Bydey-bye childhood memories.
It hurts me to say this, but after re watching Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome recently for the 8 or 9th time, and a little over 20 years since first seeing it, I finally realized what many have long held to be true: it kinda sucks.
It hurts me a little to say it too. Well actually it hurts a lot since so many of my earliest movie-watching emotions are tied up in the Max trilogy. Not only that, but I've foolishly believed all this time that the Max trilogy is one of the few film series to avoid fatally succumbing to the sequel law of diminishing returns. Don't get me wrong, it's always been my least favourite of the three, but I never believed that it was in any way a shitty film or did an outright disservice to the Max mythology. Now I'm not so sure.
Right off the bat it opens with a really crappy Tina Turner song over the credits. No, not the hit single "We Don't Need Another Hero" just some other song. I realize that its been 25 years since the films release and it's a little unfair to judge something so susceptible to the ravages of time, but that's not what I mean. The tone of the song, the style of it, is so at odds with the Max universe that it would've sucked just as much in 1985 as it does today. It's the opening song of the movie and the filmmakers put it there to let me know what kind of movie I'm about to watch. And aside from the themed lyrics, this Tina song told me I was about to watch a thriller starring Cher and Debra Winger. Not MAD FUCKING MAX.
So why did they open the movie with this song? Could it be for any other reason than to set the dramatic tone? Could it be that they signed a major pop star to not only act in the film but provide its soundtrack and then felt obliged to conform to some synergistic pressures? Angling on behalf of the ageing Turner for a Grammy or something? I think so. And its this oddly unnecessary pairing, signaled right away in the credits, that starts me to thinking that maybe my 7 year old self was an idiot for liking this movie.
Immediately following the credits, things get about 10% shittier when we first see Max and he's driving camels instead of a suped-up cool-as-fuck car primed for apocalyptic murder. (ok, admittedly I think its a little cool that Max has to settle for camels instead of a car, but you get what I'm saying). From the camels we quickly get to Bartertown with very little fussing and this is the thing I find cool about the potential in the Max series: he's a nomad, he wanders, stumbling into situations that become the basis for films. Like Bill Bixby walking the country in The Incredible Hulk TV show, the Max series had an episodic qaulity to it and could've conceivably kept going as long as Max kept wandering from place to place. Max is never looking for anything beyond the days task of survival, there is no grand inter-connected quest for him to get bogged down in. He just wanders and stumbles across the best and worst that humanity has to offer. Unfortunately for us, in Thunderdome, Max wanders into the lamest part of the wasteland.
Bartertown is cool and all and seems to fit nicely in the Maxiverse, but after a few scenes its half-baked underpinnings begin to show through. Like the central conflict between, I don't know, Upper Bartertown and Lower Bartetown. Upper Bartertown, (anything above ground) is run by Tina Turner wearing a chain mail dress that shows off her distractingly hard breast implants hanging from her bony chest. Lower Bartertown is run by Master-Blaster, a muscleman-midget duo who have apparently gotten quite uppity. Turner contracts Max to kill Master-Blaster in a Thuderdome cage match, cementing her position as true lord of Bartertown. Apparently, she and everyone else in her inner circle feel that this 5'8 "Raggedy-man" has what all the other hulking, murderous wasteland maniacs standing around, don't.
The plan is set, Max cases his target, and all the while, I counted a hundred different opportunities to simply walk up to Master-Blaster and shoot them with a sawed off. Ok, so the motivation for Max's big thunderdome debut is a little weak, but the fight is cool right? Enh, yes and no. Flying around on rubber harnesses feels a little American Gladiator, but there's weapons and accidental spectator deaths so I guess it gets a pass. The outcome of this battle leads to a double-cross of sorts for Max and a spin of the wheel to choose his punishment or redemption ("Break the deal! Spin the wheel!") which also feels a little tacky, but whatever.
Max ends up tied and blindfolded on a horse sent into the scorching heat of the desert. This cruel twist of fate via the Wheel leads of course to the most contentious section of the movie. Max is rescued and nursed back to health by a tribe of children living in a bountiful and lush valley, unspoiled by the typical ravages of the wasteland. They wear tribal loin cloths and furs, augmented with bits and pieces of the downed aircraft that landed them there. They say things like, "bydey-bye" and "pocksaclipse" and "high-scrapers" and all the while Maurice Jarre's score devolves into ebullient strings and cloying cues that scream "YOU ARE WATCHING CHILDREN, CHILDREN STILL RETAIN THEIR INNOCENCE AND HOPE DESPITE THE POCKSACLIPSE". Director George Miller (who is still a god by the way) inexplicably decides to abandon the raw, brutal edge of the previous two films and drop his sullen Clint Eastwood-esque Max into the centre of Peter Pan. There is no upside to this.
Miller, like so many franchise pilots before and after him, decides to throw away everything cool or essential about his property and needlessly inject it with antithetical components. Essentially, Miller the entertainer gives the people what they didn't know they didn't want out of a Mad Max film. In truth, Thunderdome ends up feeling like a Max movie directed by Stephen Spielberg. The first half of the movie in Bartertown feels like a much more pop version of a post-apocalypse than in Road Warrior. And the Peter Pan second half feels like a direct influence on Spielberg's Hook and I don't think I really need to go into why that isn't good.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome seems like an answer to a question that no one ever asked, "What if we took The Road Warrior and subtracted the car chases and action and added more kids?" In the end, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome has little to do with what audiences came to expect from Mad Max, and doesn't even spend that much time inside the Thunderdome. I guess that's what the "beyond" part is for. I would've preferred to see Max turned into a prisoner of Bartertown, forced to become an unwilling gladiator inside Thunderdome until he basically figures out a way to bust out and get inside a car and drive it real fast. My 7 year-old self didn't seem to mind the Peter Pan posse, but now that I'm 30, I definitely feel jipped out of a true to sequel to the mind-blowing Road Warrior.
I have nothing against Tina Turner or children, but neither have a place in a Mad fucking Max movie. This movie was part of the rot that was the corporatization of the 80's. Mad Max III was a motherfucking date movie. Boys and young men need their warrior heroes unsullied by date movie sensibilities. Mad Max was awesome. Mad Max had a real reason to be crazy, more real than uncool parents, homework and girls you couldn’t get. If Mad Max I was about being pushed over the edge of the abyss, Mad Max II was about landing at the bottom of the abyss. But Mad Max III was about what? Saving the children? In '85? Everyone knew that was Michael Jackson's job. Like buying a Bowie album in that decade, Thunderdome was yet another 80’s experience that resulted in disappointment at best, and betrayal at worst. And Max was barely even mad, pissed-off at best. Turns out we did need another hero.
ReplyDeleteThe one gift of Mad Max III to my life, is that my daughter's hair when un-battened resembles the desert-do's of those feral children, and provokes spontaneous outburts of 'we don't need another hero', which is a good pop song but one that doesn't have a place in Mad fucking Max. I think now would be the prime time for a back-to-basics Mad Max movie. Gibson – cantankerous, drunk, racist, pugnacious, weathered – is in the perfect place to revisit this character.
Keep up the great work, Mr. Onions.