Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is every bit as different from Mad Max 2 as The Road Warrior was from the original film. The residual 70s naturalism of Mad Max is entirely absent now, replaced instead with an exotic maximalism whose closest correlate in George Miller’s career would occur several decades later, in Three Thousand Years of Longing. As slick opening credits cross the screen to a lushly produced Tina Turner song backed by a Maurice Jarre score, the aesthetic is as much music video as feature film. There’s a sense of having cast off the material shackles of the first two instalments, reflected in the opening shots, which firmly anchor Miller’s dystopian landscape in hyperbolic aerial perspectives, by way of a soaring set of images from an aeroplane so high that you can see the curvature of the earth. Space has vanished or become hyperreal, collapsed into a desert that no longer bears any traces of a road. Instead, we’re presented with the virtual, undifferentiated space of early video games.

That all paves the way for the only Mad Max film to focus on adventure more than action, along with the most lavish world-building of the original trilogy. The desert is not only dominant, it has expanded to galactic proportions, turning each settlement into a discrete planetary world. We’re closer to Star Wars or even Dune here than to the original film (at one point a horse is swallowed by a wormhole-like sand vortex) and this initially jettisons the film of any distinct Australian identity, or at least positions Australia as the crossroads of the universe, both more and less distinct amongst the vast cosmicity of postmodern space. Compared to the first two films Beyond Thunderdome feels prosthetic, exuding a plasticity that often gravitates it towards a series of rides, or discrete worlds in a theme park. This goes hand in hand with a flamboyant historical pastiche, from the camel trains that cross the desert to the rotocoper of the second film, which has now evolved (or devolved) into a World War II-style biplane, housing “the man of the air” from Road Warrior but now clad in Biggles-like goggles. That stylised sense of the past and amusement park-like propulsion into the future also recalls Indiana Jones, especially Temple of Doom, which was released the previous year.

The first part of the narrative sees Mel Gibson’s Max stumbling into Bartertown, a fantasia of what Australia might look like as a themed amusement park “world.” Bartertown is arranged around three distinct zones – below ground, ground level, and above ground. At ground level it is, as the name suggests, a trading post, drawing people from near and far to haggle, exchange and purchase goods. Below ground it is a refinery that turns pig faeces into methane to power the trading post above. Above ground, in an elevated makeshift palace, resides Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), the founder and ruler of Bartertown. The substrate of Bartertown is scatological but by the time it rises to Aunty’s abode it has transmuted into the pure imagism of 80s music video. Aunty’s headquarters are all porosity, curtains billowing, saxophone playing, and hyperreal light and décor fixtures dotting its mise-en-scene. And Bartertown as a whole is a society of the spectacle, insofar as spectacle has become its main economic driver. Above and beyond trading goods, people travel to Bartertown to watch combat in the Thunderdome, a venue where Aunty has turned combat into spectacle in order to absorb and contain the devastating impact of the wars that produced the desert waste.

Upon arriving in Bartertown, Max reluctantly agrees to fight a match in the Thunderdome, against Master Blaster, the ruler of the subterranean refinery, in exchange for Aunty’s protection (if he survives). This marks a shift in the action sensibility of the series from chase to combat although Miller’s distinctly Australian take on the genre remains. While the action in the Thunderdome often feels modelled on WWF – Max and his opponents bouncing off the sides of a spherical enclosure, covered with addictive spectators – the commentary and lexicon of the combat (“Bust a Deal, Spin the Wheel!”) feels straight out of a 70s Australian game show. The ultra-masculine, hyper-muscular, oiled-up physiques of American action cinema are present but not presented as an aspirational ideal so much as an expression of the sadomasochistic perversions of Bartertown in opposition to Max’s starker masculinity.

Unlike American action cinema, Miller never imbues these hyperbolised male bodies, all of which are set up as antagonists to Max, with even the most residual naturalism. If anything, the American action body is frankly presented as a mechanised entity – it turns out that Master Blaster is an unthinking hulk who is remotely controlled by a little person sitting atop his head. To some extent, Max finds it hard to resist these mechanical and spectacular imperatives, since the rules of the Thunderdome dictate that he must be harnessed into the structure itself and use its walls as leverage for swinging into or away from his opponent. Max is somewhat neutralised and emasculated by being reduced to a spectacle in this way and is at risk of becoming just another exotic type sacrificed to the Grand Guignol burlesque of the Thunderdome. No surprise, then, that he disrupts the spectacular imperative, and refuses to kill Master Blaster when he is dissociated into his two human components, which of course leads to Aunty banishing him from Bartertown, bringing the second act of the film into play.

This second act shifts us from Australian grotesque to Australian kitsch, anticipating the luridly exaggerated images of the country that started to circulate in the buildup to the Bicentennial. After being expelled from Bartertown, Max wanders through a landscape that is no longer discernibly Australian but isn’t quite divorced from Australia. Instead this is a hyperreal Australia, composed partly from the real thing and partly from representations of it, in the same way that the society of children that Max discovers in a remote canyon both are and aren’t Indigenous Australians. At this point Beyond Thunderdome becomes an edgy children’s fantasy film along the lines of The Neverending Story, turning Max into a roguish but loveable uncle. The aerial aspirations of the franchise as a whole return in a more naïve register, since it turns out these these children are all survivors of a plane crash who have been waiting for a messianic captain to fly the hull of their wrecked jumbo jet out of the desert. The music and action also takes on a carnival-like quality, and the film as a whole feels a bit like a children’s ride, perhaps explaining why train tracks play such a key role in the closing chase sequence.

That sequence forms the abbreviated third act of the film, and while it doesn’t match the extraordinary climax to The Road Warrior, it’s clear that Miller hasn’t lost any of his directing gifts. The last scene is a showdown between a convoy of cars using the desert as a highway and a plane using it as a runway, with Max leaping off the plane at the last minute to make the critical difference on the ground. In its brinksmanship, its kinetic energy, and in the way it splits the difference between desert and air travel, this is an aptly summative image for a trilogy that would remain self-contained until Fury Road. Still, you can sense Miller’s longing for more world-building in the closing scenes, when the childlike tone abruptly gives way to our first and only glimpses in the franchise to date of post-apocalyptic Sydney. As the escaping plane catches its first sight of the ruined Sydney Harbour Bridge, an intense hush settles over the film, deepening as we soar over a dried-up harbour crater and between abandoned skyscrapers, distant harbingers of the next stage, years and aeons later, of Miller’s dystopia.