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Comment: Review a movie. It’s been too long.
Dusty: Compliance!
Rating: PG
Director: Randall Kleiser
Writers: Mark H. Baker, Michael Burton, Phil Joanou
Stars: Joey Cramer, Paul Reubens, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matt Adler
Release Date: August 1, 1986 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
THE PLOT:
(via wiki)
On July 4, 1978, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 12-year-old David Freeman walks through the woods to pick up his 8-year-old brother, Jeff, from a friend’s house, when he falls into a ravine because of a trick played on him by Jeff, and is knocked unconscious. When he revives, eight years have mysteriously passed, and it is now 1986. He has not aged, and his appearance exactly matches his missing child poster. He is reunited with his aged parents and the repentant, now-16-year-old Jeff.
Meanwhile, an alien spaceship crashes through power lines and is captured by NASA. Hospital tests on David’s brainwaves reveal matching images of the spacecraft and map of its galaxy origins. Dr. Louis Faraday, who has been studying it, persuades David to come to a NASA research facility for just 48 hours, promising him they can help learn what happened to him. Dr. Faraday discovers that his mind is full of alien technical manuals and star charts far exceeding NASA’s research and that he was taken to the planet Phaelon and back, with a roundtrip distance of 1,120 light years, in just 4.4 hours (corresponding to a velocity travelled of 140c, where c is the speed of light, if estimated by using the Alcubierre “warp” metric[7]). Travel at relativistic, or faster than light (FTL) speeds, causes an individual to experience time dilation. This is the case for David, explaining how eight years have passed on Earth, but only 4.4 hours for him. Dr. Faraday decides to quarantine him there to finish his investigation, breaking his initial 48-hour promise.
Following a telepathic communication from the spaceship, David secretly boards it and meets its robotic commander, who introduces himself as a Trimaxion Drone Ship. David decides to call him “Max”, while Max calls him the “Navigator”. They escape from the facility and Max tells David that his mission is to travel the galaxy collecting biological specimens for analysis on Phaelon before returning them to their homes. Phaelon’s scientists discovered that humans only use 10% of their brains, and as an experiment, filled the remainder of David’s with miscellaneous information. Max returned him to Earth, but Earth of 1986, having determined a trip back in time would be dangerous for a human. When Max crashed the spaceship, the computer’s databanks were erased. So, he needs the information in David’s brain to return home.
While Max prepares for a mind transfer, David meets other alien specimens on board and bonds with a puckmaren, a tiny bat-like creature that is the last of its kind after a comet destroyed its planet. During the mind transfer, Max contracts human emotions and behaves eccentrically. David and his bickering trigger UFO reports in Tokyo and the United States. Meanwhile, NASA intern Carolyn McAdams, who befriended David, tells his family about his escape in the spaceship, so Dr. Faraday has them confined to their house, and Carolyn is sent back to the facility.
When the spaceship stops at a gas station, David calls Jeff, who sets off fireworks on the roof to locate their new house. David and Max arrive there, but NASA agents have tracked the spaceship. Fearing that he will be institutionalized and treated like a guinea pig for the rest of his life should he remain in 1986, David orders Max to return him to 1978, accepting the risk of vaporization due to the time travel. David awakes in the ravine, walks home, and finds everything now as he had left it. During the Fourth of July celebration, Jeff sees that the puckmaren has stowed away in David’s backpack. David tells him to keep it a secret, while Max flies home across the fireworks-lit sky, laughing similarly to Pee-wee Herman and calls, “See you later, navigator!”
My Review
In a decade that gave us Back to the Future, E.T., Aliens, The Terminator, and a host of other great science fiction films, Flight of the Navigator might have fallen into the cracks of our collective consciousness to some degree. That’s a shame. If that has happened to you, I strongly encourage you to go give this film a rewatch. It is a fun, dramatic, emotional, silly at spots, wish-fulfilling kids adventure film that you could probably share with your kids today.
