![]() It's about kids overcoming their bullies for about ten seconds. It's maybe about Ethan Hawke stalking some neighborhood girl for about ten. It's about one kids' broken relationship with his widowed dad for about three. It's kind of a "we're building something cool and that's rewarding and of itself" for about ten. ALIEN FROM THE EXPLORERS 1985 MOVIENot only are the parents barely part of the narrative, they seemingly also don't notice nor care that their kids are just running all over town on school nights.Įxplorers is kind of an exploration movie for about fifteen minutes. ![]() Everything in it feels like an echo of something that should be there, and it gets sort of outlined or started, but then it sort of peters out. And, in true 80's movie fashion, John Bender Jr's, mom is dead and his dad is coded to be a drunk, is never seen, and so he gets the only character arc through the story, in a lot of ways, but the movie seems to do everything it can to pull focus from that story.īut that's kind of the problem with the movie. River Phoenix's parents are absent-minded intellectuals who are on screen a lot, and you get the feeling there's a story there, but they don't actually do anything. We see Ethan Hawke's mom, but there's no story and no character there. In general, whether they get seen a lot or not, parents are usually pretty instrumental in these movies, and through the action, the kids work through some feeling they have about their parents - usually realizing their parents are humans, too, and not unknowable dieties (see: Cloak and Dagger). ![]() And as it isn't ever resolved or dealt with (or mentioned again, really), it doesn't make any sense that it's even there. It's just there, it never gets dealt with (even NeverEnding Story spends 30 seconds wrapping up its bully plot), and the heroes deal with the bullying weirdly - like we're almost past the point that it bothers them anymore, even when some rando kid walks up and tears the pants clean off of River Phoenix - the sort of thing your typical middle school fight complete with bloody noses stems from. The movie sort of half-hands you the standard bullies picking on the protagonists, but it's handled weirdly. Sure enough, Explorers features 3 outsider kids - the romantic sci-fi nerd (Ethan Hawke), the science-minded nerd who other kids just want to beat the crap out of (River Phoenix in dad-glasses), and the Junior John Bender (the guy you never heard from again but who is actually better than Ethan Hawke in this movie) team up to float around in a pile of garbage inside a space marble and then. They were average, or maybe a little nerdy. The lead would maybe have a crush on some nice girl who wore lots of purple or pink. ![]() Kids weren't particularly nice to each other, even as friends. The 80's gave us kid rooms that were messy that contained things real kids' rooms of the era might contain like mangled comics, toys, posters strewn around. But the parents were present, if a bit distracted. The films required a backdrop of kids not doing great at home - divorced parents, dead parents, grieving or troubled parents. It feels like this movie kind of knew what the pieces were that went into these coming-of-age movies, a genre enough unto itself that the 2011 JJ Abrams movie Super 8 sought to recreate the feel. And it seemed like it should have been great. Back in the 1980's, an era that brought us E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies, Monster Squad and other movies about adolescents getting caught up in a magical world of imagination and adventure and maybe learning something about empathy and themselves along the way, this movie ended up as a bit of a renter after not really doing great at the box office. Lowery, along with James Johnston and Toby Halbrooks are onboard in the same capacity on behalf of Sailor Bear Productions.I don't mean to be so harsh, but, man. Fukunaga will serve as an executive producer with Hayden Kiessling on behalf of Parliament of Owls. According to the trade, the duo will collaborate on a script and pen the show bible, and it is expected that one of them will ultimately occupy the director’s chair for the prospective pilot. ALIEN FROM THE EXPLORERS 1985 SERIESYet, the names attached to the project might just give knee-jerk skeptics something to ponder.Ĭary Fukunaga ( Maniac, True Detective) and David Lowery ( The Old Man & the Gun, Pete’s Dragon) have been tapped to develop a TV series adaptation of 1985’s Explorers for Paramount Television, reports Deadline. Indeed, that is now happening in the form of a Paramount TV series. However, as the 1980s continues to be mined for reboots, it was only a matter of time before the industry revisited Explorers. Explorers arrived anemic on the box office scene back in 1985, manifesting as one of several contemporaneous wide-eyed optimistic sci-fi films with prodigious child actors, two of whom were Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix. ![]()
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