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Directors: George Miller / George Miller, George Ogilvie
Screenwriters: Terry Hayes, George Miller, Brian Hannant / Terry Hayes, George Miller

By Roderick Heath

The success of George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) prompted a sequel swift and true, emerging in 1981 under the title of Mad Max 2 in Australia. When it was bought up for distribution in the US by Warner Bros., who saw little appeal in linking it to the previous movie when distributor AIP hadn’t treated so well although it still gained modest cult impact, the film was rechristened as The Road Warrior after a repeated line in the movie’s narration, and this time scored a massive hit. Today it’s become convention to call the film by both titles combined. It’s possible to regard all the films in the Mad Max series as variations on a theme and a character archetype, or, in current parlance, “soft reboots,” rather than firmly sequential narratives, even before Miller was obliged to recast the lead role with Tom Hardy supplanting Mel Gibson for 2015’s extension Mad Max: Fury Road. As such the series stands closer in nature to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy or many of the James Bond films than, say, the Star Wars films or most other franchise film series where continuity is regarded as an overriding value. Nonetheless Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, whilst leaping off into a more extreme and fantastical realm from the first entry, does pay heed to a sense of direct connection. Less original in its world-building than Mad Max proved as a whole despite its magpie borrowings, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior nonetheless went several steps further towards purifying and reconsecrating the temple of pure action cinema.

The follow-up’s leap in ambition and budget was marked by Miller hiring some major technical talents on the Australian movie scene, including future Oscar winner Dean Semler as cinematographer and multiple nominee Richard Francis-Bruce as editor. Miller, who had received offers to work Hollywood including, supposedly, to direct First Blood (1982), had also dallied with making a rock musical in collaboration with screenwriter Terry Hayes, but with everyone wanting a Mad Max sequel he and Hayes and a third collaborator, Brian Hannant, wrote a script, this time aiming for something more self-consciously elemental and classically heroic whilst extending their theme of social decline and resource shortage to a new extreme. This time the plotline could almost be written on a matchbox, mostly jettisoning the jots of sociological theory and satire that defined the first film in exchange for situational intensity and raw-boned and elemental drama. That drama harks back to classic Western films like Unconquered (1947), Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), Shane (1953), and the genre-adjacent Zulu (1963); John Ford epics like Drums Along The Mohawk (1939), Fort Apache (1948), and The Searchers (1956); and above all Akira Kurosawa’s films. But Miller and company stripped away supernal character analysis and social context found in such forebears, and concentrated on an elemental situation of besiegement and chase, mobility and immobility in perpetual dialogue as the essence of life and death and storytelling.

The film starts with a prologue that explains the background causes on the oncoming social breakdown that Mad Max only hinted at, or which could be taken as a slight situational revision, played out over a blend of documentary footage and scenes from the first film. An old man’s voice (Harold Baigent) recalls in sad and sullen metre how a crisis of fossil fuel supplies, exacerbated by confused reactions from global governments (“They talked, and talked, and talked…”), eventually led to conflict and degradation and eventual apocalypse, a downfall Max ironically weathered through his retreat into “the wasteland.” Meanwhile “only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage” prospered if they were willing to “go to war over a tank of juice.” Max roars into the film proper still behind the wheel of his V8 Interceptor, as if emerging straight out of the very end of the previous film but plainly with a long time having elapsed – Max now has grey on his temples, a brace around the leg The Toecutter shot him in, and a blue heeler cattle dog as a companion. He’s being chased down by highway corsairs after his petrol, with one of their number, the Mohawk-sporting Wez (Vernon Wells) with his comrade-pet-concubine ‘The Golden Youth’ (Jerry O’Sullivan) sharing his bike, about to provide Max with a special nemesis for the movie.

But Wez is only the lieutenant of the berserkers’ leader, the towering, bulbously bemuscled potentate known as ‘Lord Humungus’ (Kjell Nilsson), who hides a terribly scarred face behind a metallic mask, a flourish that signals him as down-and-dirty drive-in kin of Darth Vader. Max manages to outdrive his pursuers, with two of the berserker vehicles crashing, one hitting the road-straddling carcass of an abandoned semitrailer. Wez screeches impotently from his bike at Max and tugs an arrow accidentally shot into him by one of his own men, whilst Max hastily catches gas pouring out of one of the crashed berserker vehicles. Across the semitrailer someone has scrawled a new psalm – The Vermin Have Inherited The Earth, although the word “Earth” is the one actually written on the prime mover, a first hint this vehicle can be separated, reborn and repurposed as the encapsulation of hope, a fusion of Ark and Juggernaut. As he often did in the first film Miller touches on horror movie imagery as Max is compelled for a moment by the scream of a berserker trapped in his wrecked vehicle, his gnarled hand reaching out but falling limp, and then the gnarled and rotting corpse of the semi’s driver falling from the cab. Max also finds a music box mechanism that tinkles out “Happy Birthday to You,” a touch that recalls an entirely lost world of childlike innocence and Max’s own deep pain – and also one that recalls the leitmotif of the musical watch from Leone’s For A Few Dollars More (1965).

