It’s a wonderful performance, and for quite a while, Explorers casts a real spell.
EXPLORERS 1985 EXTENDED MOVIE
Ethan Hawke, predating his eventual hipper-than-thou persona, is the ideal conduit for this sincerity: convincingly flakey, while still grounding the story in the reality of a kid who dreams of a life only known on the movie screen. It’s Dante working with his fetishes at his softest the wickedness of his previous movies has disappeared in favor of a kind of wide-eyed sincerity. That identification – with the viewer as well as the director – is what makes the first two-thirds of the movie work so well. He’s the kind of boy I was growing up – and the kind of boy Joe Dante was, too.
He’s the kind of boy that some will instantly recognize – for those of us who didn’t grow up dreaming about the next Lebron James or Tom Brady, Ben’s fixations ring true. The movie starts with great promise, as we meet Ben, an adolescent boy obsessed by late night black and white science fiction movies on TV, and who has daydreams about possessing the ability to fly or travel to outer space. As it is, Explorers plays like a film divided – the expectations and excitement generated by an excellent first half are almost entirely undermined by outer space sequences that check their brains at the door. It’s too bad, then, that he wasn’t able to resist his basest instincts – or, at least, find a better way to match the two styles, the way he would go on to do in films like Matinee and Small Soldiers. The storytelling is more mature, clearly showing off the kind of “inner child” sensibility Spielberg had mastered in the '80s (some of which Dante, having worked under the tutelage of Spielberg for much of that decade, no doubt picked up) and combining it with Dante’s usual in-jokes and sly references. It’s his fifth feature, made after Gremlins had turned him into a commercially viable director, and it finds him trapped between his past and his future as a filmmaker. Once the ship is built, the boys begin to live out their dreams of flight – that is, until an unknown signal from somewhere in space begins to beckon them, leading them on an adventure they could never have imagined.Įxplorers begins as one of Dante’s best films, and ends as one of his weakest. Three adolescent boys, spacey sci-fi movie geek Ben (Ethan Hawke in his film debut), über-brain Wolfgang (River Phoenix), and loner Darren (Jason Presson), build their very own spaceship based on blueprints sent telepathically to Ben in the form of a dream. The result is Joe Dante's most flawed and frustrating film.
The movie wasn't murdered outright, but it did have its legs chopped off from underneath it. The third act, as designed, had to be dropped and Explorers ends up introducing a bunch of ideas just as it has to drop them so the story can resolve and the credits can roll. It's not a bad film, but it is an unfinished one Dante himself has said that Paramount moved the release date up during production to get it out in the summer of 1985 (a summer dominated by Back to the Future) and more or less took the film away from him, opting to release it as it was. His 1985 film Explorers, represents the biggest missed opportunity in his filmography. From The Howling, one of the best werewolf films ever made, to Gremlins – exactly the bastard cousin-of- E.T.-film that ‘80s audiences needed to wake them from their big Spielbergian hug (its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, was less cinematically relevant, but a superior film nonetheless), to the surreal genius of The 'Burbs, to Matinee – the culmination of all Dante's work to date, and one of my favorite films of all time – Joe Dante has been turning out small works of equal parts chaos, charm, absurdity, and nostalgia for over twenty years. My adoration for all things Dante stems more from the sensibilities found in his films: he loves the same old goofy horror and sci-fi films, the same pointed social satire, and the same dumb slapstick that I do, and infuses each of his movies with all of these elements.
The great lost Joe Dante movie is one that actually got released.Īs I've said many times before on this site, the great Joe Dante is, without question, one of my favorite directors of all time.
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