With the release of Mad Max, George Miller established himself as an exciting new talent on the global stage, and with Mad Max 2 he proved he could not only replicate his success but expand upon it and improve every aspect of his craft. These skills and the success of his cult action classics made Miller and his producing partner Byron Kennedy in-demand talents as Hollywood began to take notice of their little violent road films. This gave Miller a job on Twilight Zone: The Movie, an anthology adaptation of the classic television series with five segments each directed by established and up-and-coming directors, Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Joe Dante (my beloved), and George Miller, who took on the role of modernising the iconic episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in a masterpiece of direction that stands head and shoulders above the film’s other segments. It was clear that Miller had the juice, and Hollywood took notice as Miller began to make connections and build relationships with Hollywood directors, actors, and producers, but before Miller began his American film career, he felt it was worth taking one more trip to the Wasteland with a third Mad Max film: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
This film would eventually become the aforementioned Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but the road to its release was long and laden with tragedy as Miller’s longtime friend, Mad Max co-creator and producing partner Byron Kennedy tragically died in a helicopter accident in 1983. Miller was reluctant to continue this third film without him but eventually decided to continue with the project alongside a co-director, George Ogilvie, whom he had worked with on an Australian miniseries. Miller, who had the most experience, took on most of the action sequences, and Ogilvie took on much of the dialogue and connecting sequences.
The mixture of Miller’s grief, the loss of Kennedy, and a second voice coming from the director’s chair mean that Thunderdome has a reputation as the black sheep of the series, the odd middle child that connects the franchise’s early, DIY B-movies, and the hyper-stylised epics that would later come with Fury Road and Furiosa. This is certainly true, Thunderdome is a muddled film, one that often feels like three strong story ideas stapled together instead of a single sturdy narrative. Miller’s experience in Hollywood is evident with a more sanitised sequel that feels more in line with the Hollywood films of its era. Most often, if someone were ranking their favourite Mad Max movies, Thunderdome would be at the bottom, but this film doesn’t deserve to be skipped over, and there’s a lot more in here that furthers the ideas Miller has been wanting to explore and expand on what a Mad Max movie could even be.
Beyond Thunderdome starts once again with Max Rockatansky, our wandering road warrior now without a car and rocking some funky long hair as he arrives in the trading outpost of Bartertown looking to retrieve the remains of his stolen V8 Interceptor. To get back his gear, Max teams with Bartertown’s leader, Aunty Entity, played by the late great Tina Turner, to gain complete control of the city by taking out her competitor, Master Blaster in the Thunderdome, a gladiatorial arena that refuses to adhere to gravity or really any rules whatsoever. Failing to execute Master Blaster, Max is betrayed and cast out into the desert, where he comes upon a tribe of children who have survived a plane crash and now live in a small oasis, protected from the outside world. The children believe Max to be Captain Walker, their long-lost pilot who will take them to safety in one of the country’s great cities. Together, Max and the children head back to Bartertown and get transport to Sydney to live freely.
That’s a far denser plot synopsis than the first two films, which could be summed up in a sentence each. Mad Max is a story of a lawman being pushed to the brink and beyond it by a group of violent bikers, and The Road Warrior is the story of a man finding his sense of humanity in defence of a small community. Thunderdome, though, plays by much different rules. The third film in the series is far more ambitious and seeks to broaden the scope of the world and explore more expansive ideas. At its core, Beyond Thunderdome is a film about the future more than any other Mad Max film; Thunderdome is about how society develops, how it governs itself, and how it makes way for the younger generations.
It’s clear that a lot happened between the events of Mad Max and its first sequel, with the decaying civilisation turning into a frontier of savagery and barbarism. The gap between The Road Warrior and Thunderdome seems even more expansive, with evidence of nuclear war and new civilisations and communities that have risen up to bring order to the wasteland.
The idea of civilisation and the ways in which humanity tries to structure itself is key to Thunderdome, seen prominently in the contrast between Bartertown and the Oasis of the young survivors. The introduction of Bartertown is one of the great highlights of the Mad Max saga, with massive, ever-expanding sets that seem to stretch out far beyond the confines of the camera’s lens and which imply a long and difficult history. Once again, we see Miller’s eye for detail and his uncanny ability to convey information, story, and character through environment and costume, now on a much grander scale with greater budgetary support from Hollywood studios. Bartertown is a far cry from the tiny oil refinery of The Road Warrior, but slivers of that film’s iconography remain. In the first Mad Max, police officers are clad in black leather. That same leather is worn by the gang of the Lord Humungous – marauders made up of lawmen and civil servants. And here in Thunderdome, the enforcement of Bartertown are clad in the same feathers, hockey gear, and mohawks that you can see on the gang of The Road Warrior. The message is clear, this is a decaying land governed by the powerful and the self-interested, and the law has changed.
