From the Rental Vault (1985): Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

The best way to get a real sense of how second-rate Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is to watch it soon after watching either the first or second movie of the Mad Max franchise. Bigger budget, bigger profile, bigger stars, all slapped together without much thought given to originality of story, either in terms of the movie by itself or within the context of the trilogy.

Mad Max, released in 1979, was an international hit that was next to unknown in the U.S. Producer-director George Miller made the independent project for less than half a million dollars. Mad Max 2, known here as The Road Warrior, came three years later and was much better financed based on the hit that its predecessor had been. Miller and partner Byron Kennedy used the extra budget to amp up the action in their post-apocalyptic adaptation of the classic Western story of a drifting loner who saves his own humanity when he finally risks his life to save a besieged village. Both movies established common features of the deluge of post-apocalyptic thrillers that followed and turned those features into clichés.

By 1985, the movies' lead actor Mel Gibson was well on his way to being a top-level movie star and Warner Bros. wanted a reliable box office vehicle for him, so they returned to the character of former policeman Max Rocketansky, now wandering an Australia devastated but not destroyed by some kind of global conflict. Singer Tina Turner was in the middle of a major career renaissance thanks to some well-crafted pop songs and music videos that showcased her nuclear-powered performances. Even though Turner's only scripted role before Thunderdome was The Acid Queen in 1975's Tommy, she was tapped to play Auntie Entity, Max's main antagonist.

Auntie runs Bartertown, a village in the wasteland fueled by the methane contained in pig manure. She has built a society in the midst of the ruins of the old world by virtue of her own will and association with Master, a little person who knows how to process the manure to create fuel. But Master, aided by his huge bodyguard Blaster, has begun to assert his control over Bartertown and Auntie needs him removed without appearing to be involved. Enter Max, who has wandered into Bartertown in search of his wagon, camels and supplies that were stolen by an airplane pilot. Auntie makes a deal with Max that if he fights and kills Blaster in the Thunderdome, she will replace his possessions.

Max reneges on the deal when he learns Blaster has a child's mind, but Auntie takes this hard and sends him out into the desert to die. He is discovered by a group of children living in a desert oasis -- they are the survivors and descendants of a jumbo jet that crashed nearby and are awaiting the return of the adults who promised to find rescue, led by the jet's pilot, Captain Walker. Max proves a disappointing savior and so some of the children, led by Savannah Nix, leave the oasis to find what's out there on their own. Max has to rescue them before they are sucked into Bartertown as slaves or worse.

The fact that the plot takes so much longer to describe shows one of the weaknesses of Thunderdome compared with Road Warrior, the series' high point. Instead of RW's simple point A to point B story -- Max needs some fuel for his car and in order to get it has to help a group of people at a working oil refinery escape marauders who have surrounded them -- we have this meandering storyline chock full of plot holes and lazy "apocalyptic wasteland" movie clichés. We have the strongman -- or strongwoman, in this case -- ruling a group of people by controlling their resources, the wanderer who just wants to be left alone, the degraded version of the civilization and society we know -- Master calls his power stoppages "embargoes" like the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s and the kids "member" the old world of "highscrapers" and "v-v-video." -- and so on.

Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash scouting locations for Thunderdome, and Miller lost interest in directing it. He did agree to direct action sequences and left the rest to George Ogilvie, who creates an oddly listless action picture that has to ride the iconic character of Mad Max and the charisma of Tina Turner. Neither is enough to ever really energize the movie at the level of its predecessors, and Thunderdome winds up with a chase scene that more or less repeats the same scene from Road Warrior, down to a large truck playing the center role.

For the last 25 years or so, different projects have risen up and fallen by the wayside under the heading of "Mad Max 4." The most recent and most enduring, shepherded by Miller himself, has been called Mad Max: Fury Road and apparently has been filming over the last year. Filmed with a new Max (British actor Tom Hardy), it's supposed to come out in 2012 but nothing's firm.

Although it's very unlikely that Miller could capture lightning in a bottle a third time the way he did with the first two Max movies, it would be nice if this one could wind up the series with a better final memory than the lackluster Thunderdome.