The Road Warrior is a huge leap forward in the Mad Max franchise and in some ways feels like the film that George Miller wanted to make all along. The opening is mythic and expansive, as we look back at Max from a vast historical distance, against an Australia that has devolved into “cities of pipes and steel,” the worship of “black fuel” and the endless quest for “guzzoline,” leaving man without traditional familial and social structures. Miller’s Australian cyberpunk aesthetic is much more polished and streamlined now, with no residues of the naturalism of the first film, whether in terms of setting or of character. Whereas Mad Max was laying the foundation of a dystopian world, The Road Warrior is a sustained and conspicuous act of world-building, and in that sense paves the way for Fury Road and Furiosa.

Interestingly, however, Miller hasn’t exactly expanded so much as condensed and focused the world of the franchise. Unlike the first film, there are no cities or country towns anymore, while the outback highway system, and the profession of highway patrol, has completely vanished as well. Max is now fully ensconced behind the windshield, largely fused and identified with his car, and almost entirely silent, although when he does speak his Australian accent is much more pronounced than in the original. When Max does leave his vehicle, he possesses no other home – in fact, there are no real homes for anyone, just makeshift encampments and clusters of wreckage that acts as provisional shelter in the endless desert.

This all makes for a much more atmospheric and cosmic aesthetic. Early in the film Max links up with “The Gyro Captain,” played by Bruce Spence, and the two spend their first evening on top of an enormous mountain, with a 360-degree view of the surrounding desert, gazing upon the otherworldly spectacle of an oil refinery, contoured by plumes of smoke from the vehicles of a motorcycle gang driving around and around it. You can see the curvature of the earth in these shots, and with their epic scope and sightline, they gesture towards the possibility of an Australian western. In the original film, any pretensions to an Australian western were undermined by the grotesquerie and caricature of Miller’s vision, which in turn stems from the fact that Australia just doesn’t have the same mythos of westwards expansion that occurs in American history. Interestingly, The Road Warrior glimpses an Australian western at the very moment at which Australia itself dissolves into the cosmos. Here, the outback doesn’t end with another coast, or the prospect of settling another coast, as in American westerns, but with a more cosmic universe, above rather than beyond the horizon.

This expansive vision is all the more remarkable in that it operates as a kind of radar to focus Miller’s dystopian sensibilities upon a single confined space – the oil refinery. It turns out that this refinery has been besieged by motorcycle gangs for some time, as Max learns when he takes refuge there himself. Once inside, Max strikes a deal with the community – he will leave the compound and come back with a truck that he saw by the side of the road, so that they can successfully escape with their fuel intact, so long as they return his car and provide him with enough fuel to continue along his way as well. Most of the film involves the subsequent standoff, as Lord Humungus, the leader of the motorcycle gang, summons an even more flamboyant and eccentric array of vehicles than we saw in the original. In the stand-off that ensues, Miller applies the vertiginous cosmicity of Apocalypse Now to the Australian landscape, in a precursor to Baz Luhrmann’s maximalism. In the process, space itself starts to fall apart, confounding solid, liquid and gas. More and more, the oil refinery feels like a ship marooned in the sea of the desert, while road travel yearns for the sky with even more plangency than in the first film as well. Max first meets the Gyro Captain while trying to steal fuel from his gyrocopter, which is itself fashioned from old car and truck parts, and from there car and air travel quickly start to converge, producing one of the most iconic images of the entire franchise – Max gazing down at the oil refinery from the mountain, surrounded by the cosmic glow of evening, his car perched upwards as if it’s about to ascend into outer space.

Mad Max 2 is also the most focused action film of the franchise until Fury Road, and outlines a distinctively Australian answer to the American genre as well. Whereas American action films typically revolve around the ingenious navigation of a building, a vertical structure or a dramatic topography, The Road Warrior is more focused on the need to traverse great flat distances without vehicles, petrol or protection. Since the landscape is almost entirely devoid of topography, the action is restricted to breaching walls and accelerating through space, meaning that it depends more on mechanical ingenuity than the spatial ingenuity typical of the classic action film. Ironically, this brings the sequel much closer to the American western than the original, for like a western, Miller’s aesthetic is expansive but spaceless – in fact, discrete space is what the oil refinery are trying to move towards (and they imagine it as the Sunshine Coast, with “all the fresh air you can breathe”). In a quintessentially postmodern fashion, The Road Warrior situates highly embodied action in a virtual space. The first film was gesturing towards this paradox in its metonymic narrative structure, which seemed destined to erode any residue of conventional space, but The Road Warrior fully inhabits it.

That strange spacelessness means that Miller’s action is ultimately all about choreography – an orchestra of moving pieces that ebb and flow with an extraordinary widescreen kineticism. Every structure or object in the film is mobile and provisional, some more so than others, and all of them are eventually abstracted into the supersonic flow of the desert, generating the enormous slipstream required to break out of this spacelessness for conventional space, although we are never permitted to see the latter. The closest we come is the closing sense of taking flight, of departing the endless flatness of The Road Warrior’s world for something that can’t be fully formulated when you’re still in it (and it feels right that the Gyro Captain, the “man from the sky,” becomes the first leader of this new community in the north). Even more so than the original film, then, The Road Runner begs a sequel or a prequel, immersing us in a perfectly conceived bubble of dystopian intensity and ending just as it finally bursts.