Last Friday, I had the opportunity to watch the film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I knew basically nothing about the film before watching it, so I did not really know what to expect. I ended up not really caring much for the movie. I suppose it was just not my type of movie. I found the action scenes to look ridiculous and fake–almost cartoon-like. I also found the plot to be kind of weak. It felt like they had taken some random scenes and tied them together. For instance, after Max was exiled from Bartertown, he ends up among a group of children. Although the story line involving the children was eventually connected back to the story involving Bartertown, it originally looked as if the movie was starting a completely different plot–almost as if it were a second film. I found this transition to be a bit disjointed as a result.

Perhaps the issue that stood out the most to me was the irrationality behind some of the scenes. Yes, I understand that this was a movie, and so being realistic was not a big goal. However I kept thinking about how impossible some of the scenes were. For instance, how did that one child climb up onto the top of the tail of the crashed jet? Also, how did everyone manage to fit into that plane at the end? Plus I doubt that removing one person would have reduced its weight enough to be able to take off. The biggest question that I had was this: Where were they even getting the fuel for that plane? Isn’t this place supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world, where resources are limited? They are constantly shown to be short on water. Bartertown was powered by the methane produced by pigs waste (which, as my friend pointed out to me, would have been a poor use of resources–it would have been much better to just make ethanol from all of the plants needed to keep the pigs fed). It did not appear to me that this world would possess the fuel required to run that plane. Overall, I found this movie to be quite an unrealistic portrayal of a potential post-apocalyptic world.