I have a soft spot in my heart for this underrated Joe Dante pic, though I'm the first to admit it has more than a few problems.
It starts out with a great concept. An outer space-obsessed kid (Ethan Hawke) starts having weird dreams which seem to be some sort of message from aliens. He confides in his computer geek friend (River Phoenix) who happens to be working on a concentrated force field that defies gravity and can move at incredible speeds. They talk about the possibility of actually being inside one of these force fields, thus giving them the ability to fly and travel incredible distances at amazing speeds.
Meanwhile, Hawke has struck up a friendship with school bad kid Jason Presson, and lets him in on Phoenix's new technology. They figure out how to control the field and decide that they should build a vehicle in which they can all fit. They find an old amusement park ride, and customize it into a spaceship they christen the Thunder Road. After a reckless test drive, the ship is taken over by aliens who bring it to their mother ship. It's here that the movie jumps its track.
The aliens turn out to be cartoonish buffoons that communicate by quoting old TV shows, due to the fact that they've learned English by watching TV signals picked up in space. Hawke is disheartened by their incoherence, but realizes that they're so confusing because human life makes no sense to them (e.g. war, violence, Hollywood's malignation of extraterrestrials).
The kids narrowly escape the ship when the aliens' Dad (!) returns, and rips them all a new one (the alien kids stole the Dad's "car"). Hawke, Phoenix and Presson return to Earth, but land in the lake and watch sadly as their ship sinks to the bottom. For some reason, the girl Hawke likes (Amanda Peterson) has some sort of psychic link to the guys and looks on as they walk away from their doomed spaceship. The next day, they all (including Peterson) have a shared dream of signals from the aliens, thus ending the movie on a resoundingly positive note.
Overall, Explorers is immensely entertaining, but also wildly uneven. There's an overwhelming sense of child-like wonder during the first half (and again at the finale), but the scenes in the alien ship are dreadfully out of place and hinder the movie's power. The alien sequence itself is often very funny (Dante regular Robert Picardo is terrific as the "brother" alien), but does not belong in this movie. It never quite regains its footing after that, though the final dream sequence is nicely uplifting.
Another problem is a subplot about a helicopter pilot (Dick Miller) who has always dreamed of going to outer space and discovering life. The movie goes to some trouble to set this up, then proceeds to do nothing with the character, who manages to find out what the kids are up to, and simply watches as they fly away to meet the aliens.
This movie has so much going for it--terrific performances, great special effects, wonderful music by Jerry Goldsmith--that it really is a shame when it falls apart. This could have been one of the great science fiction movies of the 80's; instead it's become little more than a curiosity (the movie flopped upon its initial release), showing up on cable TV here and there.
But I urge those who insist on defending other "bombs" like 1941 and ISHTAR to give this one another chance, if only to see future indie-grunge thespians Hawke and Phoenix as geeky junior high students. B-movie fans will get a kick out of the phony sci-fi movie playing at the drive-in, complete with bad dubbing and string-propelled spaceships.
It starts out with a great concept. An outer space-obsessed kid (Ethan Hawke) starts having weird dreams which seem to be some sort of message from aliens. He confides in his computer geek friend (River Phoenix) who happens to be working on a concentrated force field that defies gravity and can move at incredible speeds. They talk about the possibility of actually being inside one of these force fields, thus giving them the ability to fly and travel incredible distances at amazing speeds.
Meanwhile, Hawke has struck up a friendship with school bad kid Jason Presson, and lets him in on Phoenix's new technology. They figure out how to control the field and decide that they should build a vehicle in which they can all fit. They find an old amusement park ride, and customize it into a spaceship they christen the Thunder Road. After a reckless test drive, the ship is taken over by aliens who bring it to their mother ship. It's here that the movie jumps its track.
The aliens turn out to be cartoonish buffoons that communicate by quoting old TV shows, due to the fact that they've learned English by watching TV signals picked up in space. Hawke is disheartened by their incoherence, but realizes that they're so confusing because human life makes no sense to them (e.g. war, violence, Hollywood's malignation of extraterrestrials).
The kids narrowly escape the ship when the aliens' Dad (!) returns, and rips them all a new one (the alien kids stole the Dad's "car"). Hawke, Phoenix and Presson return to Earth, but land in the lake and watch sadly as their ship sinks to the bottom. For some reason, the girl Hawke likes (Amanda Peterson) has some sort of psychic link to the guys and looks on as they walk away from their doomed spaceship. The next day, they all (including Peterson) have a shared dream of signals from the aliens, thus ending the movie on a resoundingly positive note.
Overall, Explorers is immensely entertaining, but also wildly uneven. There's an overwhelming sense of child-like wonder during the first half (and again at the finale), but the scenes in the alien ship are dreadfully out of place and hinder the movie's power. The alien sequence itself is often very funny (Dante regular Robert Picardo is terrific as the "brother" alien), but does not belong in this movie. It never quite regains its footing after that, though the final dream sequence is nicely uplifting.
Another problem is a subplot about a helicopter pilot (Dick Miller) who has always dreamed of going to outer space and discovering life. The movie goes to some trouble to set this up, then proceeds to do nothing with the character, who manages to find out what the kids are up to, and simply watches as they fly away to meet the aliens.
This movie has so much going for it--terrific performances, great special effects, wonderful music by Jerry Goldsmith--that it really is a shame when it falls apart. This could have been one of the great science fiction movies of the 80's; instead it's become little more than a curiosity (the movie flopped upon its initial release), showing up on cable TV here and there.
But I urge those who insist on defending other "bombs" like 1941 and ISHTAR to give this one another chance, if only to see future indie-grunge thespians Hawke and Phoenix as geeky junior high students. B-movie fans will get a kick out of the phony sci-fi movie playing at the drive-in, complete with bad dubbing and string-propelled spaceships.