly sees himself as an Ahab figure (and certainly, both quotes lifted  from Ahab suggest that reality), then he must realize that, in life, he has been "cast" as the villain.  That's why I note above that this movie is, after a fashion, the "tragedy"of Khan Noonien Singh.  Khan knows literature well (like the Shakespeare tragedy, King Lear as well as Moby Dick), yet he is unable to escape from the orbit of that literature; from the role that fate has designated for him.  I submit this is because of guilt.  Khan must hate himself for the death of his wife almost as much as he hates Kirk.

Khan would have done well to listen to Joaquin: to take Genesis and start a new life.  But -- like Ahab -- Khan can not get over his obsession (and his guilt?).  The result of Khan's mono-maniacal compulsion to pursue a course of vengeance is the death of all his people on Reliant.   This is not a man you would want to follow, despite some attractive personal and leadership qualities. 

So, I submit, Khan knows he is a Shakespearean, Melvillian villain.  Literature tells him so. As the viewer contextualizes Khan as Ahab, so does Khan do the exact same thing.  He is willfully and deliberately playing the role of villain in the situation, invoking Hell and even Satan for his cause.  He did the same thing in "Space Seed," comparing himself to Milton's Lucifer.

We Learn by Doing. Or You Have to Learn Why Things Work on a Starship

Defeating Khan is an exercise in experience.

In regards to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Sean Connery's return to the role of Bond in Never Say Never Again (1983), I wrote a lot about the idea of heroes like Kirk and 007 entering their later years. 

Some of the historical context for that idea came out of what was happening in the American public square.  

In the early 1980s, America was led by the oldest President in our history, Ronald Reagan.  But the same era witnessed the ascent of an affluent youth culture and new modes of expression in everything from movies (with the advent of PG-13) to television with the birth of the music video "clip" on MTV.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan reflects this uneasiness and tension between age (and wisdom?) with callow youth by landing a "trained crew" (our beloved Star Trek heroes) back aboard the Enterprise, but with a trainee crew, a group of fresh-faced kits who -- as of yet -- may not be able to "steer," in Kirk's words.  

This is the Star Trek movie, we must recall, in which we first met Lt. Saavik (Kirstie Alley) and Kirk's hot-blooded young son, David Marcus (Merrit Butrick).  Before The Next Generation, they represented the next generation.

Accordingly, much of the film involves the idea that with age and experience come wisdom.  This notion is repeated again and again in The Wrath of Khan, from Kirk's reminder to Saavik in the turbo-lift that "we learn by doing," to Spock's nudging of Kirk at Enterprise's departure that "for everything there is a first time."

In the crisis with Khan -- when Saavik professes confusion at Kirk's strategy to lower Reliant's shields -- Kirk admonishes the young officer that she must learn "why" things work on a starship. This is, again, another way of stating that experience is valuable.  

And yet the conflict or tension with "youth" is present and acknowledged too.   Kirk complains after the engagement with Khan that he must "be going senile," and tells Saavik to go on "quoting regulations."

In other words, Kirk may have experience, but he hasn't yet regained his confidence.  

That comes later.  

Finally, Kirk ultimately defeats Khan with his experience. Spock provides his captain a cunning analysis, the bread-crumbs of a winning strategy.  Spock notes of Khan that the villain is "intelligent, but not experienced" and that his pattern (in command of Reliant) "suggests two dimensional thinking."

In other words, Kirk may be growing old, and he may need glasses (he's allergic to Retinax...), but he can still beat a physically stronger man with a "superior intellect" by remembering his history; by using his experience.  In 1980s America this was not a small thing.  People accused the young MTV generation of having a "short attention span," for instance.  In some ways, the passing of the torch and the value of experience play out in Star Trek II.  

Without, hopefully, sounding nasty or elitist, I sometimes worry that folks like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan so much  for the wrong reasons, "short attention span" reasons..   Or maybe I should just say, for shallow ones.

You know, it has space battles in it, where The Motion Picture did not.  There's also a charismatic villain in the film, unlike V'Ger in The Motion Picture.    

And truthfully, you can see how the Khan storyline, action and villain have been regurgitated unnecessarily in the Star Trek mythos repeatedly since this film proved so successful.  

Later on, Khan became the prototype for Soran, R'ualfo,  Shinzon, and Nero.  And like their illustrious predecessor, each of these pretenders to his throne came bearing a cosmic WMD (the Ribbon, tharalon weapons, Red Matter, etc.)

Truthfully, you can even watch Wrath of Khan today, and detect some of its flaws, too.  For instance, the Reliant goes to the wrong planet, mistaking Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI.  

Talk about sloppy mission preparation! 

Then there's the fact that Mr. Chekov never actually met Khan in "Space Seed," the sometimes oppressive use of TMP stock footage in terms of the special effects, and the idea that device meant to re-shape planets can actually -- absent the resources of a world -- create one.