Through Bartertown, we see a complete picture of how the wasteland has evolved, how it has adapted, and how its inhabitants seek to make sense of it. This is where we meet the town’s battling rulers, Aunty Entity and Master Blaster, who each claim to be the true rulers of their civilisation. Entity is played with great charisma by Tina Turner, who owns the screen whenever her presence graces it, and through her gravitas, we get a sense of Entity’s history and the trials she has undergone to make Bartertown what it is. She’s a woman who, above all else, seeks to bring structure to the wasteland, to bring things back to the way they were. But her structure is built on a lie. She doesn’t share her wealth, she hordes it in her ivory tower far above Master Blaster, who keeps the lights on with literal pig shit.
One of the great masterstrokes of this movie is its opening act which establishes Master Blaster as a fearsome, monster of fury and rage before pulling back the curtain to reveal victims, trapped beneath the weight of this new capitalist system. Everything in Bartertown is exceptional, with a clear, simple narrative and frames littered with the kind of detail that would come to define Fury Road.
Unfortunately, once Max is exiled and comes across the children, the film’s pacing takes a significant hit as our vagabond without a vehicle stumbles across the tribe of children. That’s not to say that the film’s second act is without merit because there’s still plenty to enjoy, and it continues to further the film’s ideas and thematic interests. Bartertown is the world of adults, full of greed and deceit. It is an attempt to make the world as they remember it, preserved in an effort to wrangle in the chaos. The oasis is the complete opposite. It’s the world of the young, of the coming generation, with their own rituals, priorities, and language. Their backstory is another great example of Miller’s knack for worldbuilding through detail, as it’s implied through their costumes and environment that these children were put onto a plane to escape the coming Nuclear war, a plane that obviously didn’t get to its destination. As such, these kids have no parents or much of a connection to the dead world they were born into, instead, they make their own world, their own language, their own culture, and customs. The Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 is positioned in many ways as the first child of the wasteland, and the kids of Thunderdome are a clear extension of that, a new generation struggling to find worth and meaning in the broken world they inherited.
All of these ideas are great and seamlessly expand upon concepts introduced in the first two films, but when watching, it’s hard not to feel like it misses the mark. For one, the kids and this whole middle section are indicative of the friendlier PG-13 tone that permeates the whole film, which can’t help but feel a bit out of place when the two films on either side of it are violent epics of revenge and savagery. Mad Max, at its core, is seen as a gritty R-rated action franchise, one of the best there is, and Thunderdome just isn’t that, and frankly just isn’t interested in being that. That’s part of why I enjoy it, but it’s hard not to miss the stripped-down, high-octane thrills the series is known for.
The biggest issue, though, is the motivations of the characters from this point on get lost in the shuffle. In The Road Warrior, it’s clear from the film’s very opening what Max wants: fuel to keep him mobile, to ensure that he can keep running forever. It’s simple, but it’s so effective, because the moment he rejects his goal and stands with the denizens of the oil refinery packs a real punch because we know he’s doing something selfless. Max in Thunderdome, though? I’m not really sure what he wants. In the first act it’s clear he just wants his stuff back, but once he meets the kids he seems content just staying there and even violently tries to force the kids to stay when they try to leave themselves. These muddled motivations become even more chaotic when Max takes the kids on a rescue mission to Bartertown, which kicks off the film’s admittedly tremendous third act. The film’s middle chunk lacks a lot of momentum, with no clear conflict that is driving the story and characters forward. It stinks because I can see a version where this would work a lot better, perhaps with Aunty Entity and the lowlives from Bartertown coming and invading the oasis, forcing the two would-be civilisations into conflict, the old world vs the new world. Instead, their conflict feels mostly incidental rather than the clash of ideals and generations the film seems to be aiming for.
So when Thunderdome’s vehicular mayhem finally kicks off with an elaborate chase on train tracks, it’s exciting but nowhere near as emotionally or thematically engaging as the other films in the series. Thankfully, I think all of the disparate pieces do start to fall into place in the film’s final few minutes in Max’s sole act of self-sacrifice up to this point as he gives himself up to save the kids and give them a future. It’s a great cathartic moment, a wonderful conclusion to the arc of the first three films, and a great distillation of Max as a character. In Mad Max, our hero willingly gives in to his baser primal instincts, in The Road Warrior, he manages to reclaim some of his humanity, and in Beyond Thunderdome he works to make a better future for others. While the films are largely not connected there is a clear throughline for Max’s character as a story of a man learning to be selfless and to have hope for a better future. One could never claim that Thunderdome was a concise film. It’s bloated, scattered and lacking specificity, but it’s also full of ideas and tries to expand on what a Mad Max film could really be. When talking about the Mad Max series as a whole, a lot of people tend to say that Fury Road is essentially a sequel to The Road Warrior, but Fury Road doesn’t happen without Thunderdome. The lessons learned here and the expanded societal allegory are crucial to the alchemy of that movie, and it deserves to be recognised, not just as an essential stepping stone, but as a damn fun time as well.