Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome installments of the "Mad Max" series, "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" has influenced popular culture in various regards. The term "thunderdome" is now used in various contexts in which its meaning is similar to the sense in which it appears in the film. That is, a contest where the loser suffers a great hardship, though it has also come to mean, more generically, the state of the world following a nuclear apocalypse, or any place where chaos is the norm. Filmmaker Chris Weitz has cited the film as an influence. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (also known as
Mad Max 2 Australian but is also the stuff of an international male star". Gary Arnold, in his review for "The Washington Post", wrote, "While he seems to let triumph slip out of his grasp, Miller is still a prodigious talent, capable of a scenic and emotional amplitude that recalls the most stirring attributes in great action directors like Kurosawa, Peckinpah and Leone". Pauline Kael called "Mad Max 2" a "mutant" film that was "...sprung from virtually all action genres", creating "...one continuous spurt of energy" by using "jangly, fast editing". However, Kael criticized director George Miller's "attempt to tap into the universal