![explorers 1985 music explorers 1985 music](https://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/32000000/The-Thunder-Road-explorers-32085592-500-281.jpg)
I'll leave the designs alone, though I feel I should not. There's a lot of time killed wandering aimlessly around a space ship in scenes that go on and on, but don't move the plot forward (and seem lifted from other movies).
![explorers 1985 music explorers 1985 music](https://www.vivaroxymusic.com/images/albums/explorers.jpg)
On this view, the entire portion of the film is like a particularly unsatisfying trip to a restaurant - as Co-Worker Kristi once put it to me "it wasn't very good, and there wasn't much of it".
#EXPLORERS 1985 MUSIC MOVIE#
My earliest memory of the movie was feeling disappointed in the arrival in space. It's just so strange to see a movie that seems like it had one good scene in it like that. It basically hits the best part of the movie before the characters leave for space during their first test flight, and it never recovers after that scene. 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. Not 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.