Time counts and keeps countin'.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — 3.5/5

I understand the bad feelings about this movie. Mad Max, going by the first, second, and fourth entries, are serious movies. They're epic worlds; a reverence to an old moral code within the new alien planet which is here on Earth. All solemnity; 'fun' as a fortunate byproduct. Odd, because George Miller has a comic book artists' mind, full of fun words and new images. Mad Max. Thunderdome. Aunty Entity. MasterBlaster. Big words, beautiful images—but often stupid. There's an inherent silliness at the foundation. And so here, in this one, we see Max as the last serious man in a deeply unserious world. I think where this movie series most succeeds is with a light look at continuity, letting each successive entry fade further from reality. Max enter the realm of mythological creature, appearing every twenty years or so to see how the world has changed. His separateness from everyone else puts him as a god coming down to mingle with a humanity that he can no longer understand. In this, it becomes almost a comedy. A light adventure with incredible weight, a smidge of Spielberg, more at home with 'Hook' than the previous two entries. And, for me, it works. Not by being great, by being the right amount of good. It's easier for me to put this on, or Fury Road (of which this movie almost feels like a practice run), than Road Warrior or Mad Max. Those movies, both great, have too much gravity. These last two float. And while Fury Road takes the silliness completely seriously, this one plays the serious at odds with the silly. So, tonally, a little weird, I admit. But fuck it, it works for me. Sometimes things are better when they're only good.