Mad Max : Au-delà du dôme du tonnerre

Why why why did someone think it was a good idea to fill Max Max 3 with a bunch of annoying kids? Its like half way through the movie the crew was switched and they thought they were making Oliver!

Such a horrible way to end a most amazing trilogy.

Max goes from road warrior to babysitter.

Still any Max is better than no Max.

Who could not love this movie? It's got more imagination than five average postbomb flicks, incredible visual design, enough alternate societies with enough backstory apiece for three more movies (including an aboriginal clan who look like Peter Pan's Lost Boys and speak a dialect you'll be copying for days after you see it), car chases, amazing costumes, one of the most original death-duel sequences ever, Tina Turner, *and* Mel Gibson! I mean, goddamn, what more do you want? I personally want another movie just set in Bartertown AND a movie that follows what happens to Anna Goanna and her clan, and they don't even have to have Mel Gibson in them - that's how rich I think the imaginative depth of this movie is. I like it more every time I see it. Genuinely something special.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was a bigger production than its predecessor: Road Warrior. I still think I like Road Warrior better. The nemesis was more nemesisee and Mad Max himself was in more peril.

Beyond Thunderdome was lighter as far as mood (which the presence of children may have caused). This time the nemesis was the incomparable Tina Turner as Aunty Enmity, but I couldn't bring myself to hate her. The character wasn't a real hatemonger and... it's Tina Turner. She was the Beyonce before Beyonce.

One thing I'll give Beyond Thunderdome over Road Warrior is the theme song. It's top ten in my book. In 2002, for Spider-Man, Nickelback sang: "they say that a hero can save us, I'm not going to stand here and wait." Well, Tina Turner laid the groundwork for that in '85 when she said: "We don't need another hero." And she knocked that song out of the park.

When I first saw Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, I felt disappointed. It was a letdown from its amazing predecessor. I knew its reputation as an unworthy sequel, but I still realized there was something good about it, something I had never heard from other people's points of view.

It wasn't until some time later when I watched the series a second time that I noticed what it was.

Those who think MMBT is not as exciting as The Road Warrior would be right. But those that think MMBT sucks because it is not as exciting as The Road Warrior would be missing the point. What makes MMBT a worthy sequel is its way of establishing a greater scope of the setting the series takes place in. The dredges of civilization were what set the stage for the series in the original Mad Max. The barren world of desert wastelands and sparse outposts take the idea of a post-apocalyptic world one step further in The Road Warrior. A squalid setting such as Bartertown and an oasis where the tribe of children lived in MMBT once again builds on the elaborate fantasy that makes the series as popular as it is. The final, chilling realization of just what became of civilization in the closing moments of the movie are more than enough explanation as to why the the world the viewer sees in the trilogy is the way it is.

I was too young when I first saw MMBT to understand this. It wouldn't be until I saw it again some time later, with more movie-viewing experience under my belt that I realized that what makes Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome tick is not action set pieces, but a far more subtle approach of atmospheric setting.

This will be silly and disjointed for those who found the second mean and rampaging. Spielberg had intervened in popular imagination, so there's a kid friendly dash of Indiana Jones along with some Lone Ranger. But from Mad Max I come away with two things, the narrative edges of world we discover and the cinematic action of the chase.

I don't take to the Bartertown portion of the film, it may be closer to Road Warrior in spirit but all I see here is rushed spectacle intended for a boorish audience, contraptions. We do see a bit more of the Max world around this place but not in any way I care for. It feels like this part was bolted on when they decided to turn a separate script into a Mad Max movie.

No, I find myself oddly captivated by the Lord of the Flies portion. There are glimmers of magic for me in the way the narrative of something that crashed from the skies one day has been preserved in the minds of kids. The way it's revealed through a screen that frames remnants of half- remembered story, the chorus of awestruck kids for whom all of this has profound meaning.

It does open up a window to a whole swathe of Max world but this time with deep feeling, as myth the kids have vowed to keep in memory and bide their time for. Sure, we are in Goonies territory and again in the end with the city, but there's hushed yearning here, an almost Biblical kind.

The rest is in the big chase, a train this time, briefer than usual and over before it really exhilarates, as if more by obligation than real affinity for it. They would eventually build a whole other film around it, extending it to an entire circus around the rig, but that would have to wait for 30 years.