You can argue, debate, and retcon these points to your heart's content. I know I do.  But in the final analysis a movie shouldn't have to be explained, or ever appear, on the surface, internally inconsistent. 

Still, none of these issues makes the movie a failure in any way, though I always have to laugh when people nitpick The Final Frontier to death ("they got to the center of the galaxy in hours!") but then turn around and act as though Wrath of Khan is immaculate perfection in terms of technicalities.

 

Getting controversy out of the way: Aren't you dead?

Yet I admire The Wrath of Khan deeply and thoroughly  The death of Spock (and his goodbye to Kirk), never fails to move me.  And heck yeah, the space battles are tense, viscerally-presented set-pieces  

I also enjoy how playful the movie is, down to its acknowledgment of the real-life context surrounding it (particularly the outcry over the death of Spock).  That controversy is joked about in the text of the film itself, and the air bleeds out of it; the balloon of apprehension burst.  

One line from Shatner and a delicious, raised eyebrow from Nimoy is all it takes:  "Aren't you dead?"

I also credit The Wrath of Khan for escaping the gravitational pull of TV-thinking.  Star Trek: The Motion Picture ended with, essentially, status quo.  As Harlan Ellison famously noted in his review of that film for Starlog, the human adventure wasn't beginning...the door got slammed on it.  The guest stars perished, but otherwise, the movie's climax took the leads back to square one.  It could have been an episode in an on-going series. 

With his diabolical, wonderful and artistic sensibilities,  Meyers introduces blood, gore and mortality to the mythos in a way not previously seen. Later franchise movies continued this process with the death of David and the destruction of the Enterprise.  But as a consequence of Meyer's aesthetic sensibilities, while watching The Wrath of Khan one clearly gets the idea that the stakes are a lot higher than ever before.  I remember a review of the film stating that Khan attempted "universal armageddon" and "nearly got away with it too."  Indeed.

Since the movie, by and large, concerns Kirk's realization that he has never faced death (and never experienced the freedom that comes after facing death and putting mortality aside...), this is an appropriate aesthetic choice.  Blood spatter on Captain Kirk's uniform; an engineering trainee burned and scarred; a team of scientists hanged from a control room roof, their throats slit.  It's almost grim.  

Finally, my favorite, purely cinematic moment of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan involves Kirk's realization that there's no cheating death this time.  Meyer strings together a series of sequential zooms, to James Horner's expressive score, as Kirk asks "distance from Reliant," and Sulu -- hopelessly -- comments "we're not going to make it, are we?"

Without Spock's sacrifice, no.

That moment, with the zooms-to-close-up on Uhura, Chekov, Takei and Shatner, sells the threat in a palpable, cinematic fashion.   We have never seen such fear on the crew's faces.  We have never before experienced the team vetting a "no win scenario."  It's a beautifully orchestrated moment, and one rarely commented upon.  Meyer's insistence on blood, guts and mortality -- real stakes -- makes the moment all the powerful.  We sense that this Star Trek movie plays for keeps.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is arguably the greatest Star Trek film ever made.  Perhaps it took the death of Spock, plus a strong thematic connection to our shared human experience-- our most prized literature -- to bring forth such extreme "life...from lifelessness."

30 Years Ago Today: Alien 3 (1992)

It is an indisputable fact that fan service and good drama don’t always go hand-in-hand in the cinema. 

In fact, sometimes these factors diverge sharply. 

David Fincher’s Alien³ (1992) may just be Exhibit A illustrating this fact. 

The film -- the third in the Alien series -- is lousy fan service, and yet, simultaneously, an absolutely gorgeous, challenging, and worthwhile work of art.

Of all the Alien films, the third is the first entry, for example, that legitimately earns the descriptor “spiritual” and which allows Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) to escape the same repetitive narrative formula or routine: 

Wake-up, fight aliens, return to sleep.  

Rinse and repeat.  

Instead, the thirty year old film attempts to grant the revered movie franchise that rare gift known as closure, and it devises a legitimately spiritual and dramatic end for Ripley, the aliens, and the universe they inhabit.  

Alien³ is also truthful from an emotional and human standpoint, even if fans may not appreciate the dark, contemplative story it dramatizes.  

In short, the movie obsesses on the idea that sometimes surviving is not enough. There are some values higher than self-preservation, and death, finally, is Ripley’s gift to the world, the human race, and the universe itself.

In Alien³ this message is expressed through brilliant compositions -- the building blocks of film grammar -- and through contextual clues about mortality.  

In other words, the film’s form reflects its thematic content, and for a visual art form, that is the highest ground a work of art can occupy.

I won’t beat around the bush, here. Popular or unpopular, Alien³ is every bit as strong and powerful a film as its two predecessor were.  

Its existential problem, simply, is that it didn’t please its intended audience.

