Thunderdome is a whole different vibe. A Tina Turner song plays over the opening credits and something about it feels off after all we’ve been through. We are now in the 80’s.
Critical Mush in conjunction with The Society for the Preservation of Weird Cinema presents:
A Mad Max Retrospective Part 3
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome – 1985
Thunderdome starts like Road Warrior, Max needs something, the people from whom he needs it want him to do a job in return. From there it starts to get messy. The job is a hit, the mark is Master Blaster, Master Blaster runs underworld, underworld powers barter town, Auntie wants Master Blaster dead, but they don’t want anyone to know they did it. It’s a far cry from we’ll give you gas if you bring us a truck. I mean look at the top of the poster. “A lone warrior searching for his destiny…A tribe of lost children waiting for a hero… In a world battling to survive, they face a woman determined to rule.” …what?
Conspicuously missing from Thunderdome is car chases. It’s all walking and talking. You get some hand to hand combat but it’s either not shot particularly well or has bungie cords attached to it. That shit is so dumb. Nothing could make you easier to hit than swinging from a rope like a human pinata.
George continues to experiment with different concepts he will later refine and reincorporate. As Max walks into Bartertown, he’s offered water in-trade foreshadowing the use of water as commodity in Fury Road. Miller AGAIN shows us a scene with a someone playing a saxophone. I would have guffawed harder if I hadn’t seen Max’s wife playing the sax in Mad Max. George likes what he likes and one of the things he likes is random people playing the saxophone in his movies. If I don’t get a sax in Furiosa I’m going to be very disappointed.
Everything you know about Thunderdome – all the iconic shit – happens in the first 42 minutes. Bartertown, the funny gun check-in scene, Master Blaster, Tina Turner, two men enter, one man leave, it’s all frontloaded. Once we go beyond Thunderdome, it gets a little iffy.
And by iffy I mean there are a ton of feral kids. I know that I’ve been complementary of George’s penchant for reusing motifs and even props he likes and improving upon them but here he takes it a step too far. The feral kid in The Road Warrior was a nice detail. In Beyond Thunderdome there’s literally a tribe of feral children that no one needed. It’s like the fuckin’ lost boys. They even call their promised land tomorrow-morrow land. Who gave birth to all these children? Where are your parents!? You do start to see the early stages of the war boy esthetic.
This is the first Mad Max movie that feels like a movie. The first two feel like, I don’t know, gritty portraits of a world gone sideways. This one feels like a production, like Hollywood got its clammy hands on it. Even the score sounds like like The Goonies or Toy Story.
I wanted to blame someone other than George Miller for how this turned out so I went looking for an interview or a line somewhere in which he complains about producers ruining his vision. However, in this making of documentary, writer Terry Hayes says the first idea they had was to use a tribe of wild kids so it appears that this movie was fucked from the start. Also Terry Hayes doesn’t know how to type. Beyond Thunderdome is CO-directed by George Ogilvie, a man who does not appear in the credits for any of the other Max films so I’m going to put the responsibility for this aberration squarely in his lap.
Sime highlights from the doc:
12:49 – Feral children trying Ogilvie’s patience
16:11 – Two young actors doing a proper job of sending up the entire production
21:20 – Chief Mechanic Blackfinger Thomas
24:19 – Rodney the Camel
35:48 – Tina explaining George’s directing style
41:42 – Tina Turner saying that shooting Beyond Thunderdome was the greatest thing she’d done in her entire life? It’s hard to understand but I’m pretty sure that’s what she says.
Of all the things wrong with this movie, Tina is not one of them. She’s excellent, she looks great, and she does it all in a 70 pound chainmail dress. She’s also in the part of the movie that works so that helps. I have no idea what Bruce Spence is doing here. Don’t get me wrong I’m happy to see him, but I think he’s playing a different character? He has a different character name – I guess you can’t be the gyrocopter pilot without a gyrocopter – then when he and Max finally meet, they don’t seem to know each other. Made me kind of sad. And his teeth are fixed! Which means if he is the same character, he somehow managed to find an effective whitening treatment in the wastes, a nearly impossible thing to do even in these pre-apocalyptic times.
The final 15 minutes of Beyond Thunderdome are a return to form. We get back into some dune buggies, and chase down what can only be called a Mad Max train. It’s fun and becomes the thing you didn’t know you were waiting for. This is where Miller’s team excels and I think they know it. It’s why they make the same movie over and over. It’s why Fury Road rocks so hard, it’s all this. It’s all vehicles and mad stunts set in a beautifully decorated world. The first hour and change of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome proves the point of the last 15 minutes; stay on the road, Max.
tl;dw Tibbets loved it.
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