Foster on Film

With the passage of time, the world (or just Australia) has become more desolate than in the time of the previous film, The Road Warrior.  Max, still traveling alone, is robbed, and finds his way to Barter Town where he makes a deal with Aunty Entity (Tina Turner): if he kills the muscle of a political rival in the arena known as Thunderdome, she will re-equip him.  But things don’t go as planned, and he ends up exiled, only to be saved by children that, in turn, he must save.

Following the style of The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a light action flick with humor and some exciting fights and chases.  It pulls back on the frenetic pace in order to have character development and dialog (both of which were missing from the previous outing).

Writer/director George Miller has ratcheted up the epic nature of the story.  Once again using the mythic Campbellian/western/samurai view as a starting place, he retells the hero’s tale, but this time with a bit of complexity.  To repeat my own style from my Road Warrior review, the hero’s tale now is: a lone gunslinger/samurai/knight is temped by evil.  Refusing to go completely over to “the dark side,” he still must be punished for his misdeed.  Rescued by an outsider, he finds himself no longer in the world of adventure.  However, circumstances and his inner conflict force him back in, and he must save the good people and the normal way of life from the black hats.  Of course, as the warrior, he is left alone in the end as one who can never know simple peace.  Max is still the reluctant hero, though less reluctant as he is slowly finding a reason to live.  A group of abandoned children represent both the outsider and the good people he must save.  And once again, this basic story works.

The big change that makes this film interesting is the intricate world.  Miller and co-writer Terry Hayes fill it with bizarre characters, hairstyles, costumes, buildings, vehicles, and vocations.  There so much going on in Barter Town, the root of the new civilization that Auntie is building, that you can be entertained just by looking at the edges of the screen.  And it is the home of Thunderdome, a cage where “Two men enter; one man leaves.”  If you wanted a different kind of fight scene, here it is.

As for those bizarre characters, not only do we have the ruthless visionary, Aunty Entity, but

• Dr. Dealgood (Edwin Hodgeman)—the poetic fight announcer and auctioneer,
• The Collector (Frank Thring)—the large-jowled, hulking deal maker,
• Master (Angelo Rossitto)—the arrogant dwarf genius who speaks in simple sentence so that he can be understood by a mentally retarded partner,
• Blaster (Paul Larsson)—a powerhouse who wears a diving helmet and carries Master around on his back,
• Pig Killer (Robert Grubb)—who is content with his life sentence for killing a pig because no one survives more than two or three years,
• Jedediah (Bruce Spence)—a cowardly crook with an airplane who may be, but probably isn’t, a character from the last film, and
• Ironbar (Angry Anderson)—a nearly indestructible warrior for Auntie who wears a strange combination of punk and opera-wear.

Now those are characters you can get your teeth into.  None of them are simply good or evil, but all are capable of some foul deeds, which makes them fun to watch.  While the action is electrifying, the best part of the film is listening to these personalities speak.  They’ve been given one of the few movie-future-dialects that is both believable and fun to hear.  It is abrupt, twisted, and lyrical.
Once the children are introduced, there is the fear that things could get cute.  But that doesn’t happen.  These are kids who kill and die and have sex (there are new children  since they’ve been on their own).  And Max doesn’t get sweet and fatherly with them.  Any film that has a tough, 30ish man punching out a teen girl is in no danger of losing its way.  And with the children, we’re introduced to another dialect, one that is somewhat more amusing, but believable in the context of the epic.

The score by Maurice Jarre is a huge improvement on the overblown music from the first two films, which popped in to tell you when something was exciting.  Jarre’s work fits the world, without drawing your attention away from what you are watching.

I would have liked to have seen a more formidable opponent for Max.  Auntie is great as the leader, but Ironbar just doesn’t stack up when compared to The Road Warrior’s Mohawk-styled psycho.

While I realize that Miller was going for the hero’s tale again, more variety would have been nice.  Too much of Thunderdome is derived from The Road Warrior.  This is most blatant in the third act where we end up with another vehicle chase.  I suppose this was tossed in to appease the car-fanatic fans of the second film.  A more original climax would have made for a better film.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome has gotten a mixed reaction from viewers, which usually depends on which film is considered the odd-one-out, Mad Max 1 or Thunderdome.  Those who think the defining feature of these films is vehicular combat in speeding, roaring, jazzed-up cars, group the first two films and find the third lacking.  Well, it is a bit lacking in cars.  The claim is also that the first two are taut, serious action flicks while the third is more of a light family flick.  This view confuses all three films.  The first isn’t an action movie (there is remarkably little activity till the end), but a revenge melodrama.  The second is a full-tilt, comic book, action picture with heavily comedic elements.  As for Thunderdome being a family flick, that depends on your family.  It is Mad Max 2 and 3 that fit together, being epic tales of the mythic hero.

If you don’t care about Joseph Campbell and his theories on myths, that OK.  Forget about them and watch one cool flick.

It follows Mad Max (1979), and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), and was followed, thirty years later, by Mad Max: Fury Road (1915).