Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
★ — Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
By 1985, the Mad Max franchise had already established itself as one of the most distinctive exports Australian cinema had produced. Mad Max arrived in 1979 as a low-budget, high-energy revenge thriller that announced George Miller as a serious talent, and Mad Max 2 followed two years later to considerable acclaim, refining the post-apocalyptic road warrior concept into something leaner and more mythic. Beyond Thunderdome was the third instalment, and arrived with a noticeably larger profile than its predecessors: a bigger studio push from Kennedy Miller Productions, a pop superstar in a major acting role, and a tagline that promised the grandest adventure yet. Whether that promise was kept is, to put it gently, a matter of some debate.
The film carries a co-directing credit, shared between George Miller and George Ogilvie. Miller, who had shepherded Max from the beginning, took on Ogilvie as a collaborator here, with Ogilvie handling much of the dramatic work on set while Miller focused on the action sequences. The result is a production with two distinct tonal registers: a gladiatorial spectacle set within a ramshackle desert city called Bartertown, run by the formidable Aunty Entity, and a second act that shifts into considerably softer territory involving a group of feral children living in an isolated wilderness. The film runs at 107 minutes and carries the kind of production design that was expensive-looking for its era, polished but unremarkable when set against what the earlier films achieved on far less money.
Mel Gibson returns as Max, a role he had already made his own across two films, and he brings the same weathered, laconic quality that suited the character well. Gibson's screen presence was substantial by this point, and he would carry that same energy into later work, including the Lethal Weapon series. Tina Turner plays Aunty Entity, Bartertown's ruler, a casting choice that was clearly as much about her pop cultural moment as her acting credentials. Turner had just released her comeback album and was arguably the biggest musical name on the planet in 1985. Helen Buday appears as Savannah Nix, the leader of the children's community, while Bruce Spence and Angelo Rossitto round out a supporting cast that gives the film some texture around its edges.
Pig shit. It's ridiculous. It might as well have had some puppets thrown in. The first Mad Max movie was a little weird but this was just total and complete shit. The bungee gladiator arena bit alone made us go "what? Why?" Then the Peter Pan kids show up and disney up the whole thing. I don't know how so many people came together and not one said "Hey, maybe we should make this good?" Tina Turner sucks ass.
And honestly, it's hard to argue with any of that. There's a version of this film that could have worked, where the arena sequences and the wilder world-building felt earned rather than thrown together, but Beyond Thunderdome never quite gets there. The tonal lurching between a grimy, vaguely threatening Bartertown and what starts to feel like a Saturday morning children's adventure is a genuine structural problem, not just a matter of taste. For me, the earlier films worked because they kept things grounded in something recognisably human, even within their outlandish premises. This one loses that thread early and never picks it back up. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a film is that a lot of talented, experienced people got in a room and still managed to produce something that just doesn't work. Beyond Thunderdome is that film.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1985 | Watched: 2025-05-03
Trailer
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