MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME- The Final Chapter

The third installment in the Mad Max saga has an even bigger scope,  bigger production values, goofy 80´s popsongs in the credits and Tina Turner. It also features less violence and carnage, but has also interesting quirky characters and setups. Not too mention plenty of pigs, long  before someone told George Miller  that four hundred pigs was way too much and  Miller decided to take it down a notch and make a smaller more intimate film about just one pig; Babe.

Where The Road Warrior was for the most part a silent film, this one has much more dialogue, is a slow burner of a film and focuses more of world building mythology. The result is a very impressive, ambitious movie. With four-hundred pigs and a dozen kids. In the last movie, gasoline was a commodity. Now it is pigshit. The manure creates enough energy to sustain the large community that is Bartertown that Max drifts into.

In the opening of the film Max loses his car and tracks the thief to Bartertown. A town where you can barter. The settlement is involved in a bit of a power struggle. The overworld is controlled by Auntie (Tina Turner) and the underworld in which the pigs are being fed and handled is controlled by the dynamic duo Blaster/Master. Blaster is a big doofus muscleman and Master  a midget who rides on Blasters back and is pretty much in charge of the power supply and is in a better bargaining position for power than Auntie.

Auntie sees an opportunity to change the power dynamic and hires Max to get rid of her compettition. This leads to a duel within something that is in the title of the film. Thunderdome. but not beyond it. Not yet. A gladiator arena where two men enters and one man leaves. It is a very impressive sequence with plenty of extras and with Maurice Jarres bombastic score you know this is something different from the previous films.  As it turns out, Auntie sets Max up and put him in exile from Bartertown. Max is being forced into the desert (Beyond Thunderdome) and collapses there from the dry heat. A bunch of kids finds him, keep telling themselves that he is a savior and is going to take them away. Jesus, kids! Do we really Need Another Hero?

Somehow I used to think as this as a post apocalyptic Peter Pan. But instead of taking the kids away to a Neverneverland, Max tells them it´s just a bunch of bullshit and you are better off living where you are now, you ungrateful brats.

You might think that this movie severely lacks in  the automotive vehicular destruction. Well, not really. Max takes the kids back to Bartertown and manages to escape with a really cool train. Auntie does not like that so she sends her army of terrain vehicles after it.

The vehicles are actually cooler looking than anything in Road Warrior, but less impressive than Fury Roads steroid induced monster machines.So we do have a cool chase sequence to end the film. And Mxx is left in the desert, leaving the kids well on their way to discover the ruins of an ancient civilization of assholes. (SPOILER:It´s us)

And in the desert has he been, ever since. Forgotten with time and generations. Until...