Vroom vroom, it’s Burl, here to review one
of those Mad Max pictures that we all love so well! Now, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not the best of them, and in fact is
almost certainly the worst! It’s certainly the most off-brand, as there’s
hardly any car racing in it at all, relative to the other entries at least!
But for all that, I’m fond of the picture!
Certainly the scenes in the thunderdome itself are dynamic and exciting, and
what chase material there is toward the end is darned enjoyable! Plus we have a
dynamic performance from Tina Turner, looking great in a chain mail dusset, and
a fine twilight appearance from the great and small Angelo Rossitto, from Smokey Bites the Dust and The Dark!
The problem really is that the movie
engages too freely in this trend known as “world building,” and while this is
always assumed to be a positive and worthwhile effort in series pictures, I
don’t myself believe it necessarily is, and moreover I feel it can be a real
drag on the stories they’re trying so hard to expand upon! I prefer Max and his
world to be a sort of abstraction, I think! He and his stories should be simple
and suggest much!
I guess what it comes down to in this case
is that, whereas the gangs in Mad Max movies (headed by The Lord Humongous in The Road Warrior and The Immortan Joe in
Mad Max: Fury Road) usually claim to
be a civilizing influence while in fact operating as neo-fascists, Turner’s
Aunty Entity, and her pop-up city of Bartertown, genuinely are a step forward
in this post-apocalyptic wasteland! This undercuts their menace a great deal,
as does, incidentally, the picture’s PG-13 rating!
The movie opens with Max caravanning across
the desert when suddenly Bruce Spence (playing a post-pockyclypse aeronaut
just as he did in The Road Warrior,
but a different post-pockyclypse
aeronaut) swoops down out of nowhere and steals all his stuff! Max ends up in
Bartertown, meets Tina and the Master Blaster (which is Rossitto piggybacking
on a big guy’s shoulders), and some terrific side characters played by Frank
Thring and Edwin Hodgeman! After his big thunderdome fight, Max busts a deal
and faces the wheel, which decrees that he be gulaged out into the wasteland!
Ha ha, this involves plunking him on a horse and sticking a Big Boy mask on his
head for some reason! Anyway, he comes across a civilization of children who
live in a verdant crevasse, then comes into conflict with the Bartertownians
again, which leads to the final chase, and Angry Anderson hanging off a
speeding train and dodging ironbars! Ha ha!
On this most recent viewing of the movie,
which I watched with my son, I was not as scornful of the kids as I had been
previously! Before I’d considered them no better than Ewoks, but now, with a
child sitting beside me, I could appreciate their power and how desperately
they cling to storytelling as a way to maintain their humanity! I especially
liked the 2.35:1 ratio portable frame they use to help dramatize their origin
story!
So it’s no action classic like Road Warrior, and it tries too hard to
situate Max in a plausible environment (the plausibility of which is undercut
by the array of pointless, arbitrary accoutrements that would in truth be low
priorities for apocalypse survivors), but Mad
Max: Beyond Thunderdome has on the other hand a wealth of entertaining
details, a terrific score from Maurice “Dreamscape”
Jarre, fantastic photography from Dean Semler, a nice dollop of wit, and some
miniature model work at the end! I give it two and a half Angry Andersons!
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