A little farther down the road Max comes upon a parked gyrocopter with a snake upon it, acting as a lethal antitheft device. Max is ambushed by its Captain (Bruce Spence), a gangly, whacky character who, like Max, is a canny survivor, but in his own, sly, effective if less commanding manner. The Captain springs out of the ground where he’s concealed himself and holding at the point of the crossbow he carries – bullets are all but gone by this point, and arrows have become the new weapon of choice. The Captain loses his advantage when Max’s dog springs out of the Interceptor and fells him. To stop Max killing him, the Captain raves about an oil pumping and refining station nearby that’s still operational, and Max takes his captive to check out the station: Max binds up the Captain and sets up an amusingly malicious trap for him as he rigs up his gun so his dog can pull the trigger with a toy in its mouth and tied to the trigger, the Captain sweating with particular anxiously when the dog spots a rabbit out on the wasteland. Soon Max and the Captain take up station on the peak of a hill overlooking the refinery, which proves to be operating just as the Captain said, with the petrol being stored in a petrol tanker that rather conspicuously lacks an engine to pull it. Another wrinkle is that the site is now being besieged by Lord Humungus’s flotilla of vehicles, manned by his small army of marauders, who have entirely given themselves up not just to the remorseless logic of raiding and chasing down what the Captain calls “guzzeline,” but have adopted a purposefully crazed and atavistic mindset (and wardrobe) to match, spurning the civilisation that’s left them high and dry.

By contrast, the assailed community working the refinery, equivalent to the hardy homesteaders and settlers in a classic Western, are clinging on to their remnant identities and aspirations, as they hope to use the fuel they’re stockpiling to make a long non-stop drive to a remnant corner of still-habitable earth in the north. Although not immersive and kinetic as the portions of the movie on either side of it, Miller’s style reaches an apotheosis of a kind in the lengthy vignette of Max and the Captain keeping watch on the refinery and the marauders. Miller finds eerie, quasi-abstract beauty in the vantages on the marauders roaring around the barricaded refinery, dust trails whirling in their wakes, hazy lights shining out as the sun dips and rises. Max and the Captain peer down at the scene, Max with binoculars and Captain with his large, vintage telescope – until Max forcibly swaps them – and absorb the basics of the drama unfolding silent movie-style and glimpsed from a distance. The provided theatre and spectacle entertains the Captain until some of the besieged try to flee the refinery in their own vehicles, only to be chased and down and crash. Wez and some other marauders assault a man and woman dragged from vehicle, pinning the man to an old tyre with crossbow bolts and making him watch whilst the woman is gang-raped and then executed by Wez. Once the marauders chase down the other escapees, Max descends, knocks out a guard left with the skewered man, Nathan (David Downer), and takes him to the refinery on the promise of a load of gas for saving his life.

But Nathan dies as Max delivers him, and Max is chained up and treated disdainfully by the settlers, who are led by the no-nonsense Papagallo (Mike Preston). Also in their ranks are the strident Warrior Woman (Virginia Hey), old-timer Curmudgeon (Syd Heylen), a pretty young woman (Arkie Whiteley), and The Feral Kid (Emil Minty), a bushy-haired enfant sauvage who wields a steel boomerang, has dug tunnels like a rabbit under and beyond the refinery, and delights in the music box when Max plays it for him: Max makes an instant friend when he gifts him the mechanism. The settlers assume, not without justification, that Max is another contemptible brute of the wasteland not worthy of their time or fuel, but his fate is made immediately moot when the marauders return. The Lord Humungus is announced, with an ingenious blend of medieval heraldic function, disc jockey shtick, and fight MC hype, by The Toadie (Max Phipps) as the “Warrior of the Wasteland, the Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!” Humungus tries to browbeat the defenders by displaying other captured members of their scouting expedition tied to the front of his battle wagon as grotesque figureheads, whilst promising to spare everyone’s lives if they’ll simply abandon the refinery and the fuel to him. The Feral Kid meanwhile starts hurling his steel boomerang at Wez, but kills the Golden Youth instead, much to Wez’s infuriation, and also slices off the fingers of The Toadie when he foolishly tries to catch the missile. Humungus leaves the settler to make up their minds, and when it becomes apparent the settlers risked sending out the scouts to try and find something to haul their tank of petrol, Max attracts their attention and promises to go and fetch the prime mover in exchange for a share of the gas.

