Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

#4 in my ranking of the Mad Max franchise.

Yeah, this is weird, but I get into it. Presaging the total weirdness that Miller would unleash in the world building of Fury Road, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is this combination of weird world-building and efforts at being more amenable to wider audiences. A lot of people hold certain aspects of that against the film, but I don’t. I enjoy it all. I mean, this isn’t great art. Miller doesn’t seem to be totally into the affair, going safe after the tragic death of his producing partner Byron Kennedy. That’s why Miller brought in the Australian workhorse George Ogilvie to help him direct. So, this feels like safer Max with less Miller driven storytelling, but it still comes together as an overall entertaining package.

Max (Mel Gibson) has his camel-driven V8 stolen from him by Jedediah (Bruce Spence) and his son Junior (Adam Cockburn) flying a jalopy, leading Max towards Barter Town, a refuge of nascent civilization after the collapse some number of years ago. It’s a place where you only gain access if you have something to trade, entrance determined by The Collector (Frank Thring), and run by Auntie Entity (Tina Turner). She’s in a power struggle with the two-man team who runs the town’s energy sector (operating off of pig feces), Master-Blaster (Angelo Rossitto and Paul Larsson). They want to use Max’s skills and outsider status to take out Master-Blaster to cement Auntie’s rule on Barter Town. Max has no real care about the place, so he takes the job to help get himself back on his feet.

Now, Barter Town is the center of the film and its worldbuilding, and it’s something of a marvel. Compared to the expansive, digitally enhanced visions of Fury Road and Furiosa, it can feel small, but this is what big-budget filmmaking of the late-80s looked like. There’s so much hand-crafted work in every frame as we walk with Max through the barter parts of the outpost, so much detail to take in, that it feels weirdly lived-in. The path that Max has to take to work through the politics of Barter Town are also clearly laid out with Auntie on one side and Master-Blaster on the other, neither side seeming all that good to start out with (Auntie talking about murder plots while Master-Blaster lords over everyone from his pig pit). It’s a strong foundation on which to build things.

The eponymous Thunderdome is where, of course, Max and Blaster have their fight to the death, and I kind of love this. It’s so strange and different. Both are on bungie-cords attached to the iron dome while the denizens of Barter Town straddle it from the ground up on the outside. Weapons and punching and whistles and double-crosses and sudden sympathies (okay, this last part is thin and outright manipulative), and it leads to Max going…beyond Thunderdome! Exiled into the wilderness because Auntie is a backstabber who will grab power no matter what.

This leads to the part of the film that is most reviled: the introduction of the remote society of children in a small pocket of an oasis in the desert. I have never had a problem with this because I’ve always seen it as a very conscious contrast to the dirtier, more manufactured vision of society that Barter Town represented. I think there’s a thematic thing going on here about materialism versus a life with meaning beyond the here and now, represented by the kids’ near worship of the holy figure of Captain Walker, a mysterious pilot who crashed an airliner before their memory that they have memorialized through rote repetition of his story. This story gives them hope, and it’s told by one of their oldest, Savannah (Helen Buday), presented to Max when he arrives because they see him as the manifestation of Walker, come to deliver them from the desert to the cities.

But, Max is not their messiah as they imagined him, and it creates this crisis of faith within the group, pitting Savannah against Slake (Tom Jennings) with Savannah choosing to continue to believe that salvation is possible, setting out to find it, while Slake insists on staying behind to make what they can of where they are.

What’s interesting about Max here is that the efforts at actually explaining his change of behavior from The Road Warrior are gone. This treats him less like a character and more like an archetype. This is simply what he does. He arrives in a place and decides to help people. In The Road Warrior, there was dialogue about him needing to find meaning in the world after his tragedy, but that previous history isn’t even referenced anymore. This is just who he is now. He doesn’t have an arc. He has a formula and a pattern, and he just follows it. Max is not the focus of this film, he is just the vehicle we use to go through this world that Miller and Ogilvie lay out.

So then the question becomes, how interesting is that world? Are the other characters compelling on their own? How is the action? Well, the action ranges from the kind of goofy (in Thunderdome) to the same kind of vehicular mayhem that we’ve come to expect from this series, at a greater scale. The characters are largely functional, the best of them being more fun than compelling. For instance, Master goes from villain to sympathetic through circumstance, pretty much exclusively, while Auntie is just Tina Turner overacting and has some fun moments, like her goodbye. If there’s a truly sympathetic character it’s Pig Killer (Robert Grubb), a convict in the pig mines who escapes near the end and has a nice ending for himself.

So, I have a good time with it. It’s kind of goofy. I find value with the children’s oasis. It’s thinner than it probably should be. But, it moves quickly and entertains as it goes. It’s a fun time.

Rating: 3/4