For a variety of reasons (especially including the new Mad Max movie coming out this summer), I decided to rewatch the movie series. There were some things I either hadn’t noticed or didn’t remember from when I last watch them 20 odd years ago.
Start with “Mad Max”. The title, of course, means Crazy Max, not Angry Max. This was not lost on me before. I didn’t remember how far gone things already were by this movie’s timeframe. It is set in ruralish Australia, but even so, the “Halls of Justice” are rather worn down and threadbare, with the interiors junked out like an abandoned building. The cops themselves largely don’t seem much more than thugs with a badge. They certainly take a page out of Batman’s oeuvre, leaning more toward the Alan Moore variety of Chaotic Evil Batman. There’s rather a lot of bloodlust and a reckless abandon toward the innocents on the road.
Then there’s the depiction of the biker gang to show they are crazy and evil. One of them does a dive roll walking out of a building for no other reason than he just wants to. Another one is definitely gayer than gay, wearing red leather and various stereotypical mannerisms. One guy licks another guy on the face and that leads to what appears to be headed for a molestation.
Then there’s Benno, the big lumbering oaf from the scene on the farm. I thought for a moment it might be the same actor for MM3, but imdb says otherwise. The characters probably aren’t meant to be the same at all - Benno is lumbering and slump shouldered, whereas Blaster is square-shouldered and fairly nimble.
That brings us to MM2: The Road Warrior. What’s surprising about this movie is that the cause of the end of civilization is not depicted as a nuclear exchange. Rather, it is an accumulation of more conventional warfare that is blamed. Though all the film it shows from the conflicts is from WWII era - which was dramatically out of date for depiction of technology and weapons even in the '80s.
This one also sets the framework of the narrator who is telling the story of something from long past and the stranger encountered.
What sticks out here is how wasteful the marauders are being with the fuel they have. Sure, they are driving around and chasing the ones who try to escape, living off fuel they’ve scavenged from others. But at one point they are staking out the compound through the night, and they are doing donuts on the motorcycles and things. Where did they get all the fuel they had for that?
Anyway, somehow I had missed a few details from watching this one, perhaps not paying attention too closely at the time. For starters, the marauders have people tied to the front of a couple of their cars, especially the two upright on Humongous’s car. I didn’t catch that they were some of ones who had tried to go out searching just prior to that.
The other two details that got lost on me are from the big battle at the end. First off, Max wakes up from his unconsciousness from the last attempt to leave, and hears the folks going through their plan one more time. He says he’ll drive the truck, and the leader reluctantly agrees. Later after the truck crashes, we see it is full of dirt - it was a ruse. What I wasn’t sure of but now understand is that the ruse was not for Max at all, he was just the unwitting victim of being unconscious when the plan was outlined. The leader knew the tanker was the target for the marauders, so the plan all along was to smuggle the fuel out in the other vehicles. The truck was, of course, attempting to escape simply to survive, but the expectation was that it likely wouldn’t. The people on the truck were fighting to ensure the others had the best chance at escaping, and they were sacrificing themselves for the others. They just didn’t feel like filling Max in on the plan completely once he came too.
The second bit was I somehow didn’t catch that the leader with the white helmet and mask was driving one of the cars they acquired from the prior attempt to break in by the marauders. He drove along with the tanker for a while, then departed, presumably to try to draw off some of the marauders. Then for some reason he came back. So when he was encouraging the feral boy to jump to his car, that now makes sense to me.
One other plot point is they claimed that the compound was a refinery, but that compound was actually pretty small, and refineries tend to be rather large chemical plants, not situated on top of a single oil derrick. But maybe it was something built up in the aftermath to accommodate the remote location of the well.
Now we get to “Beyond Thunderdome”. First off, I have to say I think this movie gets a bad reputation for no reason. It seems like a pretty enjoyable movie to me, and most of it makes a lot of sense. It also fits very well the world of the Road Warrior.
I suppose one criticism is that it tries a bit too hard to duplicate the previous movie. Need a car chase with bizarre vehicles - check. Cute kid who is surprisingly useful - let’s make a dozen of them. Heck, it even goes so far as to not only include another pilot, but use the same actor for the role (Bruce Spence).
Anyway, the movie begins with Max stumbling across Bartertown tracking down his stolen goods. His aim, of course, is simply to reobtain what was taken from him, but to get in to Bartertown he gets attention enough to go see Auntie - the creator and leader of Bartertown. And she has need of a man who can handle himself in a fight.
You see, while Auntie is the leader/founder/owner of Bartertown, there’s someone else who is amassing power of his own at her expense - Master-Blaster, the duo running the power plant that provided Bartertown with electricity. Master is the brains, technologically savvy, but a tiny dwarf with no physical abilities of his own. But his partner is Blaster, a very large man with powerful muscles who follows his every command without hesitation.
Aside: I suppose another complaint could be the fact that Master is described as being intelligent, but he speaks like a three year old. What is it with wizened old midgets who can’t speak correctly? It’s like Yoda. I suppose the justification is that English is his second or third language or whatever, but it just seems weird.