Around the simple, space-and-objective defined forms of the plot, Miller weaves little flourishes redolent of personal lore. At one point the Captain fights with the dog over who will get to eat the snake that’s successfully guarded the gyro from a dead marauder. The Captain’s lamenting for the dear lost days when women wore lingerie contrasts the taste for violence, rapine and enslavement the marauders have given themselves over to. The Curmudgeon shows Max old postcards of the tribe’s intended destination – the Sunshine Coast – with the sales of pitch of it being “paradise – fresh water, nothing but sunshine, nothing to do but breed.” The contrasting mystique of heroes and villains is defined in the most basic way possible: the good guys wear white, the villains black, whilst also incidentally looking like the roller disco versus the S&M club. Whilst Miller sneaks in the virtually compulsory (for the era’s Aussie genre films) sex gag, as a rutting male and female marauder are revealed as their tent is ripped away to their surprise during one action scene, the landscape actually seems post-sexual, even antenatal, the marauders generally indulging homoerotic dominance and submission a way of getting rocks off and also creating a new, purified social order. The marauders include women, but they’re indistinguishable from the men. Although the marauders rape the female settler they catch, they quickly slay her, and save their real jollies for the men they’ve caught: those are crucified and emasculated in a foul ritual invocation by Humungus and henchmen, for the sake of terrorising the other settlers and announcing their own power. Humungus retains a sleek, powerful handgun kept in a lovingly tended case along with his last bullets and a vintage photo, perhaps an heirloom of his ancestors, whilst The Curmudgeon wears a vintage army helmet and uniform, a touch reminiscent of a different kind of post-apocalyptic movie, Richard Lester’s The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), itself perhaps another ancestor in Miller’s head, and other counterculture-era satires.

The settlers contrast the marauders not just in look but in social approach: where the Humungus is a rebirth of the warrior-king and tyrant, the settlers have a leader in Papagallo but still debate their purpose and choices, with fraught argument following the Humungus’s ultimatum as factions debate the merits of obeying him or fighting it out. Max’s intervention, with the promise of bringing back the prime mover, reunites them even as they have no idea if Max will honour his agreement and return, although they hope he’ll return for his car. Max eludes the marauders’ pickets and, on the march to the truck, comes across the Captain, dragging the log Max left him chained to, trying to get back to his gyro. Max, in a variation on the “two kinds of people” gag from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966), gets the Captain to carry the fuel he’s been lugging, but gifts him freedom once the truck is started, much to the Captain’s glee, declaring them partners. And he does indeed become Max’s invaluable supporter, dropping bombs on marauders and rescuing him when he almost dies during an ill-fated attempt to flee in the Interceptor. The Feral Kid presents Max with a surrogate for the son he lost, but he’s far from being some cute moppet, but rather giving a glimpse of the breed that might grow up in this ruined world – prelapsarian and preverbal, able to defend itself from a young age, at once savage but also curiously innocent, delighted to fits of eager panting when he sees Max waste their mutual foes. He could well be the embodiment of the audience, similarly tickled in the deep roots of the cerebral cortex.

The film’s ultimate revelation, that the Kid is in fact the narrator, recalling these events as an old man through the fog of intervening decades of fading memory and accumulating mythos, gives the drama perfect keynote. Not simply in finally, fully investing Miller’s project of rendering Max a new edition of the primeval hero, the kind of titan spoken about around campfires and multiplexes in tones of awe and aspiring delight, but in suggesting the impact Max still has almost in spite of himself – the survivor Max, the loner, the Road Warrior, is still nonetheless also still the social sentinel and father, inscribing his persona on the inheritors and becoming something much larger than the singular being he is. In this regard Miller built upon not just the figure of the lost quasi-paternal hero of Shane but also the oft-floated notion that Leone’s Westerns had been in essence Homeric tales of demigods at roam transposed to a more recent and specific setting. Miller advances that notion a little further, suggesting how such tales become rooted in societies and their chains of storytelling, their ideals and role-playing, and how these attach to parent figures. The utter weirdness of the world Max contends with, the blighted weirdoes and perverts and maniacs left fighting over the scraps of civilisation, seems to pull in a different direction to that kind of higher-minded theme, but actually helps underline it, particularly as the marauders embrace the bestial, berserker side of human nature, providing this world with the equivalent of the wicked pagan priests and cruel warlords besetting the existence of the hero.

Max amidst the settlers is plainly a man out of his element and opaque in his needs beyond resuming his self-sufficient wandering – the Captain, by contrast, acts on his desires by convincing the young woman to leave with him in the gyrocopter, only for her to demur at the last moment in deciding her loyalty to the tribe can’t be shaken off easily. This in turn opens the door for the Captain to stay with her and the others and inherit the role of leader, as signalled at the end. Papagallo, the leader with selfless ideals and a goal in mind, sets in motion the great quest and shepherds his flock towards a hopeful goal even with the possibility it’s illusory or impossible. He’s a figure from a slightly different age in human development, at once vital and effectual for the settlers but also vulnerable, encumbered, refusing to give himself up to a sharklike existence on the wasteland in the way Max has, which Papagallo sees as a surrender that makes him no different to the marauders. Papagallo is provoked to interrogative frustration by Max when frustrated by his determination to leave, pushing his buttons in turn (“What burned you out, eh? Kill one man to many? See too many people die? Lose some family?”) until Max decks him. Papagallo needs an Achilles like Max – only a man with his berserker edge can run the gauntlet of the marauders, but Max finally learns in gruelling fashion that once plunged into the situation he cannot easily escape, as when he does try to flee in his gassed-up Interceptor, Wez, The Toadie and other chase him down, Wez smashing his windscreen and causing him to fly off the road. Max, bloodied and bedraggled, barely manages to crawl away before The Toadie sets off his booby-trapped fuel tanks, blowing up himself and the wrecked relic. The Captain comes out on his gyro and picks Max up, as Miller communicates Max’s battered body and swooning mind through double exposures, before he’s carried high over the marauders and back to the stockade, a brief anticipation of a flight to heaven before returning to hell on earth.

