Explorers

The friend of film fantasy and a consummate director of light comedy thrillers, Joe Dante followed up his monster hit Gremlins with the marvelous space travel epic Explorers. The gimmick?  Instead of intrepid astronauts or trigger-happy space troopers, Eric Luke’s original screenplay charts an adventure of ordinary schoolkids imbued with expansive imaginations. The core subject is The Sense of Wonder inculcated in those of us reared in the U.S. suburbs of the ‘fifties.

Witness the culture-specific movie-Sci-fi-space obsessions of our ’50s-’60s generation, the group that read Famous Monsters and dreamed of gloriously elaborate space fantasies long before 2001 and Star Wars. Joe Dante knows that territory better than anyone.

New viewers are going to be impressed. Instead of 20-something faux-teenagers, Explorers gives us an age group seldom depicted in films — partly because of child labor laws. Future adult stars River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke play perfectly-realized, believable younger teens. An equally excellent Jason Presson shines as well under Joe Dante’s direction. Nobody, not even Steven Spielberg, captures the nerdy, lovable-in-their-immaturity reality of this awkward age of childhood as well. Explorers satisfies as a film about kids, even setting the fantastic content aside.

A 1980s Sci-fi film that hasn’t dated in concept?  That’s only the first thing to praise. 

Explorers is fairly realistic, yet it immediately takes on a psychic dimension, with weird shared visions between two good friends. Neither the excitable Sci-fi nerd Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke) nor boy genius Wolfgang Müller (River Phoenix) is particularly adept in the 8th grade social swim; they’re in fact easy prey for random school bullies. They’re experiencing shared dreams they can’t account for, visions of a vast landscape, a cross between a futuristic city and a TRON — like circuit board. When Wolfgang feeds the schematic into his home computer, an external progam takes over. It generates a blue bubble in real space, a solid 3-D object.

The bubble can be directed by computer command and is unaffected by inertia. Soon thereafter the two lads team with their disaffected, somewhat sullen friend Darren Woods (Jason Presson) to build a homemade craft that will allow them to enjoy ‘bubble joy rides.’ The local press reports one of their flights as a UFO. Further ‘dream’ revelations provide the secret bubble-aviators with an unexplainable oxygen supply. What’s it all for? When an unknown outside force tries to take control of their flight, Wolfgang realizes that the original dreams were planted by unknown ‘others’ beckoning from somewhere in space. The trio doesn’t alert the authorities, but instead packs gear and junk food for a fantastic trip into space and the unknown.

Screenwriter Eric Luke chose an untapped corner of Sci-fi adventure: amateur space missions. In the late ’50s I once read a children’s picture book about neighborhood kids that make an antigravity ship and fly to Saturn. I think it turned out to be a dream. Explorers weds that basic idea to other ideas generally similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.. The emphasis is on a fertile kid’s fantasy: What if I could build my own space ship?

Because young Ben relates to all events through his favorite Sci-fi books and movies, Joe Dante fills Explorers with references to his personal culture touchstones. When the mystery bubble drills a hole through a shelf of books, I recognized at least three Sci-fi pocketbook covers; and there’s of course the Classics Illustrated comix version of The War of the Worlds with its beautifully designed Martian war machines. The boys go to Charles M. Jones Junior High school; we just now noticed that they live in  Davana County.

Some of the movie lore references are hilarious. When an atrocious imported Star Wars ripoff called ‘Starkiller’ is screened at a drive-in, Dante taps the vibe of our favorite bad-but-beloved space operas. A smart-aleck in the audience tries to impress his date by pointing out the matte lines in the special effects. Ulp, that’s practically my personal teenage biography in a nutshell. Am I the only one willing to fess up to that?

Kids at the awkward age of 13 or so are almost never portrayed with this kind of simple sincerity. The personalities and speech patterns of our space explorers resemble that real young teens, not after-school-special clones or some aged writer’s conception of childhood. Explorers makes them middle class types with a range of responses to their environment. Ben is the dreamer and the least mature; he’s already girl crazy over the dreamy blonde in his homeroom, Lori Swenson (Amanda Peterson). Pleasantly subdued prodigy Wolfgang does what he can to bring Ben down to Earth, but is equally inspired by the expedition to come.

Unlike those two, Darren is neither pampered nor sheltered. A sullen tough guy from the wrong side of the tracks, he’s energized by the enthusiasm of his geeky new pals. The odd trio slides into their fantastic adventure one logical step at a time, a dramatic trick that Explorers masters 100%. Roy Neary in Close Encounters spent two hours deciding whether or not to abandon his family to take a trip into space. Our boys recognize a miraculous opportunity when they see it: lacking the restraint of adulthood, they leap into the unknown on general principle. Ben already has the approval of his mother (Mary Kay Place) … in theory, anyway.

The basic frame for the spacecraft ‘Thunder Road’ is an old carnival ride found in a junkyard. The alien computer program does the heavy technical lifting, steamrolling the barriers to space travel and freeing their flying joyrides to become pure fun. In a bubble all his own, Wolfgang drills through the Earth, much to the consternation of an irate gopher. Ben uses the bubble to peep into Lori’s bedroom. Explorers embraces that universal teen fantasy, along with some non-PC beer drinking.

