Review of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) by Movie G — 23 Aug 2011

Well now we got a third Mad Max. I wasn't a fan of the first one, but I loved the second one, and this one sort of sits right in between them. It's not really unenjoyable, but it's cheezy, over the top, and sort of rehashes the plot of the second movie.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is about, once again, Mad Max, this time not doing quite as well. He's lost his car, his equipment, his dog, he's kind of lost everything to help him survive. He comes upon a place called Bartertown where he claims his stuff is, but he is soon exiled. He then finds himself in the middle of a group of chid warriors trying to get to the city, but he has to help them go through Bartertown first.

The final third of this movie really is identical to The Road Warrior though. You've got all these kids trying to escape in a plane, Max in a truck being to decoy, lots of intense car chases, it's not an exact copy but I guess they say if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

Mel Gibson returns as Max, and this time he actually has more than 15 lines. In fact he talks a great deal. It's nice to see his character get a little more developed, but at the same time it doesn't quite feel like the same character. The only other real big character we get is the leader of Bartertown, played by Tina Turner. Now what the hell is Tina Turner doing in this movie? I can understand that this was the "Americanized" Mad Max movie, but she sticks right out when everybody else is Australian. She's also incredibly over the top and just plain silly. On a side note, did anyone else think that the pilot in this movie was the same pilot from The Road Warrior? I did, but apparently he isn't!

The film does bring back a lot of the great stuff from the older movies. The desert is still as barren and creepy looking as ever, the enemy renegades are still just as terrifying, the car chases and action scenes are still brilliantly shot, but the one question I have is what was the point of this movie?

The Road Warrior had one of my favourite endings ever, you had the narrorator saying "And we never saw him again" and there was that amazing, sweeping shot of Max standing on the highway. I thought this was a perfect ending to the series. It closed out the character, it still left you with a little mystery of what would happen to him, but my imagination came up with more interesting stuff than this movie, and I'm sure everybody else's did aswell, which is nice because everybody can take it where they want, but unfortunately the studios just had to cash in on the success.

This movie really sort of bothers me. It doesn't seem like it should be a Mad Max movie, and I think it would be better if it wasn't, but you're constantly reminded that it is, and George Miller clearly was trying to put a little bit of his vision into what the American studios deemed acceptible, but why didn't they just make this movie, and let him make his own, proper Mad Max, or preferably no more Mad Max movies? Maybe this was the movie he wanted to make, I'm not sure, but with Mad Max 4 on the way now, it seems like I'll never get that perfect ending I always wanted.

George Miller and other director George Ogilvie did do a solid job with this movie. The whole movie looks great, from the camerawork to the sets, the costumes and effects, it's technically fantastic, and Miller's script is more fleshed out than it was for the other two films, but all this isn't enough to save this movie.

Unfortunately Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is just typical, cheezy, 80s crap. Just the Thunderdome sequence itself, as cool as it's choreographed, is just dumb. Having the host and a wheel to deside your fate, the big light-up sign, it's way too over the top for a series that used to, or should have, prided itself in it's lonely atmoshpere.

All in all though, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome isn't a terrible movie. I still find it more watchable than the first, and for what it is it's a great movie, but it just doesn't feel enough like a Mad Max movie to please casual fans of the series like myself.