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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

After surviving a hit-and-run incident involving a plane, the thick-headed Max makes his way to Bartertown, an oasis in the endless Australian desert. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a further reorganising of the series' mythos, this time paying strict attention to the shape and heft of mid-80s blockbusters. In deference to the market, the ever present sexual danger of the previous films is scaled back and action scenes are now peppered with Chuck Jones sight gags. This time Max must brave a fracturing proto-capitalist milieu, learning how to be a hero again in the process.

Max begins the film as a long-haired hermit loaded down with camels and more pistols than Carlos Ezquerra's El Mestizo. His dealings in Bartertown bring him to the attention of Aunty, a businesswoman looking to consolidate her hold on the settlement. In this section Max is willing to play assassin as long as it benefits him. Previously Max has needed an emotional investment to commit to a particular cause, even if it's something as slippery as pride. Thunderdome's Max begins as the inverse, he needs a reason not to kill.

Despite the PG-13 taming of the wasteland wanderer idea, Thuderdome proceeds from the most nihilistic point yet. Max never stopped moving. In two decades he never found anyone to share the day after with. Max has become a fallen hero, willing to murder someone he doesn't know to put money in his pocket. The third Mad Max then is about a man rediscovering himself bit by bit, testing his limits to redefine who he will be. Along the way several spectral signifiers present themselves to prod Max along.

Certain characters represent key decisions for Max, Thunderdome is rife with doppelgängers lifted from the highwayman's previous lives. The first significant signpost is Blaster, the armoured muscle that helps run Bartertown's subterranean pig farm. Blaster's true face, revealed after Max strikes off his metal helmet with a gigantic mallet, gives our hero pause. Glances are exchanged. Blaster smiles. Max relaxes. Perhaps Max remembers Benno, the strapping farmhand who lived with his friend May in Mad Max? Master talks about his beefy companion in exactly the same way May did - both are said to have the mind of a child. Either way, Max immediately snaps out of mercenary mode, ditching his weapon and revealing Aunty's seditious plot to the assembled crowd. Noble qualities are beginning to re-emerge.

Jedediah the aircraft pilot who mugged Max at the beginning of the film is played by Bruce Spence, who previously starred as the Gyro Captain in Mad Max 2. Aside from both character's aeronautical bent, there's little evidence to suggest they're both the same man. We were told by the Feral Boy's closing narration that Gyro lived out his days as head of the great Northern tribe, not as a bleach blonde sky pirate. Apart from an opportunity to bring back the wonderfully slimy Spence, Jed plays like visual shorthand to stir something in Max - lanky beanpoles as an avatar for aerial escape.

Most importantly of all there's Savannah, the surrogate mother to a gang of lost children. Savannah is the sea change in Max, the person whose actions force him to stop and consider what he has lost and who he has become. Savannah is youth, decency and a sense of adventure, everything Max no longer has. She's Max's dead wife Jessie reimagined as a spear-wielding teenager, a female equal to The Road Warrior. Primarily, Savannah is used to demonstrate how far Max has fallen.

After Max refuses to be recognised as a messiah, the braver factions within the child tribe set off to find their promised land. Max uses a rifle and his physical power to restrain them, striking Savannah unconscious in the process. The children collectively wince. The film cuts to a scene later that day, the kids huddled together under a primitive log ceiling. They look glum. Savannah is bound and gagged while Max, dressed in furs, gorges himself on fruit. It's a small, fleeting scene but it's probably the most important sequence for Max the character. This is his lowest point, Max falling into the same vile behavioural patterns as his psychotic enemies.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is an uneven film. Its hero barely drives it, preferring to take a backseat and react his way through situations. It's telling that in the film's concluding chase we spend far more time following the misadventures of Ironbar, Aunty's muscle, than Max. Thunderdome is discursive and meandering where the first two films were dynamic and relentlessly kinetic. We spend a massive amount of time in the company of white children dressed as Aboriginal Australians telling pidgin tales about a boring, specifically nuclear apocalypse. Action scenes are also few and far between, seemingly built to stress the more exciting moments from the previous year's mega-hit Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

What Thunderdome has going for it though is a certain kind of bravery. It doesn't just put its hero at a disadvantage, it organically takes him to place that borders on the repulsive. The desert photography is relentlessly beautiful and directors George Miller and George Ogilvie aren't afraid to stop the film dead to detail their world. In these moments the film crackles. There's very little in the post-apocalyptic canon as poignant as a little girl and boy huddling around a dusty old record player to learn French.

Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior

Mad Max 2 is a narrowing of focus, a rawer model of film than its predecessor, stripped of extraneous features like hesitation or emotional availability. There's no safety net here. Everybody acts out of pure, avaricious instinct. Even the Bronze are gone. Given their highway patrol outfits, Lord Humongous' marauders might even be what's left of the police. A mono 4:3 recap gives us the skinny upfront, the Cold War boiled over and society ate itself. Max has survived, buried his family and wandered out into the wasteland to become something mythic.