I gotta re-educate some of the brothers: Why the fans are so wrong-headed about Alien³

Make no mistake, Alien ³ remains maligned to this day primarily because it fails to please faithful fans of the series. 

And yet, objectively-speaking, fans aren’t always the best arbiters of quality or artistic merit because their interest -- plain and simple -- isn’t experiencing the best, most dramatic story possible, but rather the continuation of the saga and the beloved characters, no matter what. Ad infinitum.

So the first factor to understand about Alien ³ is that fans by-and-large carried a certain set of expectations into their viewing of the film. In fact, they carried an unrealistic expectation about what the sequel could be, given the reality of what the film already was: the third film in a horror movie franchise. 

What the majority of fans no doubt found most difficult to stomach in Alien³ is the shocking opening sequence, which dramatizes in blunt fashion the violent deaths of young Newt (Carrie Henn) and likable marine corporal, Dwayne Hicks (Michael Biehn), two beloved characters from Aliens.

These losses feel so traumatizing because many fans and critics displayed high hopes for the characters and their future, fantasizing about a scenario that involved Ripley and Hicks becoming lovers and surrogate parents to Newt, while the helpful android, Bishop (Lance Henriksen) hovered in the background as a kind of synthetic, all-knowing uncle. Time Magazine explicitly speculated about this possibility in a cover story about Cameron’s 1986 film.

The misguided assumption here is that such an ad hoc nuclear family could dominate an ongoing horror film franchise.

This “wish” simply did not take into account the savage and Darwinian nature of these movies. How realistic -- or how believable -- would it be to have this family go up against acid-spewing chest-bursting aliens, again and again, always coming out victorious, always emerging whole? 

Does that sound like any Alien film you would recognize, or enjoy watching? The sense of danger and surprise the franchise is famous for would dissipate…and fast, if it were to focus on this new family.

Remember, if you can, the original context for Ridley Scott’s Alien. 

There were very few films like it at the time of its relase because the alien was always changing form, always evolving. Ripley, Dallas and the others were always fighting the last enemy, not the newest, unpredictable form of the xenomorph. The changing nature of the alien -- a life-form always “becoming” something else -- granted the film a tremendous, terrifying sense of uncertainty.

Now imagine, going in, that you have a Mom, Dad, daughter and uncle fighting those monsters, film entry after film entry.  Over and over. This isn’t the template for a good horror film, or a good horror series, because horror thrives on uncertainty and unpredictability.

To put it another way, the Alien movies are not family movies. Families don’t survive in these films, as Newt’s parents and brother would attest. As Ripley’s daughter might remind us. 

And that’s sort of the point of the whole cycle. 

The aliens are so dangerous, so “perfect” in their unremitting hostility that if they make it to Earth, or any other colonized location…it’s game over, man.  

Game over.  

No more families.  No more…anything.

Having the Ripley/Hicks family front another Alien film, and emerge unscathed (again) cuts right through the heart of that thematic through-line. It undercuts it.

Would the approach have been good fan service? '

Yes, undoubtedly.  But again, it wouldn’t have made a particularly good or dramatic horror film.

Furthermore, let’s contend in reality for a moment. The whole family idea wasn’t exactly practical in terms of casting, either. Alien³ was made five to six years after the production of Aliens, so Newt (Carrie Henn) would have had to be re-cast no matter what. The family couldn’t have been reunited in its original form, even if that was the plan.  It was just not to be.

What was the other fan service disappointment of Alien³?

Again to put the matter bluntly: there is absolutely nothing in this sequel for the aroused ammo-sexual.  

Aliens is a great film, a classic, and one of the greatest science fiction films ever made. So to reduce it to the simple “hardware” angle is probably a disservice. But in reality, there are a number of fans of the film who fell in love with pulse rifles, smart guns, flame-throwers, grenades, drop-ships and other high-tech weaponry.  

The whole “Colonial Marine” milieu became beloved after the film’s release.

Pursuing its own course, Alien³ drops that angle completely.  

Just as Aliens dropped the “space trucker” mode of Aliens for a new setting and milieu, so does Alien³ choose the path of innovation instead of repetition. If Aliens is about soldiers finding their courage in a war they can’t win, developing camaraderie as a unit along the way, Alien³ upsets that apple cart completely.  

Instead, it concerns a grieving, nay bereft, Ripley alone on a prison planet, working not only with people she doesn’t know, but with both the scum of the Earth (rapists and murderers), and those who don’t accept her because she doesn’t share their religious views.  

Yet they are human, and Ripley must stand up for them and lead them.  And she must do so without the big guns, without weapons of any kind.  

Alien³ is thus about a very different brand of courage and heroism.

But let’s face it, absolutely lot of fans got into the Alien franchise because of the guns and marines of Aliens, and therefore Alien³’s scaled-back, low-tech, human-centered approach was a no-sale from the start. 

