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The Appropriate Tune - "We Don't Need Another Hero" by Tina Turner
We closed the chapter on Star Trek TOS and the original Planet of the Apes series last year, and this year I decided yet another. When Mad Max: Fury Road temporarily took the world by storm all those years ago I decided that I should get ahead of the horse so to speak and check out this odd little franchise when interest was still high. So I watched the first entry in the series, 1979’s Mad Max, and I didn’t like it. At all really, which really made my experience with Fury Road a year later much more pleasantly poignant. It took me five years after that to finally get around to watching the second film in the series, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and once again I was pleasantly surprised. All the things that had made Fury Road such a treat, the whole reason people would give a shit about a Mad Max movie in the first place originated with that film. Now, two years later, it’s time to see if they stick the landing. Witness me, and all that.
Released in Australia in 1985, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was written by Terry Hayes and co-written, directed (with George Ogilvie) and produced by George Miller through Kennedy Miller Productions. Mel Gibson returns for the last time as the titular Max, the one-time police officer and family man who now wanders alone across the barren wastes of what was once Australia. After getting wagon-jacked by a father and son team of aviators Max eventually ends up at Bartertown, a settlement and trading hub for all your physical and deviant needs, run by the vivacious Aunty Entity (Tuna Turner). The main reason Bartertown is successful though is because of the Underworld, an industrial complex and prison labor camp which processes methane gas into electricity for the rest of the town, and that place is maintained by the brains and brawn duo of MasterBlaster. Such a scenario ultimately leads to a power struggle , and when Max comes around looking for his stolen goods Aunty senses an opportunity and offers him a deal: get rid of the Blaster, without whom the Master is largely helpless and easy to control, and he gets his stuff back. Max agrees, seeing little choice in the matter, and goes about setting up his match against Blaster in the post-apocalypse’s number one place for legal arbitration and remuneration: the Thunderdome, where two men enter and one man leaves. Of course things which seem simple always end up becoming complicated, especially when Max is involved. He might even end up going past the Thunderdome entirely. Beyond it, even.
The original Mad Max was a by-the-books type of grindhouse action flick, Road Warrior was a bit wilder but felt like a logical progression, and Beyond Thunderdome blows all of that out of the water to become purely fantasy. The visual aesthetic, the mangled reinterpretations of modern society, the way some character’s language skills have degenerated into a type of pidgin English, any sense of where the films take place (beyond some of the accents and landmarks being Australian) or when the apocalypse actually occurred have completely vanished. The Master looks to be in his 50s talks like Tarzan while Aunty Entity looks younger and speaks fluently, Max and Entity remember the world pre-apocalypse while others seem barely cognizant of it. The world of Mad Max is no longer compatible with our own in Beyond Thunderdome, it is running purely on its own lore, which might interest those who come in through Fury Road or the video game.
As the seemingly final entry in the series, Beyond Thunderdome was also the most expensive at the time, with a budget over double that of Mad Max 2. That might not be apparent at first as many locations in the film look like either a desert or a landfill, but when you get into it you realize that the film definitely feels bigger than Road Warrior. There’s more people, more locations, bigger explosions, better special effects, and so on and on. A big international release calls for big international visuals I suppose, which rings true as George Miller takes some of that time and money to essentially recreate the convoy from Road Warrior in Beyond Thunderdome, a courtesy for those in the audience who might not have seen a then 4 year old cult movie from Australia. A tactic that he would reuse when it came time for Fury Road, which is ninety percent convoy set piece, but it worked because that movie ran like cinematic cocaine. Not quite the same with Thunderdome, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
In regards to the cast, not only do we have Mel Gibson taking his final bow as the stoic wanderer of the wastes Max but also the return of Bruce Spence as a technically different character from the one he played in Road Warrior who also happens to pilot a flying machine, which was a nice treat. Coming off of Labyrinth as I did I was a bit wary to see Tina Turner's name in the credits, but she actually puts in a respectable performance in spite of what that hairstyle would have you believe. It’s almost like the opposite of Labyrinth in a way, Turner only gets a couple songs on the soundtrack and not that much development but puts in a worthwhile performance, while Bowie is all over the soundtrack and the movie but isn’t all that impressive on screen. Really though I don’t have much to comment on the acting in Thunderdome, even the children, who tend to be the weak link in any film they’re in.
Yes, the children...There does seem to be an emphasis on children this time around, multiple child characters in fact that dominate the screen time once they’re introduced. So much so that the film could neatly be split into two halves, the Thunderdome section and the children section. No matter the section though, the introduction of children at all in the narrative seems to have softened the tone of the entire film. There’s still fiery explosions and fistfights, but for the most part Mad Max has traded in his guns (quite literally at the beginning of the film) for slapstick comedy bits and children hitting people with frying pans. Very strong Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom vibes here, which had come out the year before, which is probably not the one you want to be compared to if you had the choice.
The music doesn’t help to keep comparisons to The Goonies at bay, unfortunately enough. Looking at his body of work Maurince Jarre was clearly a prolific composer, having worked on such films as Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India, but it is precisely because of his status as an old hand of Hollywood filmmaking that there’s a problem. You play a scene of this with your eyes closed and you’d swear you were watching a Spielberg movie, which only solidifies that Indiana Jones comparison. It lacks the edge and the energy that the series promotes and embodies, and every time Jarre’s orchestra starts to swell and try to push this dramatic timbre, I find it hard to take it seriously. As if we’re just on some grand adventure and not in a desperate struggle for our lives in a sandy, rusty hellscape.
So what is the reason for this change in tone? George Miller isn’t a stranger to children’s films, Happy Feet being the most successful example, but it seems odd that he would go the child-friendly route in his film series that’s partly predicated on the death of children, and features child death in this very film. Without looking into the production history one’s eyes are naturally drawn to the film’s other director, George Ogilvie. Ogilvie’s debut film was Beyond Thunderdome and the few films he directed afterwards were all dramas, not quite the same as the sci-fi action of Mad Max. Considering that, the fact that this was an international release and that the budget was significantly higher than Road Warrior, one is lead to the conclusion that studio execs at Warner Bros. or at Kennedy Miller shoved Ogilvie into the position due to lack of trust in Miller to make the movie and these tonally inconsistent moves were the result of an inexperienced director and those wanting a softer more marketable film in the hope that they’ll make more money. As I said I haven’t looked into it, Miller would go on to direct Babe and Happy Feet so maybe he was looking to change things up, but I doubt it. Unless it’s the Coens or the Wachowskis generally speaking you don’t see two directors on a film unless the people fronting the money aren’t happy, especially when one of them lacks any clout in the industry and is thus easier. Beyond Thunderdome made over three times its budget back at the office and yet it took 3 decades for Miller to get the greenlight for another Mad Max film? Definitely some behind the camera troubles.
Which isn’t to say that it’s not an entertaining movie. The whole Bartertown setting, Aunty Entity, MasterBlaster, is exactly the kind of thing that I expected and wanted when I first learned of this series. In that regard I would place it above the original Mad Max, but it also lacks the grit of Road Warrior and the balls-to-the-wall action of Fury Road that made those films so enjoyable. Awkward middle child status aside, Beyond Thunderdome gets the recommendation, which means that Mad Max in general gets the distinction of being one of the most consistently good franchises in Western pop culture, so if you’re looking for something to binge watch this Halloween this is definitely an option. Only slightly less phallic imagery than your average twitter feed.
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