Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure arrives from 1989, a vintage year for films that simply were not thinking about any of this. Two metalhead students abduct historical figures for a school report, and the historical figures behave badly at a mall. That is the entire proposition. The picture has no interest in instructing anyone about anything, which places it in a category of artifact we now examine the way a sommelier examines a bottle from a cellar nobody has opened since the Reagan administration.

The casting is overwhelmingly white, though a handful of minority performers appear without ceremony: Al Leong as Genghis Khan, Bernie Casey as the history teacher, Clarence Clemons seated among the future's most important people. Nobody comments. Nobody is asked to. Joan of Arc turns up in the historical roster, and two princesses are extracted from arranged marriages to join a rock band, gestures so incidental they register as plot mechanics instead of statements. The girls get perhaps four lines. The film does not appear troubled by this.

Elsewhere the cellar is bare. No queer subtext, no racial commentary, no environmental anxiety, no economic grievance, no body politics, no neurodivergent framework for two characters who are simply written as dim. The closing sentiment, that music and philosophy will one day deliver world peace, is offered with a shrug and a wink. It is a sermon lasting eleven seconds that forgets its own text. We are left with a comedy about friendship, a phone booth, and Socrates at a water park. Classify it, file it, and move along.