When the denizens of the apocalypse thunder up in their fire-belching steel monstrosities, raving and drooling, invading the scrap of wasted earth you’ve dug into for shelter from the wind, screaming insanities, and blasphemies, you’ll know who to thank: Dr. George Miller. Now, 70, the director, who one learns, indeed, finished his residency before fully succumbing to the dubious life of movie making, is one of the unacknowledged architects of the 21st Century, or at least it’s most grandiose obsession — the end of the society. Miller’s post-apocalypse vision has proven a cultural influence as seminal as George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” and it’s unleashing of the zombie fixation that still flourishes without sign of a cure. Miller’s second film in the the Mad Max series,”The Road Warrior” — starring the then-untarnished and astonishing beauty of young Mel Gibson — was, in 1980, the excelerant to the let-it-all-burn frustrations of disenfranchised youths everywhere. Miller’s genius, beyond plumbing the arid roads of Aussie outback, ala Leone, as his revisionist Western wasteland torn asunder by monster trucks, was to populate his tale of society in its last stages of entropy with mutated punks and steroid-ripped glam rockers in glorious leather and chain-mail. A product of the energy-crisis era, he distilled the lifeblood of the humanity down to precious drops of high octane, fought and died for, to be fed reverently into “Grave Digger” hot rods in the dust, sustaining and taking life, spewing flame like pyres to Moloch. Miller’s was a wholly original vision — a ripping post-apolcalyptic yarn that tapped into Sex Pistol’s anarchy and stoked mohawked youth’s ambitions to be the last-rockers-on-earth. As a seer of things to come, time has revealed the acuity of Miller’s dysto-vision as matched only by steampunk grandaddy H.G. Welles and techno-paranoia of Orwell. Today’s apocalpyse fashionistas, pierced, tribally tattooed and encyclopedicially-versed in automatic weapons from their endless practice at survivalist video games, are the spawn of good Dr. Miller’s vision. And when the power plants grind to a halt and the mayhem begins, he may even be cursed for his mad tetralogy of the road being the source a self-fulling prophesy.

Oh yes, and this is the best one yet.

MORE TO COME