Dreams remain the central image of Explorers. Lori eventually joins Ben in his free-flight fantasy, sort of a Sci-fi kid’s version of The Beach Boys’ song  Wouldn’t It Be Nice?  That part of the film is a rousing success, every bit as touching and inspired as the bomb shelter teen romance in Dante’s later masterpiece Matinee.

Explorers also serves as Joe Dante’s valentine to the great actor Dick Miller. The Corman/Dante icon could claim to have fought aliens from two separate planets, Venus and Davana (or Davanna?). As a spirit brother to the three boys, Miller’s helicopter pilot Charlie Drake has also been inspired with alien dreams, but there is no place for him on the Thunder Road. Charlie ends up being this film’s Nana or Joe Wilson character. He witnesses the lift-off of the homemade spaceship, along with some literal ‘Nana’ pooches. Were Explorers a short story, it could end right on Dick Miller’s face and be wholly satisfactory — Charlie Drake possesses the Sense-of-Wonder ‘Right Stuff.’

The side-slip into Bob Clampett’s Wackyland. 

The last act of Explorers takes our heroes in a wholly unexpected direction. Surrendering themselves to the summons of an alien intelligence, the boys find not an intergalactic war but amiable characters straight from the Chuck Jones cartoon universe, the other Dante career theme that made his Gremlins franchise so entertaining. The goofy aliens Wak and Neek turn out to be immature teenagers as well, space alien xenomorphs of the kind that Duck Dodgers might encounter. They’re loitering in the neighborhood of Earth due to an abiding interest in our ‘fifties American culture. Wolfgang chats with Neek (Leslie Rickert), who affects a Marilyn Monroe voice and arranges her eye and mouth tentacles into eye-batting seduction mode. Wak is played by Robert Picardo, Dante’s all-purpose wonder actor. Picardo interprets Wak as an intergalactic version of the boastful kid from down the block. The boys don’t know whether to be awed or dismayed: “They’re just like we are.”

This third act is dazzling filmmaking and a visual delight … as pointed out in the extras, the interior design of the alien spaceship could be by Dr. Seuss, for  The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.. Wak and Neek are the creations of ace monster-maker Rob Bottin, who stretches the limits of what was possible with makeup effects and radio robotics. It’s also screamingly funny, no small thanks to Robert Picardo’s exuberant improvisations. Best known from the Star Trek franchise, Picardo also plays two more roles in Explorers. One is Starkiller, the space hero with lip-synch issues.

The filmmakers balance between naturalism and escapist fantasy. Typical of Dante’s humor is the insertion of a talking mouse as a comic aside. The nutty Müller household and the unseen Woods family keep us focused on the three boys; we learn in the extras that almost all of Ben Crandall’s home life was deleted in editorial. The simplicity of the computer-driven space flight allows the film to sidestep pseudoscience blather about anti-gravity paint, etc., and zap right to the fun stuff. The danger element is also handled well. When Wolfgang’s computer control quits high in the stratosphere, the ‘Thunder Road’ loses its levitating bubble and becomes random falling debris. It’s pretty scary. Even balloonists carry parachutes.

At my age I associate the name ‘Thunder Road’ not with Bruce Springsteen, but with a movie that these ’80s kids wouldn’t likely know.

The Dream sequences tie the movie’s disparate parts together while making a positive statement about the discoveries of the magic age before disillusion comes a-knocking, the point where a kid’s consciousness sees that all of life’s adventures lie ahead and anything seems possible. Yep, some of the adventures are about sex. Explorers’ fantasy is anti-Disney and anti-saccharine … and much more psychologically healthy.

An interesting detail is that Industrial Light and Magic is given a co-producer credit. In each of his big fantasy features, Joe Dante tasked pre-CGI special effects to do things we’d never seen before. His werewolf transformations are by far the best. He took puppets to creative extremes, and his high-priced incredible shrinking effects have yet to be bettered. Everything in Explorers achieves a feel of childhood magic.

We applaud Explorers’ Wak and Neek, wonderfully successful movie originals. Originality in film means risk, and the risk must have been on Joe Dante’s shoulders alone. How do film directors stay focused with the stress?  Dante knew that Rob Bottin would come through with something remarkable, but this is a delicate concept to put across.  What if Paramount had second thoughts in mid-production?  Nobody gives Dante and company credit for doing what ‘safe’ filmmakers would never dare do.

Joe Dante’s family-fantasy pictures are unlike anyone else’s. I got to take my 7 year-old daughter to see Explorers on a screen and we watched it many times on an old VHS tape. As adults my kids have indelible memories of Wolfgang’s little mouse saying  ‘Go to Hell.’  Ethan Hawke’s Ben gets over-excited about his own enthusiasm, a rare moment for insight and honesty. The show captures the joy and wonder of being a kid, and that’s no small accomplishment.