STEEL DAWN (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

In contrast to many “Mad Max” imitators, STEEL DAWN is ably filmed and displays an impressive budget. However, simple competence is often not enough, which may be the reason the movie flopped in theaters, even though star Patrick Swayze had just gained major credits from his role in DIRTY DANCIN’.

STEEL DAWN looks as if someone, be it director Lance Hool or writer Doug Lefler, studied the first “Mad Max” film (the one without all the hyperkinetic stunts) and crossbred it with 1953’s SHANE. Swayze’s tight-lipped hero Nomad has a mysterious, tortured past, but he puts aside his loner status to defend a small farming-community from a greedy land baron (Anthony Zerbe).

In SHANE, Alad Ladd’s loner-hero takes shelter with three defenseless farmers: a man, his wife, and their young boy. DAWN keeps the young boy to register wide-eyed admiration of the stoic fighting-man, but now there’s no husband, for the boy’s mother Kasha (played by Swayze’s real-life wife Lisa Niemi) is a widow. There’s a loose husband-surrogate in Tark, a tough Meridian guy who hopes to get in good with Kasha, but though Tark’s duly humiliated by Nomad’s heroic superiority, he doesn’t complicate the potential Nomad-Kasha romance.

Some early scenes also present a subplot-conflict: Nomad’s martial mentor is murdered by foul means. By sheer dumb luck the assassin just happens to be working for Zerbe’s character, allowing for Nomad to take care of both plot-concerns at once.

Swayze handles the martial arts battles and the swordfighting with aplomb, but his character remains a cipher, as do all of the other characters despite the participation of professionals like Zerbe and Brion James. Further, the original story of SHANE ended with the hero leaving the community he saves in part because he’s in love with the farmer’s wife, a married woman. DAWN keeps the same ending, but because Kasha’s a widow, there’s no inherent reason for Nomad to take his leave.

Both script and direction are simply pedestrian, except for one promising scene at the opening. Nomad is seen out in the desert, meditating by standing on his head. Three raiders—apparently post-apocalyptic mutants, though the script doesn’t say so—tunnel through the desert sands to attack the solitary traveler. If the rest of the film had measured up to the lively whimsy of this scene, Hool and Lefler might have produced something as good as the 1979 George Miller original.