Throw in the fact that Aliens featured dozens (if not hundreds) of leaping, drooling aliens, and that this sequel contains just one, and you can see why some fans choose to gaze at the film with disappointment and not attempt to engage with the material, or even meet it half way.

Again, it’s rewarding to look at reality, and pragmatism in terms of fan desires. 

Considering the geometric progression of horror from Alien to Aliens, fans expected a third Alien film to offer an even grander spectacle with more of everything: more aliens, more weaponry and more space grunts.  

Oorah!

This was plainly an impossible desire too.

How could any movie not costing 300 million dollars top Aliens?

It just wasn't possible. 

In 1997, Alien Resurrection cost 75 million, approximately, and still didn’t come close to featuring the carnage and action of Aliens.  So the possibility, the opportunity with Alien ^3, instead, was to forge a new, innovative story-line that completed Ripley’s journey and brought the trilogy to a close in a meaningful, even tragic fashion.  

And, I would argue, that’s exactly what Alien³ achieves.

It’s a long, sad story: Why Alien³ is every bit the equal of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)

On the artistic merits, Alien³, in some ways, is the purist of all the Alien films. 

No other entry speaks so meaningfully about Ripley’s character, and her spirituality, and no other film so clearly aims for closure. The high-tech background has been subordinated, and the film stresses close-ups of human faces over long pans across space age hardware.

In other words, the film takes us to the ass end of space, and then makes us countenance, directly, the people who inhabit it. Their faces -- some ugly and unfamiliar; some surprisingly compassionate -- literally fill the screen.

These human faces don't always belong to nice people, it's true but they’re all human.  

They’re all seeking answers about what it means to live a good life.  Dr. Clemens (Charles Dance), dwelling in guilt, lives a life of quiet, isolated exile, punishing himself for his medical error over and over again. 

Dillon (Charles Dutton) and his wards are trying to make right with God, waiting on the prison planet for the Lord’s return, trying to resist the urges and impulses that made them outcasts from society in the first place.  They have decided to wait and serve in their own way, but Ripley and the alien show them that they don't have that luxury.  Man proposes; God disposes.

Alien³ is also the intensely personal story of an isolated, depressed Ripley trapped on a backwater penal planet, functioning there as a sort of despised outsider or heretic, at least at first. So instead of copying Aliens Alien ³ actually attempts something new, different, and ambitious as Hell. According to Sigourney Weaver in an interview with Cinefantastique, the movie concerns the idea of "fighting a common enemy alongside people you don't really like, without guns." 

To her, this battle defines Ripley's greatest challenge.

In particular, Ripley -- who is so often termed “the ultimate survivor” -- ends up in a scenario wherein personal survival is less important than sacrifice; less important than saving all of mankind.  She comes to learn that she is carrying an alien queen inside of her, and that it boasts the capacity to hatch thousands of offspring.  

Worse, the Company wants it for their bio-weapons division.

So Ripley makes a choice.

It is the choice of a brave woman, or even a saint. She chooses to die so that we all might live. This description is not a colorful exaggeration, and it’s crucial here to consider how Alien³ actually plays as a Christ metaphor in a consistent, coherent and therefore artistic fashion.

First, Fincher telegraphs the comparison between Ripley's plight and Christ's. Fury 161 may as well be Golgotha. An early moment reveals a twisted industrial wreckage jutting out of the planetary surface, a rough Christian cross.

Next, we get the details of Ripley’s choice. It mimics Jesus’s choice on the cross. He can either live a self-centered life as a man, or he can die for man’s sins and save us all. Ripley, likewise, must die to redeem all of mankind.  

It is not something that she wants to do; it is something that she knows she needs to do.  

And again, consider the make-up of those she is saving. Some are dumb Company Men (85), some are rapists and murders (Dillon’s flock) and some are so obsessed with power that they don’t realize how their ambition threatens everything (Bishop II).

Still, Ripley chooses to save them.

In at least two separate compositions in the film -- one in Dillon’s quarters and once in the lead foundry -- Ripley, resembling Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is seen in the pose of the crucifixion, indicating her status as saint and martyr …and her destination, whether death or spiritual immortality.

Alien ^3, according to critic David Ansen is thus “a quasi-religious passion play with Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, head-shaved, offering to martyr herself to save the world from the sins of the monster....[so] credit Fincher for taking risks.” 

The religious parallel is as meaningful and as powerful as Ansen suggests. "With her shaven head and her director's predilection for unflinching close-ups, Ripley radiates passion like an SF Joan of Arc, searching the furthest reaches of her alien-battered soul for any remaining sparks of faith, hope and grace to sustain her through yet another ordeal," writes New Statesman and Society’s Anne Billson, acknowledging that Alien ³ is the first franchise film to operate on a genuinely spiritual level.

It is this final act of Alien ³ that brings the saga into crystal clarity for perhaps the first time. Ripley, the ultimate survivor, overcomes her personal (and some might say selfish...) desire to live (Alien), bear children (Aliens) and find happiness so that all humanity can survive.  

This existential moment of truth far surpasses the more popular but comparatively facile "dueling maternal instincts" battle in Aliens and successfully apotheosizes the beloved character.  The Christ analogy transforms Ripley's final decision -- essentially suicide -- into a beautiful and meaningful act rather than a cowardly or empty one.

But again, let’s continue the Christ metaphor. Ripley, like Christ, must make her sacrifice with full-knowledge of what she is losing, of what her act truly means. 

For this to occur, we need a seducer, or a tempter…a devil. 

Enter Lance Henriksen as Bishop II.  He comes to Ripley at her cross (or on her chain link fence) and whispers about the possibilities to her.  He shows her a "friendly face" and attempts to tantalize her with earthly delights. 

He tells her all the things that she wants to hear, so she can continue living.

They can take the alien out of her.  It’s a simple surgery.  

And afterwards, they’ll destroy it.  

Then, she can still have a life.  A family.  Children.

And this, we see, is where the deaths of Hicks and Newt really matter to the overall narrative of the trilogy.  Ripley had a family…and lost it.  We felt that loss for ourselves. 

And having a family is what Ripley has always wanted.  It is the gift, the blessing, she must turn away from, but which she finds so difficult to turn away from.

But Ripley chooses not to have that family. Instead, she chooses to save all families, everywhere…and die. 

Again, I love and admire Alien and Aliens, but this crisis of spirituality, takes the series to a new, higher emotional and spiritual zenith.  We have already seen Ripley survive.  We have already seen Ripley rescue a child and become a mother.  She has fought to “win” things for her life.

This time is different.  

She fights and dies to for the good of all mankind, ending forever the alien scourge, and the avarice it creates in our species.  She thus resets the direction of the human race. We have a third chance (assuming, if you are a person of faith, that Jesus gave mankind his second chance...).

There is no last minute cop-out, no surgeons racing to rescue Ripley from the terror inside her stomach just in the nick of time, only the grim reality and finality of death and the knowledge that sacrifice has a purpose. 

How does Ripley come to this point?  Well, she has examples to follow. Her dear friend, Bishop -- facing a future in which he can’t help others, in which he will never again be “top of the line”--  also chooses death.  

Ripley could refuse his request just to keep a familiar, beloved face around, but Bishop is in pain.  “My legs hurt,” he says.  “It’s dark in here,” he notes.  He is in pain, and so Ripley relieves him of his suffering, showing empathy and compassion for him. She sees from him that sometimes survival is not the right path.

Clemens is selfless in his own way too.  He is not a believer, or a spiritual man.  But he stays on Fury 161 to take care of the believers, putting aside his own material desires because he feels he was “let off lightly” for his crimes, and that he has not fully paid his debt to society, to humanity.

Ripley starts to see, in the film, that survival is not the highest aspiration anymore. 

And, I believe, it is subtly encoded in the film that her sacrifice, her gift to mankind, will become known, over time, and cherished in the way that many cherish the sacrifice of Christ.

Morse is the only survivor of Fury 161 at the end of the film.  He is depicted throughout the early portions of the movie as a coward and an asshole. By the end of the movie, he is putting aside his own pain (after being shot by the Company), to help Ripley accomplish her mission.  He has seen the light, through Ripley’s example.  He is her first disciple, in a sense, because he witnessed her sacrifice...and so Ripley’s legacy lives on.

Director Fincher obviously felt that the idea of sacrifice was an important message to impart to audiences in yuppie America, one suffering under the burden of a huge national deficit. Like all good art, Alien ³ speaks relevantly to its historical context, then. It relates ideally to the early 1990s, the time when presidential candidate Ross Perot called -- also unsuccessfully -- for sacrifice so as to preserve the future for further generations.  

As deeply as Aliens mirrored the jingoism, gung-ho spirit of the Reagan era, Fincher’s Alien ³ reflects the hangover of the Bush recession. An article in Entertainment Weekly once described the movie’s aura as “bushed.”

Ripley wins the day, but at tremendous cost. She suffers and dies, and we lose her. 

What do we learn?  

Not all battles are won crisply and cleanly, with everyone coming home and returning to their families. Some battles are wars of attrition, or campaigns that succeed because one brave person puts his or her country ahead of personal survival. Ripley -- the character with whom we are most invested in the Alien saga -- makes that choice here.

Perhaps the most devastating crime Fincher could commit after killing Ellen Ripley is to summarily end Alien ³ without the traditional sequel hook or sting in the tail/tale: the tantalizing possibility of yet another Alien film yet to come. Of course, in keeping with his philosophy that movies "should scar," this is precisely the route he takes. 

