Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
I think I underestimated this movie the first time seeing it, when I had a hard time getting past its rudimentary, exploitation structure—which, by the way, is very exploitative. At times it has the feel of a horror movie, particularly in the second act when there’s a lot of very ominous stalking going on. At other times it clearly feeds on late-20th century anxiety around lawlessness and the absence of morality, and when I say “feeds” on it, I mean it practically feasts on Western concerns about barbarism encroaching on the polite and orderly society that even in 1979 felt like it was already slipping away.
But that exploitation is elevated by Miller’s burgeoning but still distinctive directorial voice. The world he creates around this pre-millennium angst is pretty remarkable: an Australia of wide, endless landscapes and two-lane blacktops that stretch into infinity; a seemingly whole world built from impressively concise script details and strategically edited camera shots; a sense of the built environment being on the verge of collapse (the wreck of a police headquarters is a brilliant touch). This is more than just exploitation filmmaking; it's a social thesis in narrative form. Maybe that’s an apocryphal assessment given how we've seen over the course of four sequels how extensive Miller’s thesis is, but it’s impossible to deny it’s all here, from the beginning. Which is pretty amazing, given how truly different a world he presents in this movie from what followed. It would have been impossible at the time to predict the heights that this franchise would climb to.
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