Customer Reviews

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

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This is one of the greatest Original Motion Picture soundtrack CD. The sound quality, music in order, everything is excellent. Tina Turner is fantastic of course. This is a keep Album for a years to come.

If you are a Tina fan, you can't pass up the soundtrack to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. On it you will find two of her best songs. The huge hit (and one of her signature tunes) We Don't Need Another Hero and the smokey One of the Living. You can find We Don't Need Another Hero on greatest hits albums, but good luck finding One of the Living. You will find it only on this album. Another cool thing about this record is the instrumental version of We Don't Need Another Hero. It is soft, sexy and you truly appreciate the incredible vocals Tina did on this song. Try and sing the "Is it all or nothing" part of the song during the instrumental version and see how you compare to Tina. Added bonus: the great drawing of Tina as Auntie and of course, Mel. Nuff said. Unfortunately, like the film, the parts without Tina suck. The balance of the album is background music for the film. Bartertown is kind of interesting. With only two songs from Tina, they had to fill up the rest of the album with something. The soundtrack to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is best suited to the hardcore Tina fan.

Although Tina Turner's confectionary pop tunes received more airplay, Maurice Jarre's score for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome far surpassed them in terms of sheer originality and musical artistry, and is the real showpiece of this soundtrack. The 80s was an enormously fruitful decade for Jarre, who took home an Oscar for 1984's A Passage To India, and followed it up with scores for popular hits like Witness, Fatal Attraction and Ghost. Thunderdome was an unusual assignment for the composer, who tended to shy away from action movies, but the film inspired some of his finest work, which is imaginative, thematically captivating and exquisitely orchestrated.

Alas, as an 80s release, the album content had to fit within the more limited parameters of the LP format -- hence the CD's brief running time. Moreover, Thunderdome was typical of Hollywood studio politics of that decade, when executives insisted pop songs be shoehorned into films where they didn't necessarily belong, in order to help promote the movie to teens (via radio, MTV videos, etc.). Thus Jarre was obliged to share the album with these unremarkable (and dated) Tina Turner songs, and, more regrettably, pare-down his score (which was over an hour in length) to roughly 25 minutes.

However, those 25 minutes do include much of his best music from the film, and are a kaleidoscope of exotic timbre and instrumentation. Jarre studied ethnic music at the Conservatoire de Paris, and his acumen is put to good use here. While in many ways traditional orchestral film music (performed by the Royal Philharmonic) the score also includes unusual additions such as three Ondes Martenot, a digeridoo, a fujara -- and even a whip! The result is a musical tapestry of soaring triumph, violent suspense and otherworldly beauty.

GNP Crescendo's packaging is attractively put together, with stills from the film, and detailed, insightful commentary notes by soundtrack expert Paul Andrew MacLean.

Length:: 0:46 Mins