Despite The Road Warrior’s derivations from international cinema classics, its essential Australianness is nonetheless still undeniable. This is particularly true of the way Miller found a clever way of rhyming one form of resource scarcity that’s perpetually shaped human interaction with the Australian land, the relative paucity of water beyond coastal regions, with another, the reliance on fossil fuel resources to power the metal-wrapped steeds of speed-freak dreaming. That reliance had taken a sharp, severe shock in Australia as elsewhere during the oil embargoes of the 1970s. In many ways author Randolph Stow’s 1962 novel Tourmaline, a symbolic and allusive novel about a dying town on the fringe of the expanding inland desert that turns to a wandering, seemingly blessed diviner to seek out water to save the town but who can only find gold, is as much a precursor to Mad Max as any of its genre film bunkmates. Another ancestor could well be Neville Shute’s On The Beach, filmed in 1959, with its presumption that the characteristic that’s always frustrated Aussies – the nation’s distance from the rest of the world – might be in the case of nuclear war some kind of boon. One could also count as a spiritual forebear David Crosby’s song “Wooden Ships” which proposed a more sedate but not that dissimilar vision of people surviving nuclear war by keeping perpetually on the move in boats.

Miller’s sense of cinematic largesse blended aspects of many of the filmmakers he was paying homage to – Siegel’s deep-focus shots and Leone’s looming visages meet Ford’s vantages over sweeping landscapes and frame-bisecting lines of action, and Kurosawa’s wipes and figure-gripping vistas. The greatness of The Road Warrior lies in how it sets its ideas in motion whilst barely slowing down, as one of those rare movies that manages to transmit its ideas through visuals and action. Even the quieter, reflective moments, snatched by the characters in between the mean business of living and dying, contribute to the film’s overall, headlong narrative thrust, like Max forging his bond with the Kid with the music box mechanism. Brian May, who had scored the first film, returned to provide the sequel with big, booming, self-consciously epic music that once more situated the drama somewhere at the intersection of raw melodrama and pop art retro pastiche, and also nimbly mediating the generic swerves within it from rampaging action to horror movie cues to strains at once grand and plaintive at the very end. The main action set-pieces see Max driving pell-mell through the marauder camp to get the prime mover into the refinery stockade, and then make the climactic breakout as Max charges out with the truck onto a remnant road, the tanker festooned with defenders, whilst the rest of the settlers break away, with their fast-moving roadsters under Papagallo returning to intersect with Max, and the Captain drops bombs from above.

Both of these scenes are intricate in staging and structuring despite the simplicity of the goals, cut and filmed with a maximum of dynamic impact. Like one shot that utilises a camera peering out from within one of the marauder cars as it speeds up and moves to intersect with the prime mover as it barrels by, the sense of lateral motion and spatial immediacy all but physically sweeping the viewer into the imagery’s midst. Miller assembles the roaring action with a precise sense of tactical intent even when the basic purpose is to go real fast and not stop. As Max dashes to the stockade, the marauders try to halt the truck by firing arrows into its tyres, whilst Humungus fires his pistol at the truck’s engine, trying to put it out of commission and nearly succeeding, but Max still manages to get the prime mover into the stockade and the sentinels at the gate annihilate the marauder vehicles luckless to get too close with mounted flamethrowers – a particular advantage they have as long as they stick close to their fuel source. The big chase sees the marauders picking off the defenders riding on the tanker, with Wez shooting the Warrior Woman with arrows whilst another luckless defender sets himself on fire with a Molotov cocktail. The marauders then try to clamber on board, as simply shoving the truck off the road is too risky to its precious load. Meanwhile those marauders stupid enough to occupy the abandoned refinery are consumed as charges set burning eplode and decimate the place.