The events of Mad Max were predicated on Max's ability to love and, when he lost those closest to him, to use that emotion to engine his hate. This Max is a burnt out veteran, an expert traversing the desert in search of the only thing that matters in this world - gasoline. Stagnation is death. Better to keep moving. Mad Max's dissolved editing process is reorganised as a chase narrative - flee and forget. For their sequel George Miller, and screenwriters Terry Hayes and Brian Hannant take a leaf out of the Akira Kurosawa playbook, transforming their hero into a post-fall Ronin.

Although the morality here is a little more binary than in either Yojimbo or A Fistful of Dollars, the basic blueprint remains intact - a rootless wanderer antagonises two warring groups before settling down long enough to help a child. Mad Max 2 is an exceptional stranger film with the added benefit of knowing the events that shaped the man. Sergio Leone is stressed again in Max's relationship with his foil, the Gyro Captain. Their callous deals within deals recalling Blondie and Tuco's interactions in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

George Miller is one of those rare directors that understands action as something more than punctuation. The chase sequence that swamps Mad Max 2's finale is a mini movie with its own rhythms and reveals. A silent stunt spectacular built around the idea of how a tribe of Neanderthals, armed with arrows and grappling hooks, might halt a monstrous, speeding truck. A battered Max pilots the tanker, incidentally the greatest technological force we've yet seen, against the fragile insects that buzz around him. Miller's sequence is infectious and exciting primarily because it was obviously incredibly dangerous to create. Real cars buckle and break in the path of the tanker, stunt men tumble through the air with legs locked at unseemly angles. Miller hurls us back and forth, drinking in the convoy one minute, wincing at steel hands around Max's throat the next.

Action is typically resolved much how we expect in films. Cause and effect never getting much more complicated than a basic call and response. Mad Max 2 is completely different, its thinking is inventive, designed to confound. This unusual ordering best demonstrated by an early attempt to slow the eighteen wheeler. A biker hurls a tethered hook at the tanker's rear gun pod, ensnaring one of the settlers helping Max. There's a brief pause to linger on the pain of the trapped man before physics kicks in. The rusty old dune buggy at the other end of the rope weighs a fractional amount compared to the tanker. It upends and breaks, dragged behind like a trophy. Miller and his team aren't interested in brief, shocking confrontations anymore. They're remaking Buster Keaton's The General in hell. Over thirty years later, nothing else even comes close.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is about a life completely dedicated to equalising a situation. Thulsa Doom, an otherworldly, apparently eternal magician, ransacks Conan's village, slaughtering his parents and his people. The child doesn't say a word. Instead he drinks in his enemy's face and flag, making them his motor. Sold into slavery and forced to suffer punishing manual labour, Conan abides, using the appalling situation to transform his body into the tool he needs for revenge.

Conan the Barbarian endures and enchants because it is about a man who is completely unbeatable. Every step in his life is designed to bring him back to the snake priest who ruined it. He doesn't run from his destiny, he embraces it. He races forwards, screaming, sword held high. Conan doesn't even chaff, you have to seek out a Director's Cut to hear him reflect and complain. The film, like the rest of John Milius' work, taps right into a basic, almost embarrassing facet of unreconstructed masculinity - the desire to be remote and unconquerable. It's male emotional autism on a vast, panoramic scale. If, as JG Ballard hailed it, Mad Max 2 is punk's Sistine Chapel then Conan is the heavy metal equivalent of Michelangelo's David.

In his break-out role, the Austrian Oak is photographed like an expensive special effect. He exists centre frame in long, loving takes. There's a vein of body shock running through Arnold Schwarzenegger's first few screen appearances, as if filmmakers struggled to properly contextualise this horrifying figure. Hercules in New York found him sexually overwhelming, the camera pushed in porno close like some marginal other trying to grasp at him. The Terminator presented him as a mechanical horror - a gleaming metal skeleton coated in puffy musculature to facilitate efficient gun reloads.

Milius seems to regard the star as a natural phenomena. Milius and Duke Callaghan shoot Schwarzenegger like a mountain. A still, emotionless thing comfortable with silence and contemplation. The Martian deserts of Spain and the visual language of Sergio Leone is re-purposed to tell a pagan rock-opera in which long-haired roadies battle it out for mystical supremacy. Conan isn't about talking or explaining. He's all doing. Everything is communicated physically, his thought process reported through tight close-ups on Schwarzenegger's face bracketed by Basil Poledouris' pounding, prehistoric score. Milius wasn't considering Arnold as the heavily accented body builder he was, he saw him as the larger-than-life megastar he would become. This complete confidence actualises Schwarzenegger in the same way that The Wheel of Pain warped the young barbarian.