Explorers (1985)

Explorers arrives from the summer of 1985, a Joe Dante picture about three suburban boys who dream of a circuit board and build a spacecraft out of an abandoned Tilt-A-Whirl car. The studio rushed it out the door to compete with Back to the Future and lost badly. Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix make their debuts here, young and unformed, before either became the sort of actor who gets asked about the cultural import of his work. The film itself asks nothing of anyone. It wants to show children flying through clouds and meeting a pair of aliens who have learned English from television reruns. That is the entire proposition.

The social consciousness on display is precisely none. The cast is a conventional 1980s teen ensemble, white and male, with Amanda Peterson's Lori positioned as a romantic interest and little else. No character contends with identity, no subplot interrogates power, and the sustainable oxygen device invented in the second act is a convenience for longer space flights, not a statement about the planet's health. Race never enters the frame. Neither does sexuality, nor wealth inequality, nor any notion of bodily self-acceptance. Wolfgang is a prodigy, a nerd archetype, and the film treats his gifts as a plot mechanism instead of a window into how minds differ. The aliens are the closest thing to a message, and their message is that humans broadcast too much violence, which is less a lecture than a punchline about television.

We are left with a charming, unfinished artifact. Dante has said the released version was not the film he intended, and the seams show. For the purposes of classification, though, the record is clean. This is a family adventure from a decade that had not yet learned to explain itself, and it offers no contemporary instruction to anyone.