MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME You fools! You DO need another hero! Mock me if you will, but I'm way past caring; Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is by far my favorite of the series, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time too. It's got all of the action of the second film, the humanism of the first (used more, uh, humanistically this time), and more imagination, smarts, vision, and sheer cinematic inspiration than both combined. Needless to say, a lot of people accuse this movie of being this series' "big Hollywood mistake", or something. Not that there are no mistakes here; I can't say I like the part where the kids run amok in Bartertown, and the hit single "We Don't Need Another Hero" just makes no sense at all on at least two levels. (on the other hand, "One Of The Living" has this great metal chorus that could've come from Ronnie James Dio) If you think things were looking rough for Australia in The Road Warrior, things are even worse here. Water ominously has to be checked with a Geiger counter, and up until it's spelled out for us about halfway through the movie, there are several offhand references to a possible nuclear conflict. (again, it's hard to say if only Australia looks like this or it's a worldwide situation, but the latter seems more likely when Max has to tell the kids why they can't get back to civilization) Max (Mel Gibson again) wanders the wastes with his pack of camels, until they're stolen from him by an opportunistic pilot (Bruce Spence, returning) who doesn't recognize him; when they're re-united near the end of the film, it's rather ambiguous as to whether they recognize each other from the events of the previous film. So he has to continue on foot, which first leads him to an attempted re-starting of civilization called Bartertown where he becomes a pawn in the wrangling between the two rival political figures, and later, an isolated tribe of abandoned children, who mistake him for their messiah, who I might add is more real to them than Jesus has been to anyone in two thousand years, since they actually knew the real guy before he (presumably) died. Tina Turner plays Aunty Entity, the mayor (Baroness? Empress?) of Bartertown, who started it from scratch when it became obvious that civilization wasn't going to re-start on its own. I'm usually wary about singers trying to act, but not anywhere near as wary as actors trying to sing, and Turner holds her own just fine. (curiously, another singer - Angry Anderson from the Australian band Rose Tattoo - shows up as Aunty Entity's seemingly indestructible chief thug, Ironbar) She's not really a villain; it's probably a little harsh to even call her a prudent megalomaniac, since if you started up a project like this, wouldn't you do whatever was necessary to keep it from falling into the hands of a bully who'd only twist it for his own purposes? The worst thing she does is kill an unknown number of strangers in "the audition", which might not make her a "nice lady", but is hardly grounds for true villainy by this series' standards. She gets a few fun scenes where she gets to address crowds, and she does it in the same hypercaffeinated style you see in her live performances, and one-on-one, she's almost as melodramatic as the Toecutter. Turner's only bothersome misstep is in the climactic chase scene when she steps onto the train; why did she do that? This bully is Master-Blaster, so named because it consists of the diminutive genius Master (Angelo Rossitto) riding on the shoulders of the diving-masked hulk Blaster (Paul Larsson). Together, they run Underworld, a smelly but crucial energy enterprise which produces methane from pigshit, and they extort public declarations of allegiance out of Entity through energy embargoes. If you're wondering who would work in such a place willingly, the answer is no one; that's where the prisoners (who otherwise seem to be allowed to wander the city freely) work, such as Pig Killer (Robert Grubb), who takes his life sentence in stride because "down here life's two, three years". Once the lone property of the marauding gangs, funky names (and fashions, if you want; half of the men don't even bother wearing shirts) are now the norm for just about everybody. Characters with names like Aunty Entity, Ironbar, Master, Blaster, Blackfinger, Doctor Dealgood, Pig Killer, and The Collector, surely must have once been known as "Nancy" or "Bernard". Just think, all we'd need is a nuclear holocaust and EVERYBODY would be calling me the Tyrannorabbit. (shakes fist) AND THEY'D TREMBLE AT THE SOUND OF MY NAME!!! Anyway, as Entity points out, before the downfall of civilization, she was nobody, but afterward, "nobody had the chance to be somebody" - all of these larger-than-life characters that inhabit Bartertown were once just ordinary people. Now, they're whoever they want to be, having found a new kind of freedom from some of the more individualism-murdering aspects of the old civilization. The dialogue is usually so abrupt and punchy that it almost feels like a poetry slam. Even Bartertown's laws come in rhyme (I find amusingly telling the line "Do you think I don't know the law? Wasn't it ME who wrote it?"), though Aunty Entity doesn't appear to be one for consistency in sentencing. The only time sentences start taking on actual structure is when people are making speeches, such as the wonderful Dr. Dealgood (Edwin Hodgeman) speech at the beginning of the Thunderdome scene. A LOT of science fiction movies through the years have tried to give us a "futuristic" version of the English language, usually by slipping in a few stupid-sounding future-swears, or some slang words for things which haven't been invented yet (books tend to be downright embarrassing about this). MMBT is the ONLY such movie to have succeeded. It's the only such movie to have even come within light-years of succeeding. I mean, outside of this movie, it has just never worked, ever. And this movie succeeds at it TWICE - once with the budding civilization of Bartertown, and separately with