The official trailer for George Miller and George Ogilvie's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome arrived in 1985 and announced the franchise's most commercially ambitious entry with a visual spectacle and tonal confidence that perfectly captures the film's more accessible and more varied register. The trailer's central selling points are immediately apparent: Bartertown, the Thunderdome arena, and Tina Turner's Aunty Entity, a villain of such commanding presence and genuine theatrical authority that she gives the franchise its most compelling antagonist since the original's Toecutter. It is a trailer that understood the film's essential appeal clearly, and it presented that appeal with a directness and visual energy that made Beyond Thunderdome one of the most anticipated action films of its year.
First Impressions
The trailer is immediately the franchise's most visually spectacular, with Bartertown's production design conveying the film's world-building ambitions with a confidence and conviction the more intimate original and the more austere Road Warrior did not attempt. Tina Turner's Aunty Entity is introduced with a physical authority and theatrical intelligence that immediately establishes her as the franchise's most compelling villain, and the Thunderdome arena is shown with enough visual detail to convey its remarkable practical filmmaking ambition. The trailer rightly identifies the Bartertown sequences as the film's most dramatically effective and most visually inventive passages.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the Bartertown setting, introduces the Thunderdome premise, and glimpses the film's action sequences with enough detail to establish its considerable physical ambition. Aunty Entity's relationship with Max is shown with enough dramatic complexity to establish the film's most interesting antagonist dynamic, and the trailer pinpoints the visual spectacle of Bartertown and the Thunderdome as the film's primary selling points. The footage is honest about the film's priorities: this is a more theatrical, more varied, and more commercially minded entry than its predecessors.
Music and Sound
Tina Turner's We Don't Need Another Hero gives the trailer a sonic identity that is entirely of its moment and highly effective within the film's more commercially accessible register: a song that captures the film's tonal shift from the austerity of The Road Warrior to this entry's more emotionally direct and more open approach. Maurice Jarre's score provides the action sequences with a propulsive energy that suits the film's spectacular register, and the combination of the two gives the trailer a sonic range the previous entries did not attempt.
Most Memorable Moment
The Thunderdome arena sequence, shown with enough visual detail to convey its remarkable practical filmmaking ambition and genuine physical excitement, is the trailer's most purely spectacular image: a demonstration of world-building of such inventive specificity that it immediately establishes the film's action credentials as something genuinely new in the franchise's history. Two men enter, one man leaves. The trailer makes that proposition feel genuinely thrilling.
Trailer Verdict
A visually spectacular trailer for the franchise's most commercially ambitious and most dramatically uneven entry. Beyond Thunderdome is a film of extraordinary first half and adequate second half, and this trailer sells the extraordinary first half with a theatrical confidence and visual energy that few pieces of franchise marketing from the mid-1980s could match. Aunty Entity alone is worth the price of admission.