So in my write-up of The Road Warrior, I mentioned that the movie had a lot of propulsive energy and well-directed action scenes, but also made zero sense and had no characterization worth speaking of. This sequel betters its predecessor by keeping its strengths and improving on its weaknesses.

The strength part is obvious: Like The Road Warrior, this one has a propulsive pace throughout. We meet Max as he encounters an aerial raider, and within thirty minutes he’s having a fight inside the titular Thunderdome. The movie takes a bit of a break in the middle for him to encounter a group of kids living in an idyllic canyon paradise, but then quickly returns to the action, with a climactic desert chase scene that definitely evokes Fury Road.

And on the weakness front, it solves the “makes no sense” problem by just… not trying. Whereas that movie tried to establish its world as a post-apocalypse with some economic logic behind it, this one is set in a pure sword-and-sorcery fantasy world that also happens to be post-apocalyptic. Does this town make sense? No, but who cares, it’s the sorceress queen’s stronghold, roll with it.

I realize that this sounds a bit Homer Simpson (“You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”), but the thing is, Miller isn’t really interested in making a realistic movie about the construction of post-apocalyptic society. He wants to make a movie about a lone warrior and his adventures in the wasteland. The setting is post-apocalyptic because it looks cool that way and enables the car-centric action scenes Miller wants; fundamentally, it’s just set dressing — every minute trying to make sense of the setting is a minute not doing the things the movie actually cares about.

As for characterization… well, it’s maybe generous to say that we get a lot of it here, but Tina Turner’s character is much richer and more interesting than the villain of The Road Warrior (or of Fury Road, for that matter). And Max himself is still something of an enigma, but at least here, he has some clear heroism to his character, and his relationship to the kids he’s trying to save isn’t totally flat.

But for all that, this still ends up being a basically mid movie, because Miller got trapped in an ’80s fantasy aesthetic. I don’t know why, but nearly every fantasy adventure of the era ends up having a bunch of kids in it, and this one is no exception. And at its worst, as they’re re-infiltrating the city, it falls into The Goonies-style slapstick. I don’t like Fury Road as much as its enthusiastic fans do, but it has a coherency to its aesthetic that this lacks, torn between Miller’s vision and the demands of commercial ’80s fantasy.

I said of The Road Warrior that “it’s just an okay movie with some good action scenes” and honestly, that’s a pretty good description of this one, too, albeit for different reasons. There, the science fiction genre trappings worked against the movie Miller actually wanted to make; here, it’s the ’80s PG-13 family adventure genre trappings that undermine his vision. Fortunately for him and his fans, he did get another try, decades later, where he finally got to make the movie that was the purest expression of his vision.