The movie begins after civilization has ended. Its characters have names such as ''Gyro Captain,'' ''Feral Kid,'' and the ineffably evil ''Humungus.'' The hero is a man named Max, a laconic wanderer doomed to travel through the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic Australia, endlessly searching for gasoline to fuel his car.
Vicious marauders dot the barren land, and as the narrator explains in a prologue to the film, ''Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage,'' could possibly survive.
If this all sounds pretty dismal, it is; but ''The Road Warrior,'' an Australian film directed by George Miller, offers a compelling vision of a world that has been overcome by conflict. It is a world in which Max, the disaffected loner, ultimately finds he has a responsibility to other people - a responsibility he would rather avoid. ''The Road Warrior,'' which has been released in waves throughout the country since late May, will open here on Friday at the Cinerama, the Beekman and other local theatres.
The film - which is a sequel to Mr. Miller's first feature, ''Mad Max'' -has received wide critical praise for its imagination and intensity, but it has variously been described as primitive entertainment, an adult version of a fantasy film, or a high-tech update of a classic Hollywood western.
Mr. Miller has been called ''the Diaghilev of demolition derbies,'' and this film has been referred to as '' 'Shane' in black leather.'' But his wit and talent have been acknowledged as well. Vincent Canby, writing when ''The Road Warrior'' first appeared last spring at the New Directors/New Films series, noted that in ''its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country.''
While ''The Road Warrior'' shares much of the distinctive flavor of the ''New Wave'' of Australian films -most notably in its striking visual texture, and its reliance on the wide outdoors rather than studio shots - Mr. Miller's films are much more openly commercial and purposefully abrasive than most Australian films released in this country.
''I certainly don't want this film to be seen purely as an escapist fantasy,'' said Mr. Miller. ''That is all there, sure, but a movie that only stimulates you on that basic emotional level is not very effective.
''This is a mythological tale, and Max takes a journey and learns some things about himself during it. You can compare it to a western - I grew up on them and they are very important to me - but I think this kind of story is told over again in many cultures. 'Road Warrior' is a hybrid: part Hollywood, part samurai, part European art film.''
The 37-year-old director now lives in Sydney, but he was raised in the rural ''deep North'' of Australia, where he became an ardent film fan at an early age. He was a ''Saturday matinee fanatic,'' and he freely concedes that much of the pleasure of his childhood can be traced to the local movie house. As with most of his Australian contemporaries, American films were his main form of entertainment and his explicit style can easily be connected to the forthright tradition of Hollywood movies.
''My influences are the montage directors,'' he said. ''Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Howard Hawks. The guys who cut the movies in their head before any of the film was ever shot.''
Although Mr. Miller was devoted to movies, until recently Australia was never a country with a thriving film industry. It never seriously occurred to him to become a filmmaker as a child, and so he attended medical school. But by the time he graduated, he had begun working on several film projects, and for two years he supported his forays into filmmaking by working as a doctor.
He was involved in what he describes as ''literally the first film workshop in Australia,'' and he feels deeply attached to the small but growing film community in his country.
By the time he had developed the screenplay for ''Mad Max'' - the story of a young highway patrol officer who battles a gang of outlaw bikers - Mr. Miller was in the business to stay. That film, which was easily the most commercially successful Australian film ever released in Europe, firmly established Mr. Miller as an important member of the ''New Wave'' of directers from his country.
''Mad Max'' earned more than $20 million in rentals outside the United States, and ''The Road Warrior'' -which cost $4 million to make, and is called ''Mad Max 2'' outside this country - is performing significantly better than the original film.
But directing ''Mad Max'' also introduced Mr. Miller to some of the unpleasant realities of his new profession. ''Making 'Mad Max' was a very unhappy experience for me,'' Mr. Miller said. ''I had absolutely no control over the final product, it was just grabbed out of my hands. But, to my surprise, it succeeded everywhere but in the United States and Canada. There was strong pressure to make a sequel, and I felt we could do a better job with a second movie.
''In the first story, Max was transformed from a relatively normal man to a monster character, which is where he started the second film. But by the end of it all, he senses a new order.''