Fincher's film ends decisively with three separate compositions focusing on heavy metal doors slamming shut with a clang, thus asserting quite literally that there is no door left open for a future sequel. Ripley’s sacrifice is such that it has saved mankind, and ended the alien threat.  Forever.

This is it. The trilogy has ended. Don't let (the doors) hit you on the way out.  End transmission.

So Alien³ grants the series a noble, honorable and believable and satisfying ending.  

Yes, this idea was undercut by the release of Alien Resurrection in 1997. Yet Alien ^3's denouement must be judged on its own artistic terms. It was designed to be "the end" and is, therefore, a notable example of Fincher's brass.  He adds something no predecessor had offered the Alien franchise: dramatic closure.  

Finality.

Beyond his steadfast determination to direct an unpredictable and surprising entry in the Alien series, Fincher has crafted a film of uncommon technical virtue and beauty. Much of the film is shot from an extreme low angle, not to suggest the size and power of the protagonists, but to constantly make viewers aware of the protagonists’ vulnerability.  

The prison ceiling -- visible in literally hundreds of deep-focus shots -- not only reminds audiences that Ripley and the other convicts are trapped inside a decaying institution (a sardine can, essentially), but that the alien strikes from above. The xenomorph clings to the ceiling over the human hustle and bustle, and the continual focus on "what lurks above" Ripley and the others often has viewers scanning the background anxiously, waiting for the next strike.

Regarding Alien ^3’s visuals, critic John Anderson noted in Newsday that "Fincher attains a claustrophobic feel in his shots, which emphasize the vastness around the characters and the feeling that somewhere, just out of sight, something horrible is lurking.  And there's nothing you can do about it." 

The New York Post's Jami Bernard agreed with him, writing that Alien ³ “is smart in how it plays on the audience's fears and failings..." 

But probably no element of the film is more visually impressive than David Fincher's elaborately-staged climax, a chase set in a massive subterranean complex. The labyrinth is so confusing an arena that the characters themselves -- one of whom we are explicitly reminded has an IQ of 85 -- are unable to navigate it successfully.  Naturally, the alien picks the confused men off, one by one.

Although some critics commented that the final chase in the film is a mess because the geography of the lead-works is "confusing," they have missed the point of the action.  

The exact opposite is true.  

The men of Fury 161 are not aware of spatial orientation or tactical information any more than the audience is.  

They aren't trained marines.

They aren’t even space truckers. 

They’re inmates in a deserted installation, and they are lost and disoriented. Fincher's technique mimics Stone's non-traditional battle scenes in Platoon (1986), reflecting that this is a war without conventional boundaries; one that these humans are unequipped to fight.  There are no mock-heroics in Alien ³, just frightened and confused people trying to survive a crisis, running around lost in the dark.

Depressing?  

Perhaps, or maybe just part of the overall schema, one that suggests Ripley -- through her actions -- can bring light to darkness.

Why is Alien³ so hated by so many fans, to this day? 

Easy answer: it ignores issues of fan service and instead crafts a beautiful, haunting tale about human nature, and about the choices we are called upon to make in the most difficult circumstances imaginable.  

Ripley doesn’t survive the film.  But the human race does.  

She gives up all the things she could have -- the material and emotional happiness she has desired but never found -- and she does it for you and me, not so we can all have a sequel.

And after all this, after such a remarkable spiritual journey, all many fans could do was complain. 

Not enough guns. 

Not enough aliens. 

Downer of an ending.

Thirty years later, there are still those fans who want to ignore the film and pretend it didn’t happen; and make Alien 5 as a direct continuation of Aliens.

And that, my friends, is a deep, deep betrayal of Ripley’s journey; of her ultimate sacrifice.

In the final analysis, Alien ³ is a great film because it rejects convention, safety, and predictability, and leaves one discomforted and bereft.  

Furthermore this approach assures that Alien³ -- love it or hate it -- is never merely an uninspired copy of earlier franchise films. 

In this way, Alien³ actually gains a foothold on immortality like the other movies. 

No one can ever accuse it of being just like the other films in the franchise. This is a case of “stasis interrupted,” of a major film franchise suddenly ascending from the realm of predictable mass entertainment to something else; to illuminating work of art.

The film deserves to be in continuity. I hope it remains there.

End transmission.

40 Years Ago Today: The Road Warrior (1982)

I first viewed The Road Warrior on a double bill with Superman III at the Castle Theater in Irvington, New Jersey. I was thirteen or fourteen years-old at the time and saw the movie(s) with my father. 

Alas, my showing of The Road Warrior was interrupted three times by police incursions into the auditorium (the Castle was that kind of theater in the eighties...) but somehow the danger in the theater only added to the aura of danger, anxiety and uncertainty generated by George Miller's landmark, startling post-apocalyptic film.

