It’s so refreshing to see a franchise as weird, unique, and downright Australian as Mad Max endure throughout the decades. Beginning as a modest $400,000 (Australian) action thriller from director George Miller, the series has since endured on the back of Miller’s boundless imagination. Charting an apocalypse punctuated by over-the-top characters, souped-up motor vehicles, and more explosions than you can shake a boomstick at, the Mad Max franchise envisions a dirty, sleazy vision of the future that remains bleak, compelling, and entertainingly weird.
The original trilogy of films, made in the late 70s and early 80s and starring a young Mel Gibson, have their ups and downs: Some are slower-paced, and some are a bit too goofy for their own good. But they still established a subgenre of end-of-the-world films that emphasized roaring vehicles, shredding metal, and some of the most uniquely, perversely poetic dialogue this side of Shakespeare.
Then, of course, came Fury Road decades later to elevate the universe, Miller, and the pop culture consensus around the franchise to new heights of respectability and acceptance. Nearly a decade after that, Miller is back with a prequel to Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, another blood-soaked legend of torn limbs and busted carburetors that peers into the world beyond Max Rockatansky’s rear-view mirror. To that end, we’ve taken a look at each entry in the franchise — the cars, the villains, the silly names — and ranked each entry in turn. What a lovely day!
05. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
The Tell: After his camel-drawn vehicle is stolen by a pilot (Bruce Spence) and his young ward, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) gives chase and follows them to Bartertown, an erstwhile trading post run on pig-dung methane and run by the imperious Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). Before long, he’s wrapped up in an internal power play between Aunty and Master (Angelo Rossitto) over control of Bartertown, which leads him to gladiatorial fights, exile, and — strangely enough — a group of orphaned children surviving on the edge of the desert.
How Mad Is Max? Unlike some of his other installments, this version of Max feels comparatively sanded down. He’s still the grumbly lone wolf, but he’s far more willing to lead a group of children to salvation and stop to help the needy. He’s more of a reluctant dad figure than a wandering hero, especially in the film’s second half.
The Wasted Land: Bartertown is a thriving metropolis as apocalypse-based burgs go, with a booming population and amenities like electricity (fueled, of course, by the aforementioned pigshit). But outside is vast, vast desert, save for an oasis that The Tribe Who Left call home, while they wait for “Captain Walker” (i.e. the captain of the jet liner whose crash they survived) to return.
Who Killed the World? As Mad Max foes go, Aunty Entity is decidedly the most unusual, and perhaps canniest: Turner plays her with no shortage of camp maximalism, but tempers it with an Eartha Kitt purr and no small amount of Machiavellian charm. It’s fitting that she’s one of the few Mad Max protagonists to live, impressed by the Road Warrior’s gumption. “Ain’t we a pair, raggedy man?”
Silliest Names: Aunty Entity is a classic George Miller name, obvs, but we also have to give it up to the pair of Master/Blaster (the dwarf and his hulking enforcer, whom he rides on his shoulders like Krang) and the Bartertown auctioneer Dr. Dealgood (“Dying time’s here!”)
Fuel-Injected Suicide Machines: This one’s got the least amount of high-octane mayhem of the Mad Max series, which partially explains its placement on its list. That said, the actual Thunderdome bout is a fun, inventive bit of gladiatorial melee, with Max and Blaster bouncing around on bungees and fighting with chainsaws like the world’s deadliest American Gladiators round. And the final chase, a race using a modified truck to speed down train tracks with Entity’s buggies in hot pursuit, lets Miller and co-director George Ogilvie make merry play of the conventions of the classic train robbery (complete with a stuntman dangling from a pipe dodging at least four different hurdles on camera).
Verdict: As bottom-tier films go, Thunderdome is hardly a complete disaster; rather, it’s just scattershot and feels the least Mad Max-y of the rest of the films in this franchise. The addition of Turner is both fun and an unwelcome stunt-cast distraction from the usual Milleresque weirdness (the two pop songs that bookend the film, >while bops, feel super out of place in a world without popular music anyways).
But the rift between its nihilistic bleakness and the more kid-friendly stretches of the film is a hard thing to sit through all at once — the pace skids to a halt when Max meets the Lost Boys-esque tribe halfway through. Still, we can be thankful to this film for introducing the word “thunderdome” into the modern lexicon, and for putting Tina Turner in so much chainmail.