Miller builds up to the breakout with succinct character grace-notes, like that between Max and Papagallo, as Max despite his injuries announces he wants to drive the truck out, and Papagallo, after a brief display of scepticism, hands over his gun and a satchel of shells for it, before the two men give each-other salutary nods from behind their respective steering wheels just before venturing out. The mechanics who repair the prime mover’s damage also affix a stout bulldozer blade to the front, armouring it against Humungus’s bullets, whilst the marauder lord keeps Wez literally on a leash to deploy to best effect when he sees fit during the chase. The Captain helps clear their path by dropping incendiaries on the blockade, and Max soon finds he has company as the Kid has stowed aboard, but the lad proves invaluable as he’s able to warn Max about attackers and even put his teeth to good use. The presence of the gyrocopter, zooming by high over the ground action, is visually exploited as it passes high over the charging vehicles, a tide of motion running at different speeds, all this steel and rage and flesh charging across the vast plain to ends at once urgent and illusory, the plain itself practically featureless, a cradle of surrealist dreaming. Max makes unique art out of marauders vehicles that get in his way, reducing them to pulverised masses of metal.

The imagery, like Humungus roaring down the road, mask in place and muscles bulging, still retains perfectly iconic punk-poetic force, and little squiggles of vicious, often ironic detail weave curlicues through it all, like Max getting an arrow through the thigh and a biker getting himself crushed under the truck when he tries to stab one of its tires. The two hapless captives on the front of Humungus’s roadster are kept blind through the chase with bags over their heads, only for the bags to be ripped off just in time for them to see they’re going to be crushed against the rear of the tanker. Humungus kills Papagallo with a hurled spear just as the settler commander cries out to Max that they’ve won. This climax is one of the greatest of its kind in cinema, all the more impressive and thrilling for the complete absence of anything but the most basic camera trickery. One indelible moment sees the boundary between art and life collapse, when a stuntman was accidentally hurled head over heels from a car and crashed to earth, breaking many bones but, thankfully, not dying: the stunt became a centrepiece of the sequence. The sequence also bears an interesting resemblance to the desert chase in 1981’s other immortal action film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which also revolved around trying to commandeer a truck at speed, and sports a similar punchline about a character seemingly to be lost under the wheels only to reappear unexpectedly. Only in this case it’s not the hero but Wez, who, bloodied and shrieking, fights Max in a tug-of-war over the Kid, whilst Humungus, briefly knocked off the road, comes flying up only to see the oncoming truck coming over a rise, both vehicles moving too fast to swerve: the tanker crushes Humungus and his vehicle and Wez between them, but swerves and capsizes on the roadside in turn.

The sting in the tail: even Max seems to have been unaware that the mission was a deception, as the truck was loaded not with fuel but sand, the “precious juice” actually carried away in drums in the other settler vehicles, having made their getaway clean and having turned the warlike assumptions of the marauders against them. The Captain, whose gyro is wrecked during the battle, pulls up and gives Max a grin of relief: the smirk the battered, barely-standing Max offers in response has a queasy quality, an undercurrent of bewilderment over his inability to die even amidst such utter carnage and when it’s the only logical thing to do. The Captain takes his place driving the settlers away, whilst the Kid loses sight of Max left behind on the road, now with Papagallo’s roadster as his steed. The famous last shot, as Miller pulls back from Max in recreating the Kid’s last view of Max, silhouetted against the last light of day, nods to the introduction of John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939) but deliberately reverses it, not just in the technical sense in pulling away from the stark figure on the road until lost in shadow, but also the dramatic idea: John Ford presented Ringo as the legendary taking solid human form, whereas Max finally melts back into the great dream. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia, although it doesn’t entirely lack some of the problems that have dogged the country’s cinema, like some flimsy performances dotted amidst the supporting cast. And, of course, there’s a vaguely absurd aspect to the plotline as the marauders seem to have all the fuel in the world already to chase down their foes despite the total lack of apparent supply – it might have been apt, and amusing, if Miller had taken a lead from Battle of the Bulge (1965) and seen the villains simply run out of fuel for their pursuit, leaving the landscape littered with their less-than-useless jalopies.

The question of where alternative fuel sources might come from would, at least, inform the plotline of third film, before then being roundly ignored again in Fury Road. This element points to the way the themes and assimilated cultural ideas in the Mad Max films, so hip and timely when the original entries were made, had become rather quaint and retro by the time Miller got around to making his long-delayed fourth instalment. In any event, the third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, sees Max having embraced different forms of transportation, crossing the wasteland now on a truck converted into a wagon and pulled by camels. Miller opens with an amazing aerial shot swooping down over a seemingly endless expanse of desert and over Max’s wagon. This shot is actually the viewpoint of another flying pest played by Bruce Spence, this time aviator Jedediah, who wings his way over the wastes in a light aircraft looking for things to steal, and takes off with Max’s wagon after dislodging him from its cockpit and jumping from his plane, whilst his son (Adam Cockburn) keeps flying. Max, who now has long, flowing, salt-and-pepper hair and a permanently dilated eye after his injury in The Road Warrior, keeps following the rough path he was travelling until he comes to an outpost of the new civilisation, Bartertown. This proves a place where the nominal ruler is the female warlord known as Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), aided by collaborators and minions including the trade-running Collector (Frank Thring) and chief enforcer Ironbar Bassey (Gary ‘Angry’ Anderson). But real power in Bartertown is wielded by a diminutive but ingenious man known as Master (Angelo Rossitto), who has built the town’s energy system and fuels it with methane gas obtained from the shit of pigs he farms.

