This is one of those films that I loved as a kid, and which I jumped at the chance to view again on DVD the other night - although my fiancée groaned, she relented as there was nothing else on. I remembered a quirky, dry situation movie with a strangely brutal finish.
What I got was a sappy, immature and poorly-paced piece of sci-fi schlock with a payoff that's really too violent for the under-twelves market the storyline appeals to. What a shame. It did have its plus-points - the matte backdrops were wonderful and such a pleasant change from the CGI tosh we've all grown accustomed to, and Dennis Quaid is actually a good actor - but the script was appalling, with a mix of bad jokes and the pretentious over-seriousness that generally hampers the sci-fi genre (including all the STAR WARS films and the STAR TREK series bar the originals).
The racism metaphors were both obvious and unambiguous; the death scene interminable; the acting, for the most part, abysmal. The final scene, which features a hammy voice-over struggling to compete with what sounds like four or five people gargling mouthwash, was laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Some childhood memories are best left as just that ... memories.
What I got was a sappy, immature and poorly-paced piece of sci-fi schlock with a payoff that's really too violent for the under-twelves market the storyline appeals to. What a shame. It did have its plus-points - the matte backdrops were wonderful and such a pleasant change from the CGI tosh we've all grown accustomed to, and Dennis Quaid is actually a good actor - but the script was appalling, with a mix of bad jokes and the pretentious over-seriousness that generally hampers the sci-fi genre (including all the STAR WARS films and the STAR TREK series bar the originals).
The racism metaphors were both obvious and unambiguous; the death scene interminable; the acting, for the most part, abysmal. The final scene, which features a hammy voice-over struggling to compete with what sounds like four or five people gargling mouthwash, was laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Some childhood memories are best left as just that ... memories.