the children out in the desert, though granted, the second sounds like a tweaked Australian dialect. The second half of the film where Max finds himself among the tribe of marooned children is admittedly not as successful as the first half, but it has enough great moments to carry me through smiling every time, and manages to bring Max full-circle into re-discovering the humanity he'd mostly abandoned but, as demonstrated by the end of the Thunderdome fight, couldn't leave entirely behind. While unknown years have passed between this and its predecessors, the children present Max with the first chance we see him get to indulge himself in the kind of unconditional heroism that he'd once tried to make a career out of. And he snaps up that chance, as soon as he can. (even Spence's pilot again demonstrates that he can't turn down a chance to be heroic) The question Mad Max posed is given a satisfactory enough answer to close the series out on; there are plenty of heroes, if they're given a chance. For that matter, maybe this film turns that question around, and asks whether there are any villains anymore. Aunty Entity is hardly a villain, as I'd said; Master-Blaster may be an asshole, but again, he's no Toecutter, or even Lord Humongous on the villain-o-meter. Maybe the point of this one is that people don't need villains to be heroes; adversaries, maybe, but true villainy is different. Sure enough, this movie's detractors' most common complaint about it is the children. I'm not sure how you could possibly handle a storyline like this and keep EVERYBODY happy; there are always going to be some people who think the kids were too cute, even if they're all bleeding constantly from some horrible jungle disease. And, yeah, they could've been handled a little better here, such as with the silly scene where they run around causing havoc in Underworld. But for the most part, these kids are not simply cute distractions; they've had to live an extremely hard life without adult guidance, and the script treats them accordingly; they get killed, pregnant, ordered to their likely doom into the desert, and sucked down into the sand just like anybody else. (do these sinkholes really exist? I remember being profoundly disturbed by the notion when I first saw them in an episode of Manimal.) (hey, I was eleven, and scared enough of the beach as it was because five minutes in the sun, to this day, turns me into charcoal briquette) Max doesn't coddle them either; he's forthright with them about why their isolated canyon is where they're going to have to live their lives, and he makes no attempt to return to the tribe a VERY young boy who later follows him out into the deathly desert ("He holds his own"). And since he knows better than anyone what lies in wait in the desert, he's not above punching out a teenaged girl to prevent her from setting off. It's funny how MMBT contains THREE plot elements I usually despise: the we've-got-to-stretch-this-out-to-feature-length gladiatorial fight sequence, the "silver bullet", and the messiah prophecy. The reason I usually hate these things is because they're usually used so mundanely; the fight sequences usually ARE just to stretch the movie out to feature length, the "silver bullet" usually dispatches what it's meant to be used against with little fuss, and the prophecies usually unfold exactly as they'd been written and interpreted. I mean, how boring and brainless can you get? MMBT is smart enough to turn things around a little; the fight sequence is quite integral to the plot (not to mention one of the most unusual and interesting fight sequences ever filmed), the "silver bullet" works only up until a point, and Max ISN'T the messiah the children are expecting. Sure, he becomes a different kind (and then, only to some of them), but that's pretty neat too. MMBT gives us the beginnings of a new civilization, and with civilization comes the luxury to indulge in things more survival-oriented people often don't have the time or resources for, like bars, arm-wrestling contests, and unconditional affection. Even the refinery workers didn't seem to have any real love for each other in The Road Warrior, just an understanding of their interdependence. Here, for example, Master-Blaster is at first cast as a villain, but it soon becomes clear that there is a strong, loving bond between these two characters. Master is usually heard talking in short, almost stupidly simple sentences, until later on when he can no longer afford to, and we realize that he'd simply been breaking down his speech to a level Blaster could easily understand, even in situations which don't even really involve Blaster but are merely observed by him. (call it "dumbing it down" if you will, but teaching Blaster to improve his sentence comprehension isn't useful for Master or anyone else, and he's not going to improve his grasp of the language on his own) There are a few logical quibbles; for example, what exactly are they feeding the pigs? Why does Ironbar catch almost all the way up to the train while pumping one of those pump-it-up-and-down rail thingies, only to jump onto a car at the last second? And why did ALL of the adults go off with twenty kids, years before? But overall, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, despite its rather clunky title and annoying, attached hit single, has burrowed its way into my heart the way few movies ever have or are likely to do again. George Miller chose to work with a second director, George Ogilvie, with one of them handling the action scenes and the other, the rest; I have no idea which did which. It is, certainly, less dark, more upbeat in tone than its predecessors, but that is as it should be, seeing as how it's more about the birth of a new civilization than the death of the old one, and I know which subject I find more interesting. The new world may be corrupt, but it doesn't seem so awful compared to so much stupid shit we have to live with now. Carrot Top wouldn't last five minutes in Bartertown, so how bad can it be? BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE