I’m not one who is overly familiar with the lore of the world of Mad Max, but this movie served as a standalone without too many references to the larger franchise. I also appreciated how the film didn’t seem “overproduced”  in spite of the many action sequences, with the multitude of stunts serving as a contrast to the CGI-rich action movies of today. Ultimately, I enjoyed Beyond Thunderdome as a return to an older era from the cliches of modern cinema.

In spite of the problems that often occur in movies and TV shows that focus on children in what in clearly a world for adults, Beyond Thunderdome pulled off the parent and kid dynamic. All of them serves to humanize the characters in a way: the reveal that Master Blaster’s symbiosis was intended for survival rather than domination shows off a merciful side in the thug who was presented as a secondary villain to Auntie; Max turns out not to be a callous protagonist in that he grows to care for the stranded children. My one complaint is the complete lack of common sense that the children show is designed to propel the plot rather than result from their naivete.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is the the third film in the Mad Max series, so it has already been established that the world is post-apocalyptic. In this film, he meets with a group of hopeful children searching for a captain to pilot their salvaged plane and bring them back to the world before. Max has to take it upon himself to break the news to these children that the world they have been waiting to return to no longer exists. He instead brings them to Bartertown and works to overthrow the people in charge so that it is no longer a dog eat dog environment.

These post-apocalyptic movies always make me think about how people can change so quickly. I like to believe that they are a gross exaggeration of how humans would react, and that we would instead begin rebuilding rather than turn into savages. It also makes you appreciate the society we have formed. It is not perfect and in many places it is far below ideal, but at least we don’t have a universal terror. Even if these are just movies, I hope the thought of a fallout of this magnitude would deter the majority from allowing nuclear destruction to occur in the modern era.

On Friday, we watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and since this is the first time I have watched any of the Mad Max films, I did not have much to work with in terms of expectations. While much of the plot was a bit confusing to me in the beginning, a quote that stood out to me was during the fight between Mad Max and Blaster, the giant that was being controlled by a man named Master. The fight was in a dome/nest like enclosure with the rules being “Two men enter, one man leaves.”. In the context of the fight, I didn’t think that this quote meant much. In fact, it was to be taken literally since it would be an all-out fight where one man would kill the other.

However, I did feel that this quote played back to the end of the movie when Mad Max sacrifices himself to let all the children and Master leave on the plane. It seems that Mad Max “entered” the mission to save the children since the children were seeking to return to a civilized world. And in order for them to leave, Mad Max had to be the one who was left behind in order for the others to survive.

What I did not get, however, was why Mad Max would even risk his life for the others. Once he comes upon the children that have been hiding and waiting for a captain to bring them to salvation, Mad Max immediately denies that he’s their savior. Instead, he claims that he is just a regular man that happened to pass by. But his actions say otherwise. This led to me to think that Mad Max was the indirect meaning of his quote. When he sees that the children are in danger, he puts himself out there to save them and in doing so risks his own life.

All in all, I think that the movie was okay. I was not particularly interested in the plot itself since it was a bit confusing for me to jump straight into the third movie of the series. However, I am certainly interesting in checked out the previous installments to see what they hold.

Upon first glance, there is not much to be said about Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It is the third in the series, and the second one to feature the titular character, Mad Max, surviving in the hostile, barely-hospitable Australian wasteland. There seems to be no innovation here: only a continuation of the previous movies’ breakthroughs.

And yet, it has received critical acclaim, immortalized by a cult following. Though it isn’t the first of the Mad Max series featured in this post-apocalyptic realm, it is the first to contain a semblance of civilization in the blasted wasteland.

Bartertown: a cluster of ramshackle hovels, which could hardly be considered a town. However there still remains a semblance of order. Their denizens stay not only because the deserts outside of Bartertown are riddled with raiders and sinkholes, but also because of their sacrosanct “law”:

“Two men enter. One man leaves.”

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome may seem samey or corny to us, but for its time, it was definitely a new take on cinema. Though Westerns had been in decline, a simple change of setting proved to be wildly successful. Instead of cars, cowboys ride cars and buggies; instead of tyrannical sheriffs or bold vigilantes, we have Auntie, Master, and Mad Max himself. Instead of mysterious and hostile Indians, we have the tribal coven of children from the crashed 747 flight. Yet, one key theme remains the same. Though the denizens of Mad Max seem to be struggling to survive, they are in reality struggling to maintain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly brutal landscape, one which is hell-bent on destroying the sanity of man.

Different people in the movie have different ways to accomplish that. The children cling to their belief in their exodus to civilization. Auntie thirsts for power over Bartertown.  Yet, Max only clings to his humanity by upholding a sense of right, one which had been engrained into him from his days as a policeman. He was a guardian before the world ended, and he still clings to that need to protect the weak.

Any conflicts the characters may have had between each other were due to their motivations, which were spurred by the burgeoning world around them.

To be honest, I thought this movie was weird. I came away with this impression likely from a combination of not having seen the prequels (apparently, this Mad Max was third in the original series) and not being able to discern the dialogue at times. However, I appreciated some parts.

I don’t think I could contribute any meaningful comments on the plot or its role in the series as a whole, so I’ll discuss what I thought about the aesthetic of the movie. As I was watching it, I was reminded of ‘Rango’, the 2011 western-esque animation starring Jack Sparrow as a chameleon. Back when I first saw it, I absolutely enjoyed it, maybe partly because I was going through a spaghetti-western phase at the time. A distinct memory I have is the discussion about the movie with a close friend. For him, he said he hated the movie because it was ‘ugly’. I argued that it was an intentional ugliness that was central to the movie’s identity, as the movie wouldn’t be as effective with ‘Finding Nemo’ textures and palettes. Anyhow, I was reminded of his point throughout the Bartertown scenes in ‘Beyond Thunderdome’, as everything about the town was ugly. It felt stifling at times, and although this was definitely intentional, I can understand how my friend might have felt when he watched ‘Rango’. Although, the rusty steampunk (?) look of the vehicles in the chase scenes towards the end of ‘Beyond Thunderdome’ was pretty great, and I can see why they stuck with that look in the most recent Mad Max film (I haven’t seen it, but similar chase scenes with similar vehicles were shown in the trailers for it).

Now that I think about it, ‘Beyond Thunderdome’ and ‘Rango’ share a theme: an outsider shows up in some established community, he’s mistaken for someone else, he’s expected to save the day, he disappoints everyone, and then he ends up saving the day. Interesting~

The movie Mad Max was one of the most interesting movies I have watched thus far in the Flora’s Film collection. One of the main points of the movie was to acknowledge the presence of technology in our lives. The children were stranded on the island. They wanted to go back to the civilized world with technology and modern devices. Technology has made our lives easier by making information more accessible. Sometimes we take our access to technology such as personal computers and smartphones granted. We do not realize the tremendous importance it has in our lives. In addition, there was no religion in Mad Max, although there were a set of principles people seem to follow. People followed a “leader.” Similarly to God, the leader was someone who people laid expectations on. Overall, I think the movie was decent.

Watching “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” made me think how much technology impacts our lives. The main plot is about a man (Max) who exiled to a desert and ended up in an area where Boeing 747 crashed. The children who were survivors of the accident were left in the oasis desert by their parents. They were desperate to go back to fly to their home land and live in civilization. However, they weren’t able to fly back home since they had no one to fix the air plane. They thought that Max will take them to the civilized world that they saw in the pictures left by their parents which have sky scrapers and bright cities. Personally, the main take away from the movie was appreciation of the technology that we take for granted these days and using them effectively for the common good. I am not surprised that this 1985 movie was chosen over the current movies. I definitely encourage you to watch it over the break!

I walked into Flora’s Friday Film ready to see Mad Max Fury Road, as I didn’t realize “Mad Max” was a larger concept. Instead, I saw a younger Mel Gibson and Tina Turner in a film which spoke about the nature of civilization and naivety of children beyond the low-budget but surprisingly well-done action scenes.

Mad max is the prototypical loner-hero combo, a wandering nomad. When he battles Blaster in the Thunderdome, Max stops, sparing Blaster’s life when he finds out he is mentally challenged. His behavior sharply contrasts that of the residents of bartertown, who show no mercy and demand a death. Civilization is not so civilized, and this installment of Mad Max shows the humans living together may congregate towards more feral, mob-like mentalities instead of good.

On the other hand, the children who rescue Mad Max are innocent and unknowing in nature, akin to the lost boys of the Peter Pan story. The create a reality for themselves based on limited evidence and are able to stand by it despite the accumulation of facts presented.

The movie caused me to think about how humans get from being those children, to being members of a society whose core beliefs are not always good. The contrast between individual and group, and child and man run deep, and may be astonishingly accurate even now.

Last Friday I attended the showing of Mad Max in Rose Main. I had never seen the film before, and was thus surprised by the societal commentary present. The depiction of the primitive law, and the way in which people conduct themselves in a post-nuclear society spoke to certain sociological implications of human nature and formation of society.

Specifically, the Thunderdome and “break a deal, spin the wheel” laws were interesting in their basis in retributive justice, which we have started to stray away from currently as a society. It was incredibly interesting to see the way in which the film explained the formation/need for order in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic society. Another component of the commentary I found interesting was the society of children who believed Mad Max was their deity figure. This scene in particular said much about the formation of religion, and has interesting implications for the way in which information can be distorted through generations to form a mythology, in addition to the way in which religion is a product of disastrous circumstances.

Overall, I found the film entertaining and interesting from an ethnographic point of view. The film’s setting really makes you think about the way our own society would degrade and rebuild in the case of such a circumstance.

Last Friday, I attended Rose’s screening of the post-apocalyptic film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Although I didn’t particularly enjoy the movie, I could see why it was an important film for its time. It was released in 1985, one of the final years of the Cold War. Through this lens, we can view the movie as an encapsulation of the fears of the American people, who foresaw nuclear devastation and destruction by the USSR. These anxieties towards the Soviet Union are manifested in two important scenes. The first is Bartertown’s (the town to which protagonist Max travels to take back his stolen belongings) punishment of Max, as they send him to the “Gulag.” Gulags were, in reality, Stalinist labor camps, where high mortality rates and difficult working conditions befell people sent there. The second scene referencing the USSR is that in which a Bartertown resident is thrown into a pig pen to be eaten by the animals. I saw the use of pigs as a clear reference to Animal Farm, an allegory in which author George Orwell uses farm animals to portray the Russian Revolution and Stalinist era of the USSR. In the book, pigs represent historical Russian figures, including Stalin and Lenin. Therefore, in this scene,  the pigs could be construed as a symbol of the USSR, and their near consumption of a Bartertown citizen as a representation of the fears of the American people.

In addition to manifesting Cold War fears, Mad Max also makes interesting points about what it means to be a civilization. The movie portrays civilization and savagery, two normally dichotomous concepts, as synonymous. Bartertown is a symbol of both the civilized world and barbaric tendencies. With infrastructure, livestock (pigs), a source of electrical energy (porcine feces), merchants, blacksmiths, and a bar, the town can be viewed as a civilization in the post-apocalyptic world. On the other hand, the level of savagery is profound: residents challenge other residents to fight in Bartertown’s Thunderdome, where “two men enter and one man leaves.” When Max enters the Thunderdome for a fight to the death, the citizens of Bartertown are sadistically thrilled and energized that they will get to see someone killed. This movie thus makes the important point that savagery and civilization are not mutually exclusive. It reminds us that we must pay attention to our own civilization because even though we have infrastructure, a Constitution, roads, and settled homes, we are not immune to the possibility of savagery and barbarism.

Last Friday, I watched Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in the Rose dining hall. I had seen the newest installment, Fury Road, when it came out, and I thoroughly enjoyed it not only because of the action but because of feminist icon Furiosa. Fury Road being my first exposure to this post-apocalyptic universe, it was interesting to see how dated this movie, made in 1985, was compared to the 2015 film. The color and resolution quality of Beyond Thunderdome was one noticeable difference, but another obvious indicator could be seen from Mel Gibson’s mullet, a classic 80’s hairstyle, compared to Tom Hardy’s shorter style.

While I found Beyond Thunderdome interesting as a time piece, beyond that I found nothing extremely compelling about the plot. However, I did think the dynamic between the characters Master and Blaster was an interesting statement about the division between mind and body. Master is a dwarfed man who sits on the shoulders of the physically able and strong Blaster, and together they form one character “Masterblaster.” Master is portrayed as intelligent and power-hungry, with a deep understanding of the political heirarchy of Bartertown. He knows that though he seemingly is in charge of literal pig shit, he in fact controls the whole town because the fecal matter of the pigs powers the electricity, and without power, the town cannot function. Blaster is  portrayed as the brawn, following the commands of Master to a T. He is revealed during his fight with Max to be developmentally disabled with the mental functions of a child, as Master screams “Don’t kill Blaster! He’s just a baby!” On his own, Master is disabled by his dwarfed height, and without Master, Blaster is lost and without guidance. This symbiotic relationship to me represents that the two components, mind and body, though functional on their own, are incomplete without core aspects of the other.

I really enjoyed the 80s vibe of Mad Max, but that’s probably the only good thing I can say about it. While I am a fan of apocalyptic stories, it was difficult to see the messages, if any, that Mad Max intended for audiences to grasp. Perhaps it’s one of those movies that you should watch multiple times before you understand the meaning. Perhaps it would’ve been better had I seen the first two movies.

It was a typical post-apocalypse film, but toward the end Max meets a lot of raggedy children, survivors of a crashed 747, which reminded me of Peter Pan’s “Lost Boys.” As with all movies, I try to look for symbols. I found it interesting that society in Bartertown is not actually that different from society today. There is a clear separation of classes in the movie: the ruler Aunty, the “regular” folk, and the pig workers underground. We worship sports and entertainment just like Bartertowners love the Thunderdome.

But I think most importantly–and I’m not completely sure this was intentional–it seems that in hard times people will always look up to someone, or something. Many people on this planet are religious, and while there was no religion in Mad Max, there was always someone that people looked up to or yearned for. For the people of Bartertown, this was Aunty and, for a little bit, Master Blaster. As for the kids? They basically worshipped the idea of their captain coming back to save them. In fact, they were so sure that when they found Max they believed he was their lost captain. Of course, Max made clear that he was not, but eventually, after saving them multiple times, was Max not their hero, their captain? Did he not eventually lead them to safety and thus become the captain whose story they carved into the sides of the oasis?

Perhaps we should remember that even if something we believe it isn’t true, there may be something else that’s just as good, and that when people are desperate, they will believe anything. Like fake news.

On Friday I watched Mad Max 3-Beyond Thunderdome , a 1985 post-apocalyptic film starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. The film is the third in a series shot in Australia in a future world that exists after some kind of nuclear disaster. Here, Mad Max on his motorcycle meets up with two separate societies. Bartertown is run by Aunt Entity, played by Tina Turner who is ruthless and corrupt. The town runs on methane produced by pig’s waste and anyone who wants to challenge a rival fights them to the death in the thunderdome. Max forgoes killing a rival who he fights because Aunt Entity tells him to–the Blastmaster, because he is cognitively like a child. Bartertown is run on greed, which leads to unending violence. The other society is a group of children, the young tribe, who have survived an airplane crash and are waiting to return to the past. They are innocent and in the end of the film represent the future of the world. The film was action packed and Mel Gibson is always easy on the eyes. Tina Turner was good too, but I didn’t like the violent scenes, especially those in the thunderdome. For a Friday movie that was voted on as number one, the action scenes probably won out. I really wasn’t that impressed with the message or the film.