Master, whilst obliged to subsist in his stinking underground abode as he runs his power-making operation, often asserts his clout over Aunty and the rest of the community whenever he senses he’s being encroached upon in retaliations he calls “embargoes” – a nice touch acknowledging Miller’s real-world inspirations – shutting down the city’s energy supply and demanding that Aunty publically acknowledge his authority. Wrongdoers in Bartertown are enslaved and used to propagate the pigs and shovel their leavings: one, Pig Killer (Robert Grubb), was as his name suggests imprisoned specifically for killing one of the swine to feed his family. Aunty, unsurprisingly, wants to wrest back ultimate authority from the short savant, but faces one special problem. Master is only one half of a practically symbiotic being, as the hulking, masked man known as Blaster (Paul Larsson) always carries him around and protects him – the two men together called, of course, MasterBlaster, without Stevie Wonder around to sue them. Getting wind of Max’s desire to get back his camels and belongings, sold by Jedidiah at the Bartertown markets, Aunty Entity makes him an offer after getting her goons to test his mettle: if he’ll pick a fight with MasterBlaster, he and Blaster will be obliged to duke it out in a ritual gladiatorial contest in an cage-like arena, the titular Thunderdome, a place designed to be the only one where violence is permitted and one inviolable rule is kept: “Two men enter, one man leaves.”

Beyond Thunderdome was criticised upon release and after for playing as more Hollywoodised and sentimental and far less gleefully raw and violent than its precursors. And that’s certainly true, to a degree, particularly in the finale which presents a reprise of The Road Warrior’s climax but without the same sadistic vivacity and relish. But it’s also, I feel, a film that demands much greater appreciation, and a vastly more interesting individual film and variation on the Mad Max theme than the subsequent Fury Road. Some of that might be nostalgic connection – it’s the first of the films I saw, as a child when it was indeed the only one of them I could watch. The imagery of the film haunted me, and still find retain enormous power, particularly the coda. Beyond Thunderdome was also a product of shifting expectations and life circumstances for the people making it. The success of the first two films had gained Miller, Gibson, and other crewmembers international attention. Miller had made his Hollywood debut directing easily the best portion of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), whilst Gibson was beginning his quick rise as a major star, having anchored several more Aussie hits before making his American debut with Mrs. Soffel (1984).

Now a serious injection of Hollywood cash and concomitant expectations for blockbuster reach were in play for Beyond Thunderdome, and Miller himself was feeling the first urges towards becoming not just the family filmmaker who would make the later Babe and Happy Feet films, but also one who would invest much of his career – too much, perhaps – playing the mini-mogul akin to George Lucas. By the time shooting started on Beyond Thunderdome Miller was also recovering from the accidental death of his stalwart production partner Byron Kennedy, an event that so rattled Miller he brought in George Ogilvie, with whom he had worked in television, to help direct the film. Ogilvie, whilst nowhere near as well-known as Miller, nonetheless did good work himself, with his 1990 film The Crossing well-regarded particularly and notable for providing the first starring role for Russell Crowe. Despite all such compromises Beyond Thunderdome comes out of the gate swinging, including that epic opening and once the action settles on Bartertown, a superbly-realised setting, grimy, shadowy, filled with the flotsam of the future wastes. Max gives swift, efficient displays of both his sceptical acumen – he resists a water seller’s overtures by waving a Geiger counter at his tank and finds it irradiated – and his dangerous pith when confronted by a guard he pulls his shotgun and glows off the crest on the guard’s helmet, and later bests several of Aunty’s goons including Bassey, whose enmity is earned and stoked.

The Thunderdome battle between Max and Blaster is a grand set-piece that starts with the citizenry of Bartertown clambering up its dome mesh for a view on the battle. Bartertown’s judge and auctioneer Dr. Dealgood (a splendidly arch performance from Edwin Hodgeman) acts as the event’s florid emcee, a touch that harks back to The Toadie in The Road Warrior but with a very different spin: Dr. Dealgood invokes the ritual meaning of the battle with philosophical undertones, and oversees a lottery-like spin of a wheel used to decide tricky matters of justice, like a conflation of high priest and game show host. The two gladiators bound around on suspension rigs at first and trying to grab for weapons dangling on high, the battle involving wielded chainsaws and swords and a huge mallet. Max by this time has discovered Blaster is extremely sensitive to noise, and after several near-fatal delays uses a whistle to paralyse Blaster in pain and swats him with the mallet until Blaster lies sprawled and unhelmeted, only to see that his opponent is a childlike being reminiscent of the long-lost Benno from the first film, and reveals the degree to which Max still retains his old scruples. Master intervenes desperately to save his friend, and Max refuses to kill him, but Aunty slays Blaster with a crossbow and after deciding Max’s fate with the wheel has him placed on a horse – with hands tied, facing backwards, and with a fibreglass head from some long-destroyed carnival attraction placed on his head. He’s sent into exile and likely death in the desert.

