3 Short Paragraphs: Explorers

1985, d. Joe Dante

I've seen the bland box cover art of Explorers
a million times. I don't think I've ever seen the
actual poster before

Having never seen it before, I was way into watching this film, nerdy and charming and so wistfully 80's, up until the end of the second act. It's a film about discovery and it really gets the childhood tendency of hanging out with people who will hang out with you.  You don't so much as choose your friends as happen into them.  The way the three boys here interact feels spot on for the ways boys actually interact, not heightened Hollywood versions of how kids behave around each other.  You've got lil' Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson all showing real talent for this acting game.

This film seems so in Joe Dante's wheelhouse.  He's great at unfurling a mystery, and building a world around his characters, but he's not always so great at bringing it all home into a satisfying story.  His cinematic inspirations are obviously sci-fi films of the 50's, high concept stories that rarely had much budget for effects.  The most successful genre features of the time did so based on characterization and world building (or world declining, as so often they were disaster pictures).  You can see that in how lovingly takes his time as the boys take information conveyed to them in a dream and make it reality, discovering a computer-generated force-field with the ability to go anywhere, do anything at any speed.  There's application of scientific reasoning, and even more, logic, here, and even better 12-year-old boy's logic, so that what happens in the first two acts makes complete sense.  Up until they decide to try and tie Dick Miller's cop character into the proceedings.  First he states to having had dreams himself as a kid (as statement which breaks the logic of the eventual reveal in the third act) and then he starts investigating, finding young Hawke's jacket and tracking him down to his home...only to...do absolutely nothing and serve no actual purpose.  Putting the cops on the tail of the kids is a complete fake out to the point of irrelevance.  Every scene with Miller past his very brief encounter with their UFO while he was in a helicopter should be cut.

But then again, so should the entire third act. The boys (and it's so 80's sexist/young boy heavy...it's sad that Amanda Peterson's Lori is pretty much just an object of affection and not part of the gang...thought the film's ending implies that a sequel would bring her into the fold) go into space, get sucked into a much larger spacecraft, explore the inexplicable innards of said craft and then meet the two most ill conceived alien characters of the 80's. Seriously, worse than the family in Mac and Me. We spend the entirety of the first two acts anticipating some very cool space adventure, but instead we get a sub-par Robin Williams impersonation out of Robert Picardo voicing a gruesomely ugly and downright unappealing teen alien who is obsessed with 80's Americana. Ugh. I hated this third act so vehemently I'm blind to thinking anything was good about the film in the first place.  I cannot summon the strength to talk about this third act.  It's one of the all-time biggest let-downs as far as third acts go.  It's on the level with Sphere and Event Horizon and Mission To Mars and even Flight of the Navigator  in how it so utterly falls apart.  Yeah, I hate this movie now.