These films were released in 1981

The Road Warrior

The Road Warrior

Three or four career meltdowns ago, Mel Gibson was still a fresh face on the scene when he went into a bar the night before his audition for a little film called Mad Max. The brawl that temporarily battered his youthful good looks actually helped land him the role that would launch his career. The first Mad Max was a hit worldwide but made a negligible impression in the States, partly due to a lousy dubbing job the studio inflicted on the film because the suits thought Yanks weren’t ready for a real Australian accent (This was a few years before Crocodile Dundee).

As a result, the sequel was called Mad Max 2 everywhere but the U.S., because you can’t have a sequel to a movie no one had heard of. Call it Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior, it was like a jolt of adrenaline right into the eyeballs.

Continue reading

Das Boot

[/types]]

Wolfgang Petersen’s obsessively detailed World War II epic remains one of the most influential war movies and certainly continues to set a gold standard for submarine movies. Even the best of the rest, such as Hunt for Red October, run a distant second. If this all sounds like fanboy blather, well, it is, but it’s still hard to overstate the achievements of this film.

Continue reading

Raiders of the Lost Ark

[/types]]

As a standalone movie, judged apart from its lesser sequels, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a pure, unfiltered dose of joyful escapism. Rarely has the medium of film been so successfully used for the purpose of pure entertainment. Free from director Steven Spielberg’s tendency for suburban navel-gazing, cute kids and distant parents, as well as producer George Lucas’s later bloated mythic pretensions, Raiders tosses overboard every piece of narrative flab as the story hums along like a well-tuned V-8 engine.

Continue reading

Gallipoli

[/types]]

Gallipoli is not as much a war movie as it is a road picture with the Battle of Gallipoli as the destination. The story only gets down to the business of war within the last 30 minutes of the film.

”[types
[/types]“]

This battle is to Australians in many ways what Pickett’s Charge was to American South in our Civil War, a moment of definition for the national character. The fact that it was a folly that ended tragically is part of the point. For those who see battle as the ultimate test of manhood, to advance in the face of the certain death is the unquestionable display of your commitment to duty. The second and later waves of Australian soldiers to go over the edge of the trenchline during the Battle of the Nek were as certain of their fate as any man in Pickett’s divisions.

Continue reading