Miller’s referential streak is just as marked in Beyond Thunderome as in the earlier movies, with the enlarged budget this time stretching to hiring Maurice Jarré, most famous as the composer for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), to do the score and paying homage throughout to David Lean’s film, as well as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly again in Max’s desert exile, and the script even smirkingly has Dr. Dealgood call Max “the Man With No Name” when introducing him at the Thunderdome. Miller’s new epic lexicon also nods directly to Ben-Hur (1959), on top of Thring’s presence as one shared by both movies: MasterBlaster is a riff on that film’s crippled Simonides and the large, voiceless man who serves as his minder, and the Thunderdome itself can be seen as a version of the chariot race. More curiously, the script’s later portions – with Terry Hayes and Miller again credited as writers – have been seen as influenced by the 1980 novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Some common roots might have been in play there, particularly as the second half of the film turns towards Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies as touchstones. It’s also interesting that Beyond Thunderdome is the first of the series to actively invoke nuclear catastrophe as a cause of the collapse rather than simply exhausted resources and environmental stress, situating the third entry squarely in the legion of nuclear war angst dramas that proliferated in the last, fitful decade of the Cold War. There’s a disparity between the way the Mad Max films engage this vision compared to, say, Planet of the Apes (1968) – where that film and other Hollywood apocalypses evoke an American artistic tradition of going back to Thomas Cole, fearing and anticipating the collapse of all works and wondering what the ruins would look like, Beyond Thunderdome is the very Australian counterpart, coming almost with a sigh of relief after being sick of waiting for it, knowing it would come, a sentiment captured by John O’Brien’s classic Aussie poem “Said Hanrahan”, about a fretting farmer expecting every manner of disaster – “We’ll all be rooned!”

Max is rescued from the desert by Savannah Nix (Helen Buday), one of a tribe of children who have grown in a virtually paradisiacal sanctuary lodged in a canyon hidden in the desert – a grotto with water and trees which they’ve maintained a child’s wonderland. The children (whose ranks include future Aussie TV stalwarts Justine Clarke and Rebekah Elmaloglou) shear away Max’s long hair whilst he recovers from his ordeal. Max soon learns they think he’s Captain Walker, a rescuer they’ve been waiting for ever since they were left to fend for themselves in this place now grown to the stature of messiah, who can fly them out on his back to a place they call “Tomorrow-Morrow Land.” Beyond Thunderdome expands throughout on the notes sounded in The Road Warrior regarding storytellers and performers as constructors of social traditions. This is first in Dr. Dealgood’s role as voice of the law and philosophy of Bartertown. Aunty herself is as much a figure who dovetails performance and authority, and Turner’s casting introduces a faintly metatextual aspect, especially as the two songs she contributed to the movie, “The Living” as heard over the opening credits and the big hit “We Don’t Need Another Hero” at the end, serve as thematic extensions and commentaries that in their reproduce the motif of storytellers: Turner’s blazing vocals and the self-consciously epic soundscapes match the filmmaking describe the emotional experience of the characters. The notion becomes more insistent when Max is regaled by the tribe, who range between very small and late teens, with their story. The tribe have mapped out their history in terms of a legend, with paintings on the walls of the cave shelters recording the events of how they were evacuated from the city on a plane which then crashed after nuclear holocaust, and the adult survivors left them behind to seek out help.

Here Beyond Thunderdome makes linkages between primeval rock art and modern visual storytelling, science fiction and mystic atavism. Savannah serves as bard who holds a rectangular shape – a movie or TV frame – to become the portal to view the paintings through. Max is given a Viewmaster and flips through the captured images on the discs, including of some random airline pilot who has been immortalised as Captain Walker and a showgirl from some sexy cabaret who has been anointed as “Mrs Walker!” The kids then lead Max out onto the sand and stand upon the stranded hulk of the crashed 747, as grand and invested with meaning and utterly useless as any pyramid or ziggurat left behind by an ancient culture. There’s some kind of genius in this element of the movie, and it does much to offset the swerve towards a different kind of moviemaking to the series so far when it comes to the lost tribe themselves. Far from being as crudely developed and close to the animal as the Feral Kid in The Road Warrior, the tribe is instead only a little rambunctious, if still interestingly conceived with their skewed language and sense of the world, churning together the lost world of technology with the spiritual. Ethereal broadcasts from beyond, aka radio and TV signals, are referred to as “the sonic,” and some of the kids are utterly enraptured when Max introduces them to the workings of a retrieved gramophone, the disc on it reciting a lesson on how to speak French on vinyl, with the kids obeying the recorded voice’s injunctions to repeat the French phrases like catechisms of entirely obscure yet urgent meaning.

