Both Tomorrowland and Mad Max present the apocalypse not as a single peril, but as a convergence of multiple paranoia-inducing concerns: resource scarcity, environmental collapse, nuclear war – just about everything you’d put in a second edition of the Book of Revelation. Yet, whether in trying to prevent the end times, or salvage what little they’ve left unspoiled, both properties embrace the light over the dark. Fury Road and Beyond Thunderdome may be opposing, swaying poles on the spectrum of Mad Max films, but they are ultimately about the same thing: finding hope in a hopeless world. Tomorrowland all-but literalizes and quantifies this same theme, with Casey’s optimism providing a vital 0.0006% margin for error in a futuristic machine from Tomorrowland that predicts the Earth’s certain, imminent destruction.
And just as Bartertown, and Beyond Thunderdome as a whole ran on manure (Max’s coincidental similarity to an etching of Walker is as big a leap as Turner’s villain sparing him in the end out of respect), Tomorrowland is fuelled as much by “gee-golly” enthusiasm as it is refined bullshit. The “make every cent and scrap count” aesthetic of the Mad Max films is lost upon the well-funded aerospace imagineers of Disney. Tomorrowland too often lets its unbridled vision of the future play like a nonsensical one. Bird and Lindelof’s jetpack-flight of fancy hits turbulence whenever addressing core concepts and basic plotting, with barked lines from Clooney like, “Can’t you just be in awe of something without me explaining everything?” doing more to draw attention to script deficiencies than excuse them.
Still, there’s a reason why the shared message of Tomorrowland and Beyond Thunderdome will win out for viewers willing to ignore their haphazard construction. Though less didactic and direct than its spiritual descendant, Beyond Thunderdome offers its hero some manner of redemption, and its world a modicum of hope. In the end, the Lost Tribe is left to rebuild the blasted Sydney that Max helps them reach. It’s no Tomorrow-morrow Land, but it’s a start, and the tribe’s inspirational journey becomes part of a new legend passed down in a nightly “tell.” Tomorrowland ends on a similar note, with a ruined metropolis having been reclaimed by a new generation, one that struggles, and in the short-term, succeeds against the doomsaying of the present.
By grounding their cataclysms rather than sensationalizing them as, say, the scheme of a megalomaniacal robot, Beyond Thunderdome and Tomorrowland are better equipped to earn the uplift they aspire towards. Only by acknowledging tangible fears of what’s coming around the bend can a positive outlook on the future have much value in such fantastically fictional contexts. The exact “tell” of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’s story may have changed in the three decades separating it from Tomorrowland, and the only thing that’s changed about the catastrophes they confront is the odds on which is more likely to get us in the end. But so long as the same fight for hope is still being fought thirty years later, it means at least it hasn’t been lost just yet.