Steel Dawn (1987)

We’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic world, though, taking the handful of hints the film drops about the world before, perhaps not a post-apocalyptic Earth. So much is clear: there was some kind of war, and eternal winds have turned the world, or at least the part of it we get to see, into a windy wasteland.

Our protagonist is a nameless wanderer (Patrick Swayze) and former high-ranking soldier spending his time wandering the wastelands, meditating while standing on his head and fighting off the only mutants the film bothers with including; all to deal with his PTSD, one supposes. However, when he meets his old teacher (John Fujioka) only to witness him being murdered by professional assassin Sho (Christopher Neame wearing a very excited looking hairpiece), he ambles after the killers, eventually ending up on the farm of Kasha (Lisa Niemi), where he hires on as a farmhand.

He’s at exactly the right place, too, for Sho is the preferred hired assassin of local bad guy Damnil (Anthony Zerbe) who is in the classic bad guy business of trying to take over a small community with violence. And that’s without Damnil knowing Kasha’s secret: her lands include a secret underground source of clean water. Clean water, mind you, she plans to provide to the whole community for free soon enough. Looks like Shane, ahem, Swayze, will have to use his powers of violence for good while also falling for Kasha, and playing replacement dad for her son.

As post-apocalyptic westerns – and this really is a thinly veiled variation on Shane and other films where a violent stranger arrives in a little town, finds peace for a short time and then has to solve bad guy troubles with his old violent ways only to drift away again afterwards – go, Steel Dawn is a pretty good one. As a friend of the goofier side of the post-apocalyptic divide, one can be a little disappointed that the sand-digging mutants in the film’s prologue are the only truly Italian-apocalypse-style weird bit Steel Dawn delivers, but the film’s straighter soul works out fairly well for it. And hey, straighter doesn’t mean there’s anybody here not dressing either in weird rags or in weird rags with leather pauldrons and of course other assorted Duran Duran music video leather bits, nor do we have to miss men wearing mop-shaped things where we humans have hair (best in class here is obviously Neame’s hair-thing even the less imaginative will suspect of one day just packing up its bags and crawling away, leaving a bald man behind). In fact, the lack of mutants – as well as firearms and even bows for some reason – does clearly convince the film to replace other post-apocalyptic mainstays as well. So no dune buggies this time around but wind-powered dune buggies that move so slow you’d think people would rather walk – there’s still even a race of a sort – and suggestions of the rests of a bizarre warrior culture in this place’s military that has nothing whatsoever to do with the one in our world. Also, Brion James is playing a good guy.

Lance Hool’s direction isn’t anything to write home about, competently plugging away at Doug Lefler’s script without demonstrating much style but also showing himself to be just competent enough to handle things decently, as well as clever enough to understand that a good desert shot means instant atmosphere. The script is mostly competent too, with a couple of fun ideas, a couple genre standards executed well, and with some curious moments like the randomly appearing and disappearing dog Swayze befriends that has no function at all in the film except to suggest that our hero, probably, doesn’t eat dogs but shares his food with them. Or the fact that it can’t seem to decide if Sho is an honourable assassin or not, and so has him jumping merrily from honourable to dishonourable while Neame is chewing the scenery just as merrily.

The action scenes are fun, making good use of the fact that Swayze’s dancer background makes him a natural for screen fighting (I’d argue dancers are better basic material than many non-screen/stage trained martial artists for this). We’re not talking Hong Kong levels of choreography here, obviously, but the fights are much better than clean punch-ups.

At this point in his career, Swayze is in full sway of his soft macho persona, generally selling the softer parts of his character a bit better than the machismo. Though on the machismo side, he has a note-perfect scene where he encounters Damnil and his henchmen while bathing and very naked that gives extra tough guy points. Swayze certainly makes a more convincing romantic actor than most guys you’ll see playing the lead in action movies of any era, so the romance part of the film actually feels like more than a beat the plot has to hit. Throw Swayze into a pool of character actors for every other role like Steel Dawn does, and he certainly gets my seal of approval.


Honestly, what more could I ask of a post-apocalyptic western without guns?