At that young age, I had rarely experienced an action film as intense or cut-throat as The Road Warrior, but now that I've screened the film a dozen times over the years, I recognize that it wasn't merely the experience of seeing it at the Castle during a drug bust or three; it's the film itself, which remains of the ten great action films of the last forty years. 

More than that -- and discounting Planet of the Apes -- it's one of the cinema's most effective and brilliantly-shot post-apocalyptic efforts.

The Road Warrior, released in America on May 21, 1982, opens with an evocative and tightly-edited black-and-white montage. A voice-over narration accompanies the fleeting but memorable documentary images (stock footage), which depict our twentieth-century "oil culture" as two "mighty warrior tribes" go to war to control the dwindling resource. 

The montage reveals vast war machines at sea and on land, and then endless, stagnating debate among world leaders on how to control the limited reserves. After this debate, the montage reveals, the thundering war machines of technological man "sputtered and stopped." 

Furthermore, world civilization itself "crumbled." Cities exploded in a whirlwind of looting, and man "began to feed on man." Nomadic gangs took over the highways, dominating them and making the roads treacherous, murderous passages. It is here, via stock footage of 1979's Mad Max that we are introduced to the personal story of Max [Mel Gibson], an ex-policeman who lost everything; only to wander the wasteland as a "burned-out" desolate sentinel.

In terms of narrative, the voice-over device and stock-footage montage in unison frame this tale as though it occurred in the distant, murky past. 

In part this is because of the grainy stock footage, which looks to be drawn from the early part of the twentieth century, but the sense of an "old story" also arises from the voice of the narrator, which suggests wisdom and age, among other qualities. 

The war is history to the adult "teller" of the tale; and our civilization itself is pre-history. This remote time frame thus lands the post-apocalyptic "future" of Mad Max into the realm of origin myth, or heroic legend. The teller could be speaking of Achilles and the Trojan War, or perhaps more aptly, the Old West in his discussion of the manner in which a new civilization was founded from the ashes of the old.

The Old West metaphor also works to the film's advantage because in -- some very critical ways -- The Road Warrior is not unlike a Spaghetti Western of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Witness these facts: it is filmed in a location that could be the American West (here, the Australian Outback); the camera work is highly fluid (like the work of Sergio Leone); and the production is distinctly, but not alarmingly, low-budget.

Similarly, much like many Italian Westerns, the film also actively sets about to deconstruct or de-mythologize its world, focusing on such horrible human behaviors as rape and murder. To put it politely, The Road Warrior is not a romantic vision of human nature. 

Even the treatment of a child -- the Feral Child -- is realistic rather than romanticized.

After the opening exposition, which plays like the visual equivalent of a dusty history book, Miller's kinetic camera swoops down (apparently from a helicopter) at near-warp speed towards an endless highway. 

The asphalt flies by the camera and immediately the audience feels a sense of momentum and acceleration. Suddenly we're enmeshed in colorful, full-speed chase, as loner Max is pursued by the motorcycle-riding thugs of a warlord called Humongous (also known as "the ayatollah of rock-and-rollah..."). 

From this first moment, the film never lets up, never stops, never really slows down. It is a race from start to finish, a maelstrom of flipping, careening vehicles, high-speed pursuits and bloody confrontations.

The cinema has provided us all manner of "end of the world" scenarios before, from nuclear war (Planet of the Apes) to germ-created vampires (Last Man on Earth), to melting ice caps even (Waterworld), but The Road Warrior today seems to offer the most plausible (or at least relevant) scenario as it explicitly concerns a war over limited resources, in this case oil.

In 1982, America had not yet fought two wars for oil in the Middle East, and so didn't seem quite so prophetic. 

But now? It's seems so indeed.

The bulk of The Road Warrior involves Max's interactions with a post-apocalyptic frontier town, a society that has sprung up around a functional oil refinery (perhaps the last...). The people who live there boast resources to squander, and don't want to share it. Instead, they dream wistfully of a paradise by the beach where they can live in peace with their drums of black gold tucked safely away. 

Before long, Max is dealing not only with these inhabitants of the refinery (who feel they have a rightful claim to the oil), but with the occupying, invading army of Humongous. The Warlord, who admonishes the peaceful refinery people to "just walk away," requires the oil to keep his mechanical war machine running. Without it, one realizes, even his loose society of scavengers and marauders would likely fall into total anarchy.

The story of fallen mankind fighting over the scraps of civilization (like "angry ants," as one character notes), is buoyed by Miller's directorial sense of invention and also his understanding of framing and mise-en-scene.

For instance, in the scene in which Max is confronted by an auto-gyro pilot (Bruce Spence), notice how Gibson is almost always positioned in the center of the frame, He deals with snakes and an armed assailant...yet those threats still "orbit" Max, not vice versa. This is important because the framing makes us believe in Max as immovable object -- a tower of strength -- early in the film (witness his handling of the snake...), a notion which is undercut significantly later in The Road Warrior when he is bruised and beaten after one encounter with the scavengers. 

The idea, I suppose, is to open with Max as figure of strength, and then -- as the events of the film overcome him -- figuratively cut off his legs, so that the audience grows more involved with his survival. He starts out as a loner, but by the end of the film, Max needs the others to survive. This is an important element of his growth; of his redemption and return to the human race. The journey is completed in the final film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

The stakes are high in Max's world, and George Miller doesn't shy away from revealing how bad things are there. There is a scene, for instance, in which Max sits on the rim of a mountain eating dog food, and acts as though it is the best thing he's ever tasted.  

Miller also dramatizes a failed escape attempt with horrific results. A man and a woman flee the refinery and are set on by the marauders. The moment, seen through the lens of a telescope, culminates in a double murder. The auto gyro pilot watches this event lasciviously at first, because the female escapee is stripped (we see her breasts...), but his desire turns to horror as she is brutally raped and murdered. '

This is what mankind has come to, and it's only hope is Max, a man whom the screenplay describes as "a parasite." Max is no hero; the people of the refinery are no saints (they resort to duplicity with Max, for one thing...);but both Max and the town people are better than the utter immorality and monstrosity represented by Humongous and his gang. Here -- as in many cases -- it is a choice between the lesser of two evils.

So much of The Road Warrior is unromantic and blunt. Consider, for instance, the beautiful, Amazonian warrior (Virginia Hey). She protects the refinery and is portrayed as heroic and courageous. In most Westerns or genre films, a romance might blossom between this gorgeous, strong character and Max. 

Not so here. 

Instead, she is brutally murdered in the film's final chase scene. She is shot and left to dangle off a truck turret. The message: this is a world that makes no distinction between male and female; between movie "hero" and movie "fodder."

Likewise Humongous's version of Baghdad Bob loses his fingers to a boomerang in one scene, and Miller indelicately cuts to an insert shot of those fingertips flying through the air. Even more tellingly, it was the Feral Kid -- a warrior, himself -- who throws that boomerang. A child! And how do Baghdad Bob's "friends" and associates react when he loses his fingers? They cheer and guffaw. 

In this world, pain is a source of laughter; even if the person hurting is on your side. The message is again that society is gone, and that we -- as viewers -- can't expect decorum from this film if we simultaneously expect it to be "true" to what such a world would look and feel like.

The murder of a dog (or dingo) is depicted slightly less bluntly, but there are other harrowing moments here, when arrows are yanked out of human skin on screen, for instance. And examine Max's demeanor too. In the film, he demonstrates no compassion or human consideration for anyone, including the pilot, until he himself requires help and rescue.  All of this focus on human ugliness makes The Road Warrior a nihilistic action film, but one of remarkable imagery and power. With civilization goes decorum; with decorum goes decency; with decency goes humanity.

The central portion of The Road Warrior involves Humongous's Alamo-like siege on the refinery (and there is a brilliantly-staged, almost De Palma-esque tracking shot featured here as Miller's camera pursues a rabbit hopping madly through the compound as an attack gathers nearby...), yet it is the final third of the film that leaves one breathless and walloped. 

The last act of The Road Warrior is an eighty-mile-an-hour chase scene, a non-stop demolition derby involving a weaving tanker truck, buzzing cars, roaring motorcycles and the swooping auto-gyro. Characters leap from speeding vehicle to speeding vehicle; characters swing chains, fire arrows, and drive for their lives. 

It's a go-for-the-gusto finale that tops everything else in the picture, and to this day still tops most action movie denouements. I should add, it was all executed on a low budget, with real vehicles (no CGI!) and absolutely rousing stunt work. Coupled with Brian May's pulse-pounding soundtrack, the action climax of The Road Warrior is a burst of sustained adrenaline, injected right into the heart.

A superb and clever addition to the post-apocalyptic film pantheon, The Road Warrior is artistically crafted, and the film pauses its relentless drive to the climax only long enough to offer a little homage. In a scene involving a music box and a corpse falling out of a truck cab, Miller's film momentarily pays tribute to a quieter moment in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. 

It does so, I submit, because Miller recognizes Night as a spiritual antecedent. Both films are distinctively unromantic portraits of humanity; both films are about a change (or degradation...) in the social order, and both films are blunt in their portrayals of violence. 

The only significant difference is that Night of the Living Dead is so bleak that it kills Ben (the film's hero), whereas the device of the montage/voice-over leaves room in The Road Warrior for the possibility that mankind -- in a better iteration, hopefully -- will go on to thrive in a new world; one where the violence we see here is but a misty memory; just like that warrior of the wasteland, Max.

The third film completes Max's journey of redemption, but even there, he is not quite ready to return to the human race, to civilization.