I was excited to watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third and final movie in the original Mad Max series, because I had heard good things about the franchise but had never watched any of the movies. The only context I had about the series prior to watching the movie last week was that it took place in a post-apocalyptic world. In all honesty, I hated the movie. The action scenes seemed way too over-the-top, the children from the oasis were annoying as hell (I must have heard at least a hundred squeals of “Captain Walker!” and each one was more irritating than the last), and in the end nothing seemed to be accomplished aside from that the children finally found “Tomorrow-morrow Land,” which was honestly just a city ruins wasteland.” Aunty was still in control of Bartertown, and on top of that, Mad Max had destroyed the methane refinery so the entire town had no power source. Perhaps Max had some kind of grudge on Aunty, but the entire town should suffer for it.

I suppose one thing that the film did correctly was the idea of Bartertown. I guess I never really thought about how a post-apocalyptic society might look like. Bartertown’s political structure is backwards–it has a near all-powerful leader and justice is administered with a wheel of fortune. Conflicts can be resolved by staging a gladiator-style fight to the death. I suppose in an environment where survival isn’t taken for granted, political fairness comes at a much lower priority. It makes sense that all goods are bartered for in a place where new currencies can’t be produced.

I also found the speech of the children kind of interesting. Not really knowing anything about the world that Mad Max takes place in, I’m assuming that they were born after the war that tore civilization apart, and a lot of what they know about English, they learned from each other. So as a result, some of the words and grammar is off. I suppose the scene where Max goes through Captain Walker’s old photographs is where South Park got the idea for “Member Berries” from.

I won’t lie, I came to this movie thinking it was the new Mad Max, but I really enjoyed the old version. Obviously this one doesn’t have all of the amazing special effects that the new one has, but it has much better dialogue and a more interesting storyline.

That said, I found many themes in the movie very powerful–specifically the idea of justice. Justice sprang up numerous times throughout the movie, but the most concrete example was when Max was forced to spin the wheel of punishment. Tina Turner looked at him and said “justice is blind”, as if the randomization of a verdict somehow equated to the idea of our justice system. Blind justice in American law refers to the impartiality of judges. Theoretically, it should not matter what color you are or what your economic status is, in court you should only be judged based on the crime you are accused of committing. It is entirely debatable about whether or not this principle is a reality–personally I believe that the attempt by the courts to be “race-blind” has created a new kind of racialized discrimination. Either way, the idea of a completely random punishment is at odds with the American justice system, which relies heavily on an adversarial “combat” by lawyers to reveal the truth.

I suppose, in a way, Turner simply took upon herself the role of judge, and the clamoring horde screaming for blood constituted a type of “jury of one’s peers”. Nevertheless, Barter Town definitely adhered to their twisted idea of justice. Their laws are what allowed the town to function, and every person knew it. Thus, they obeyed, and they propagated the system.

Last week I went to the Flora Friday Film night where we watched the 1985 science fiction action film Mad Max. To be honest, I went into last week thinking I was about the watch the new Mad Max: Fury Road, expecting a modern Hollywood blockbuster action film. Instead, I was surprised to see a cult classic starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. Like many movies now regarded as cult classics, first time viewers may not always get the appeal that has made the movie so popular. I was one of those viewers. While Mad Max had action, comedy, and suspense, it came off as cliché and sometimes even tongue and cheek. Most of the movie was incredibly predictable, with moments only memorable because of how cheesy they were. Perhaps it was the style of the time and hasn’t aged well, but I found the movie boring.

On another note, it was interesting to see how revered Mel Gibson was at the time, and how much his status has changed. When he first appeared on screen, I heard some people around me give a mild groan. It was only 5 years ago that the tape of his rantings was released, I don’t expect his reputation to recover in such a quick time.

Some people I watched the movie with quipped that “oh this movie takes place in a future California,” referring to California’s severe drought. While that drought has thankfully ended, and their comments were in jest, the movie does show how crazy and desperate people become once natural resources are depleted. None of this will happen in the near future, or even moderate future, but like in the movie, people won’t hesitate to murder if it means they can get more water, or oil, or whatever scarce resources they need.

Overall, I wouldn’t watch Mad Max again. The film was simply too boring and predictable. It had a few redeeming qualities, but not enough to warrant a recommendation.