Bruce Spence, the gyro captain from The Road Warrior, reappears, along with a child that looks a great deal like the Feral Kid from the same movie, but, apparently, they’re supposed to be different characters here, despite Spence’s character also being a pilot, here named Jedediah. Tina Turner proves to be a nice addition, though it is a disappointment that the role is relatively skimpy for someone with such a striking on-screen personality. In fact, the film wasn’t intended to be a Mad Max film at all, about a group of children waiting for a savior Miller and co-screenwriter Hayes decided that Max could be that guy, and retooled it to fit. Instead, the movie plays like a children’s fable, mixing elements of Barrie’s “Peter Pan” with Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, then shoehorning in a Road Warrior-regurgitating climax with marauding vehicles against a truck running tire-less on a train track, just to keep the Mad Max purists from claiming a shark had been jumped several times during the writing process. No grisly dismemberments, no rapes, and not much true sense of dread for a world gone mad. Following his ordeal, Max manages to make his way to a desert oasis full of children awaiting the return of adults, and who see Max as a messianic figure named Captain Walker, foretold to come back to them and take them to the fabled Tomorrow-morrow Land with his magic.īeyond Thunderdome is a decidedly less violent film than its predecessors, going for a PG-13 rating, rather than the original’s hard R. The town is overseen by Aunty (Tina Turner), though it is really run by a dwarf named Master (Angelo Rossito), who gets into a scuffle with Max, where the only resolution anyone will abide by is to battle to the death in a caged arena called ‘Thunderdome’. In this film, set a few years after the events of The Road Warrior, Max’s nomadic travels lead him to Bartertown, which, as the name implies, is the methane-fueled hub where anyone can go to exchange something they have for something they need. In terms of my Blu-ray collection, to satirize one of the famous lines of the script, two Mad Max films still enter my player, and one film I leave on the shelf. While there’s a certain admiration one can have for co-writer/co-director George Miller for trying to defy expectations by taking the series in a direction no one would have expected, he also manages to take it to places few really wanted the franchise to go. It’s the first to be funded, at least in part, by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.), and that also means there will be a lot of corporate suits trying to provide input on where they think the series should go to be profitable. The third in the original Mad Max trilogy, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome represents the most expensive film in the post-apocalyptic series, as well as (arguably) the least satisfying.
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