Anyway, Master-Blaster runs underworld, and is trying to garner power to himself, by forcing Auntie to capitulate to his whims and loudly proclaim Master-Blaster is the one who runs Bartertown. So from Auntie’s perspective, she needs to take him down to size, as it were.
Auntie’s dilemma is that she has created a town with the rule of law. It may not be the kind of law we’re used to, but it is a damned sight better than what goes on elsewhere, with savages and the mighty taking from the weak. So she doesn’t want to send her enforcers in to bust up Blaster just to keep power - that would undermine the very rule of law and society she is trying to forge. So she needs to take out Blaster in a way that leaves Master to answer to her needs and doesn’t undermine the social structure, preferably leaving her hands clean. Her goal is laudable. It’s not just pure protection of her own status, though there certainly is some of that. But what happens if Master-Blaster can usurp her authority and take over control? Does he have the same respect for the idea of the social order she’s trying to establish? It seems not - he seems a petty tyrant more concerned with his own power and status than with the good of everyone. He does not seem like he’d make a good ruler for the people.
That’s where the deal with Max enters the picture. Max wants his stuff and provisions. Auntie needs someone unaffiliated with her to get into a conflict with Master-Blaster, which will then be decided via Bartertown’s legal negotiation system - Thunderdome.
Note that the theater of Thunderdome itself feels right. The speaker sets the stage with his lesson so any newbies are informed and the message of why Thunderdome is reinforced. The point is a way to resolve disputes in a way they won’t continue to fester bad sentiment. Simple - one of the parties is dead. No festering.
It’s all set up nicely and working according to plan right up until Max actually gets the upper hand and is ready to finish off Blaster, only to discover Blaster has Down’s syndrome and is mentally just a big kid. So he doesn’t want to be the executioner. So Max breaks the deal by refusing to do the killing, and by calling Auntie out. While Auntie still gets Blaster dead, she loses face.
That makes Auntie look bad, and she has to do something to turn the crowd back in her favor and rescue the situation. So she turns to the next element of the law that Max happens to be wholely unaware of - “Break a Deal, Face the Wheel”. The wheel of fortune does have acquittal as an option, though only a small fraction of the wheel, where the rest is bad things. But it’s in there.
Max is exiled into the desert on a horse, which dies from exposure to the elements. Max himself nearly dies, but is discovered by an explorer - a teenage girl from a weird tribe of kids living in an oasis at the edge of the wasteland. These kids are a herd of children and teens with no adults whatsoever, living with a fractured recollection and poor retelling of the civilization that was. Apparently the airplane that brought them there, the captain had at some point taken all the able-bodied on an expedition to go looking for their old world.
It’s not quite clear if the intent was to really return, or to abandon the kids they thought wouldn’t survive. It’s odd that there weren’t any adults left with the kids. Seems if it really were an expedition to look for a way to some form of civilization, they would have left some adults in the camp while they were out looking.
Of note here, the kids have such a poor and incomplete understanding of the world gone past and technology, they are heavy on symbolism. It’s a very sympathetic magic kind of approach, like the cargo cults of the south seas. There’s also a weird similarity to the Ewoks.
Anyway, because of Max’s arrival, a few of the kids depart looking for a way across the wasteland to find civilization. Max sets out to bring them back, but they end up at Bartertown.
Here’s the thing - Max seems intent on stealing Master away. Maybe he’s just looking for info so he can steal a few provisions and maybe a vehicle, it’s not clear. But what happens is a real travesty - the busting up of the power source that makes Bartertown run, with the strong possibility of ruining Bartertown.
Now Auntie may have been rough on Max, she may have been manipulative and underhanded with Master-Blaster, but Bartertown was something to be proud of. It was the closest thing to civilization we have seen in that world. It was a society functioning beyond the powerful stealing from the weak. So what Max and the crew do is a crime. Or a sin. Or something.
Max is in the wrong. He entered a bargain to kill Blaster and do so without revealing Auntie’s role. It doesn’t matter that Blaster was a big “kid” - his connection to Master made him a threat. Separating them in some other way might have been possible, but by the rules of Thunderdome, one of them had to die. And Max broke the deal, both by refusing to kill and by revealing Auntie’s role. So she was in the right to punish him by the rules of the society she built. Sure, she forced it for her own power, but it was still legal by the rules of Bartertown, and more importantly, the rules were set up to create a sense of order and ultimately a safer place for everyone.
And Max is in the wrong to bust up underworld and steal the truck that is the heart of the power generator. It’s arguable whether “rescuing” Master is wrong or not. Master is being imprisoned and forced to keep the plant running rather than given freedom to exchange his services. However, Master kinda earned that imprisonment with his embargoes and other bully tactics when he had power, so that’s a debatable point.
Anyway, the ending of the movie has the few that escaped from Bartertown resettling in the burned out Sydney, and building up a society there, passing on the legend of how they came to be there.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts. What are yours?