This element of Beyond Thunderdome also extends the theme of Max’s lost family and the appearance of surrogates for it, delivering an excellent pay-off for it as Max for all his hardboiled cynicism is provoked to protective instincts towards the children, even if at first these instincts manifest as domineering aggression. Max tries to convince the tribe they’re much better off where they are, and particularly doesn’t want them to venture near Bartertown. Savannah and some of the tribe, exhausted with waiting and realising that Max’s coming portends only the pointlessness of it, determine to leave the grotto. Max tries to intimidate them by firing off a rifle he finds amidst their possessions: appropriating their personification of Death in their legend, Max declares, “I’m the man who keeps Mr Dead in his pocket!” Still the group leave during the night, and Max, with three more of the tribe, sets out to track them down, coming across them as one child is sucked down into a sand void. During the night, they see distant lights that the kids think might be the elusive promise of Tomorrow-Morrow Land but Max knows is Bartertown. Knowing they can’t survive a retreat into the desert, they elect instead to sneak into the powerhouse complex, where they find Master has been thoroughly humiliated by Aunty and her goons by being stranded in a cage amongst his pigs. Max and the kids make hasty alliance with Master and the other prisoners, and Pig Killer sees a means of escape in Master’s engine, which proves to be an adapted steam engine still mounted on rails and with a carriage connected, and the fast-found tribe crash out of the city upon it.

It’s arguably in the concluding eruption of derring-do that Beyond Thunderdome actually, properly stumbles, as the action that ensues once Max and the kids invade the powerhouse confirms just how much Miller had filed down the teeth on his creation. Conceptually, the final chase only offer slight twists on The Road Warrior’s. Despite Anderson’s vividly pugnacious visage and the memorable look of his character (Bassey sports a Noh-like mask mounted on a stick jutting up from behind his back to make up for his lack of stature), he’s a pretty weak replacement for Wez, never allowed the kind of genuine ferocity and threat his predecessor wielded towards Max. Vignettes of the kids sliding down ramps and making violent but non-lethal havoc with Bassey and Aunty’s other thugs feel, as is often noted, closer in spirit to movies produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company than the earlier series entries. Many critics and fans were justifiably wondering how a series that started off with pansexual rape and familial homicide had now become a kiddie adventure tale. The final chase is slightly distinguished from its precursor not just in terms of the different brand of locomotion taken by the heroes, but also in the object of pursuit, as Aunty and her warriors come roaring after the fleeing train – knowledge rather than a limited resource, as Aunty wants Master’s intellect at her disposal, an interesting twist but one that just doesn’t have the same urgency. The mayhem unleased is a lot less bloody and concussive, with the vignettes that make up sequence less brutally impressive and nowhere near as densely packed. Instead of blasting his foes with his shotgun or crushing them under his wheels, Max is now knocking them around with a frying pan.

And yet it can also be said that if one is going make kiddie adventure, Beyond Thunderdome still does it just about as well as you could ask for. The staging and raw filmmaking values are still superlative, with Semler’s work in particular hitting a zenith in the awesome surveys of Aunty’s squadron of vehicle poised on a rise before plunging over the edge and carving trails across a vast plain: such shots have an old-school widescreen texture infinitely preferable to the obnoxiously graded imagery of Fury Road. Miller’s original concept of a blend of screwball comedy and fast car action comes to a different kind of fruition here, with one of the kids, Scrooloose (Rod Zuanic), commandeering an enemy car and working out how to drive it on the guy like his silent comedy forebears, and the sight of Bassey hanging off the engine’s cowcatcher as it barrels down the rails. The train finally comes a halt at the end of the line which proves to be right next to Jedediah’s cave home, and the pilot and his son are pressganged into saving the escapees in their plane. Trapped between a chasm and the advancing vehicles, Jedediah points out the lack of sufficient runway in either direction, so Max, with a selfless bravado that signals the restoration of his original spirit, rides a truck into the advancing foes to bash a gap large enough for the plane to take off.

Aunty laughingly leaves Max amidst the wreckage with plain admiration for his ballsiness, whilst the plane wings its way through a dust storm as Jedediah fulfils the tribe’s quest to reach Tomorrow-Morrow Land. The coda of Beyond Thunderdome opens up a new landscape and scale for the trilogy even as it dovetails its themes and images, as the children behold the ruins of Sydney, complete with fractured Harbour Bridge and gutted skyscrapers looming over an emptied Port Jackson, the atmosphere flooded with red dust. A depiction, finally, of the total devastation of the old civilisation, but with the embryo of another clinging on raggedly in its bowels. The film concludes with Savannah now resuming her role as the storyteller for a new, larger tribe of all ages, living within one of the deserted skyscrapers, recounting the legend of Max and keeping the ruins lit as beacons for him and all the others lost in the wasteland to find their way home. The very last image is again one of Max alone, this time on foot, carrying a set of spears as he wanders in the setting sun – having concluded his devolution into primal warrior, yes, but also now purified, the hero his old boss wanted finally and properly ensconced in the collective dream.