The first two-thirds of the film provide its gravity. We get some fantastic mood-setting shots as the film opens, where it looks like objects are hovering over a city skyline. Only a short few moments later do we see that these objects are a perspective trick. We zoom out and see that they’re frisbees being caught by dogs in 1978. A short time later, we get another similar moment, with kids playing as a large shadow moves over them. We find out that they’re seeing a blimp. The film score is also great throughout, with this really ominous synth tune playing over everything.
Finally though, we get to the meat of the story. 12 year old David falls down a small cliff in the woods, encounters a downed UFO, and the next thing we know he wakes up in 1986 after 8 years have gone by. Joey Cramer (David) does a great job making me feel the panic a child might feel upon returning home to find other people living in his house and his parents nowhere to be found. The movie maintains this dramatic and serious mood as he is reunited with his family – all 8 years older. There’s a kind of nervous mood over the story as we learn his brain is emitting signals and David is hearing an unexplained and non-human voice in his head.
Then after escaping from the room where he was kept for government testing, young David sneaks his way into the presence of a UFO. In the 1980s, one of the magical properties of kids in any movie is that they could really *sneak.* The adults could never quite get their top secret facilities protected from children. David gets to the UFO and the intelligence onboard tells him that his brain has within it information it needs. They leave the facility together, to the astonishment and frustration of U.S. national security.
From this moment on, we get a completely new tone that somehow still fits comfortably with the one we’d been watching. The UFO’s alien intelligence (Max) – after downloading things from David’s brain – talks like Pee Wee Herman for a lot of the rest of the movie. I suppose if you’re going to get Paul Reubens to be your alien, you need to give him something fun to do. It wasn’t too over the top, though, so it felt like the two were friends on an adventure together. David “the Navigator” learns to fly the ship, while he and Max interact and find their way to the new house of David’s parents in Florida. The flying scenes were really fun and definitely something you’d wish you could try yourself. Along the way we learn that Max usually returns the species he studies back to the moment he picked them up, but he learned after picking up David that he was too fragile to safely travel back in time.
They fly the ship around the globe, get spotted numerous times, park at a gas station so David can make a pay phone call home, and then eventually arrive in Ft. Lauderdale – with some help from David’s younger-but-now-older brother setting off some fireworks to show them the location. Forty years later, all of these special effects still look surprisingly good, all things considered. I was never taken out of the movie or distracted, and occasionally I thought things looked fantastic.
In front of his family and the Feds who tracked them down, young David then decides not to go home. He apologizes and says goodbye his family and then asks the ship to do the risky (for humans) time travel maneuver to return to the moment he left in 1978. This was an emotional moment but David decides (almost certainly accurately) that he’d be a science experiment for the rest of his life if he stayed in 1986. He survives the time travel and makes it home. The whole thing is heart-warming, and emotionally impactful, but it wasn’t overdone. I really enjoyed the sincerity of the reunions, with David telling the members of his family that he loves them. The film ends with us learning David sneaked off one of Max’s other pocket sized aliens in his backpack, as he shows it to his little brother.
One nugget from this film, that a modern audience might enjoy, is the side character of Carolyn played by a young Sarah Jessica Parker. She was only 21 when this was released, so this was really early in her career, but she definitely popped on the screen, with a ton of charisma. Howard Hesserman (who you might remember from WKRP in Cincinnati or Head of the Class) played Dr. Faraday – the non-malicious government antagonist. He didn’t have a lot to do, but it was fun to see him in this kind of role when he typically played more counter-cultural characters.
This is a really fun movie. There are a few bad words in it, but relative to the too-frequent swearing in pretty much every 1980s film, this one is much more kid safe than most in that regard. The story touches on some big science fiction topics – like aliens, alien abduction, and time travel – but does so in a way that those topics and the way that we arrived at them were not traumatizing for its viewers. It’s an adventure, not a traumatic experience. I definitely recommend checking out Flight of the Navigator if you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it recently.