I would pay $20.00 to watch this film. Buy it for your collection.

    Luc Besson's first film was recently released on DVD. The internationally-acclaimed director of such blockbusters as "The Fifth Element" and such classics as "Subway" started his career in 1983 with a movie that has become a cult classic: "Le Dernier Combat". The movie has no dialogue (unless you count grunts) and is filmed in black and white, but bears a greater resemblance to "Mad Max" than it does to film noir - it's a post-apocalyptic tale of survival.
    Like "Mad Max", "Le Dernier Combat" is more about the survival of human spirit than it is about the struggle for basic human needs. In "Mad Max", we watch as the protagonist's spirit is profoundly altered by the brutish environment he dwells in. Throughout the movie, we see him tormented until, finally, he becomes "Mad Max", a vengeful force of nature. A sense of loss and despair is the payoff in "Mad Max".
    Oddly, even though the post-apocalyptic world in which Pierre Jolivet's character in "Le Dernier Combat" dwells is much more grim and hopeless than that in "Mad Max", "Le Dernier Combat" offers us hope and redemption, rather than the portrait of a hopeless future so romantically portrayed in many B-movies of the '80s.
    The world of "Le Dernier Combat" is possibly the most post-apocalyptic one I've ever seen in a movie. Pierre Jolivet's character lives in the skeleton of a skyscraper buried more than halfway in sand. As he looks out of the window to the horizon, all he can see is sand. A small group of scavengers lives near Jolivet's building, in what appears to be a small junkyard. They get their water by sending a slave underground, and we watch as he fills up canteens from standing water in an old building now buried in sand.
    Pierre Jolivet begins the movie as the same sort of selfish bastard as everybody else in his world. We watch as he stabs a sleeping man in order to steal a car part. He escapes retribution in a homemade ultralight aircraft, which then crashes far away from where he began. After a crash, a rain of fish, and a brutal encounter with Jean Reno, Jolivet is taken in by a doctor in a new city. The doctor patches Jolivet up and befriends him over the course of his recovery.
    The doctor has painted cave art on a wall in his offices, thus bringing home the point that man has degenerated into a primal state after the apocalypse. Of course, this begs the question: How degenerate must man have been to bring about an apocalypse in the first place? The doctor teaches Jolivet about the finer things in life, such as they exist in this grim world. This eventually alters Jolivet such that he is no longer as brutish as the others in his world. At this point, the doctor paints Jolivet as a mighty warrior on his wall of art.
    I won't give any more spoilers to this movie, as it is such a great pleasure to be surprised in this case. Suffice it to say that Jolivet meets Jean Reno again in this movie, and that is the obvious genesis of the title, which translates to "The Last Battle". However, I see the real last battle being the struggle of man to preserve his humanity from his own, lesser nature. Call it a struggle between the Id and the Superego, if you will. This is a theme by no means unique to "Le Dernier Combat", but it is presented, I stress, with no dialogue.
    This movie does not serve you up a platter of Theme, but rather hands you the ingredients. I personally love every Luc Besson movie, but I understand that not everybody has seen them all. If you have only seen his recent movies, such as "The Messenger" or "The Fifth Element", don't judge all of his work by them. "The Big Blue", "Subway" and "Le Dernier Combat" are all vastly different films, and vastly different from Besson's work as of late. "Le Dernier Combat" is my personal favorite 'experimental' film ever. Even if you don't like Besson, you will be able to appreciate this movie.