For reasons long forgotten two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They’d built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded — a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. —The Feral Kid, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Their world crumbled, leaving a wasteland. A wasteland that didn’t forgive. That didn’t remember. Although men remembered as their eyes scanned the wreckage of the remnants of what had once been.

In George Miller’s 1981 masterpiece Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the camera lingers on cracked earth, rusted hulks, and human faces smeared with grease and desperation. 

It is a picture of a world that is dead. The eyes scanning the scene? The eyes of the world that now is.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is a post-apocalyptic parable that strips civilization to its bones and asks what remains when the veneer is gone. 

Beneath the roaring engines and scenes of depraved humanity lies a stark meditation on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the fragility of the social contract, and the cold abyss of nihilism. 

The film insists that the “state of nature”—that war of all against all—is never truly banished. Government, law, and morality are fragile illusions, and when the fuel runs dry, we revert to beasts in leather and chrome.

Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In Mad Max 2, the apocalypse has already happened; the precise cause is irrelevant. What matters is the aftermath: a world where civilization has collapsed, leaving behind roving gangs, scavengers, and a single precious resource—“guzzoline”. 

The opening narration, delivered in the future-voice of the Feral Kid, sketches a society that imploded under its own weight. Nuclear exchange? Resource wars? It hardly matters. The point is that the elaborate machinery of government—designed to lift humanity out of chaos—proved as brittle as the tankers that once fueled it.

The marauders, led by the masked warlord Humungus, are not cartoon villains; they are Hobbesian man unleashed. Without a sovereign to enforce covenants, every interaction is a zero-sum game. The strong prey on the weak, and the weak either die or become predators themselves. 

The besieged refinery compound represents the last ember of organized society: a micro-Leviathan with walls, rules, and a shared goal (to haul their tanker of fuel to the coast). Yet even here, trust is transactional. The settlers debate abandoning their wounded, and the Gyro Captain negotiates his cut with surgical precision. He is, after all, a mercenary. Government, Miller suggests, is less a moral achievement than a pragmatic truce. Remove the fuel, and the truce dissolves.

This is where the film’s nihilism cuts deepest. In a world stripped of transcendent meaning, survival becomes the only currency. Fuel is not merely gasoline; it is life itself. 

A full tank means mobility, which means food, water, ammunition, and the fleeting illusion of control. The camera draws our attention to this new reality: close-ups of dripping nozzles, the glint of sunlight on a tanker’s flank, the ecstatic roar when Max’s Interceptor fires up. 

Possession of guzzoline confers godlike power in a landscape where everything else has been reduced to barter or a bullet or a crossbow bolt. 

The settlers dream of a paradise “2,000 miles” away, but the film never shows it. Is it a story? A mirage? Another survival myth to keep the tribe moving? Perhaps. In any event, the significance that it is not shown cannot be overlooked.

Max Rockatansky, the Road Warrior himself, embodies the man who has no meaning other than to keep on going. 

He is not a hero. He is a scavenger with a supercharged V8. 

When we meet him, he is already a ghost of the man who once upheld the law. His family murdered, his faith in justice incinerated, Max has become a dead man walking. He has no meaning. He simply exists. 

He helps the refinery compound not out of altruism but because they have fuel. “I’m just here for the gasoline,” he tells them, and we believe him. 

And to get that gasoline, he’s willing to drive the tanker to allow the others to escape. A dangerous job, but he’s already a dead man. What does it matter? In the end, he might get the fuel to keep on driving in a meaningless world. 

The film refuses to grant Max a redemptive arc. At the end, the settlers ride north to build their new society, narrating their triumph through the Feral Kid’s adult voice. Max? He vanishes into the horizon, alone, unchanged. He is one with the nothingness that is the wasteland.

Miller elevates Mad Max 2 above the mere action-adventure flick. The settlers escape, yes, but the film withholds catharsis. Their new home is implied, never shown; the camera stays with Max, the eternal outsider. 

Miller understands that nihilism is not a phase to be overcome but a condition to be negotiated. The settlers create meaning by collective action: forging tools, sharing risk, telling stories to their children. They build a covenant in the desert. Max cannot. His meaning died with his family, and fuel is a poor substitute. He is the spectator to their fragile hope, the reminder that Hobbes’ state of nature lurks in every human heart.

Critics sometimes accuse the film of glorifying violence, but that misreads its moral lens. The action sequences—choreographed with balletic precision—are not celebrations; they are autopsies. Every crash, every explosion, every severed limb underscores the cost of Hobbes’ war of all against all. 

When Wez screams in berserk rage or the Feral Kid hurls his razor-sharp boomerang, we see Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes in high-octane clarity. Government fails not because it is inherently corrupt but because it is artificial, a thin membrane over primal impulse. The moment scarcity bites, the membrane tears.

Yet the film is not entirely bleak. Meaning, it suggests, is not discovered but manufactured. The settlers do not find paradise; they agree to pursue it together. Their escape is a collective fiction, a story they tell themselves to keep the engines running. The Feral Kid’s narration—delivered years later—frames the entire saga as myth. Max becomes legend, the Road Warrior who “lived for the hunt, and the hunt alone.” Even in nihilism’s grip, humans spin narratives to impose order on chaos. The irony is delicious: the very act of storytelling contradicts the void.

In this light, Max’s solitude is tragic rather than heroic. He is the man who cannot join the story. Without a tribe, without a shared fiction, he is condemned to repeat the cycle. The final shot—Max’s Interceptor disappearing into heat shimmer—mirrors the opening. Nothing has changed for him. The wasteland is his Leviathan, and he is both sovereign and subject, forever at war with himself.

Mad Max 2 endures because it refuses easy answers. It shows the state of nature not as a historical phase but as a latent possibility. Turn off the pumps, empty the supermarkets, cut the power for a week, and watch the social contract fray. The film’s genius is to make this regression visceral: the stench of petrol, the howl of superchargers, the glint of a crossbow bolt. Hobbes warned that covenants without the sword are but words. Miller gives us the sword in chrome and fire.

For readers of dark literature, the wasteland is familiar terrain. It echoes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where love is the only bulwark against cannibal hordes. It prefigures The Walking Dead’s crumbling enclaves and the brutal pragmatism of A Song of Ice and Fire. But Mad Max 2 distills the horror to its essence: a world where meaning must be wrested from scarcity, and the strongest myth wins. The settlers’ tanker is their Exodus, Max their Moses who never enters the promised land.

So the next time you fill up your tank, spare a thought for the refinery compound under siege. Spare another for the lone driver on an endless highway, chasing a horizon that never arrives. The state of nature is always one catastrophe away, and the fuel gauge is ticking. In the end, we are all Max—until we choose to build something that outlasts the ride.