Guest Post: I Don't Understand You (2025)

I Don’t Understand You, Either

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Note: Spoilers ahead—all of which appear in the trailer.

Buried inside I Don’t Understand You is a razor-sharp satire that never fully emerges. In a polarized world where opposing sides seem to speak in code, the concept of a gay couple trapped by cross-cultural misunderstandings feels timely and full of potential. But the film, co-written and co-directed by real-life spouses David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, loses momentum early and never quite recovers.

Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells) are celebrating their anniversary in Rome while awaiting news from an adoption agency. After being previously duped by one mother-to-be, they’ve now pinned their hopes on Candace (Amanda Seyfried). Meanwhile, they’re invited to dinner by Dom’s Italian uncle at a remote country estate. What follows is a misadventure marked by language barriers, poor navigation, a busted power line, latent homophobia—and eventually, an escalating body count.

The setup plays like Babel meets Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. Like Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning film, Craig and Crano explore how language and cultural confusion sow chaos. A recurring theme is miscommunication: an early gift of pocketknives, intended as a nod to their passion for cooking, becomes symbolic (yes, Chekhov would be proud). A misread road sign leads to a crash. A panicked conversation during a blackout devolves into bloodshed. Even the local police misinterpret their one witness, fueling further disaster. It’s a comedy of errors that builds cleverly—until it hedges its bets.

The comparison to Tucker & Dale highlights the film’s identity crisis. Unlike that film’s innocent hillbillies, Dom and Cole contribute significantly to their own spiral. Yet the script refuses to let them fall. Enter the adoption subplot—a narrative safety net that seeks to exonerate them. After all, can loving prospective parents be held fully accountable? The baby thread feels like a calculated plea for jury nullification, softening characters who might otherwise be compellingly flawed. Lift that element out, and the story might dare its audience to grapple with real ambiguity. Instead, it blinks.

Still, Craig and Crano display a flair for suspense and have a deft hand at spinning grotesque farce into laughs. Their major set pieces are crisply staged, and the tension is often laced with a slapstick edge.

Kroll and Rannells shine as the central couple, radiating both friction and fierce loyalty. You believe these two share a kitchen, a bed, and eventually, parental potential. Nunzia Schiano delivers a touching turn as a nearly blind and deaf chef mourning her lost son—pouring out her grief in Italian to two men who understand none of it. Her monologue lands like a private exorcism. Morgan Spector also stands out as her volatile surviving son whose garbled diction seals his fate.

In the end, I Don’t Understand You is a nasty little black comedy that blinks when it should bite. Strip away the emotional cushioning, and the satire might have left a scar.

30 Years Ago: Waterworld (1995)

Sometimes, mainstream film critics focus too much on the inside-baseball aspects of filmmaking for my taste. 

I suppose that everyone enjoys behind-the-scenes stories of disagreements between lead actors and directors, and tales of woe concerning films that run massively and catastrophically over-budget.  

It’s impossible to take your eyes off a train wreck, in other words.

And yet the problem with this focus on inside-baseball emerges when the same critics draw an explicit connection between behind-the-scenes strife and the artistic merits of a finished work-of-art.  In other words, some reviewers utilize the inside-baseball knowledge to fit into a specific, pre-drawn narrative. 

Using the former factors (behind-the-scenes strife), to judge the latter (artistic merit), is problematic, I submit, because the relationship clearly isn’t one-to-one.  A difficult shoot doesn’t necessarily result in a bad film.  Going over budget doesn’t necessarily mean artistic disaster, either.  And the opposite is also true: a smooth shoot doesn’t indicate that a film is going to turn out terrific.

Certainly, this unfortunate critical paradigm was exposed with both King Kong (1976) and John Carter (2012), both of which were received harshly by the critical community largely on the basis of behind-the-scenes, inside-baseball factors rather than a judicious consideration of artistic factors.

This fallacy is also true of Waterworld (1995), now thirty years old, and a film that, upon release, was clearly marked in the press as a troubled production, and furthermore, the most expensive film of all-time. 

Yet seventeen years later, I don’t know that our knowledge of those facts is vital to a fair assessment of the film’s particular strengths and weaknesses.

Eschewing the inside-baseball stats and figures, Waterworld plays as a straight-up and not un-enjoyable transplant of The Road Warrior (1982) aesthetic, only in a world destroyed by global warming rather than by nuclear war. 

Kevin Costner’s gilled, mutant Mariner, in other words, is a wet Mad Max who, like his predecessor, is something of a variation on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, a classic movie character featured in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). 

In short, this archetype involves a “stranger” who rides into town and becomes involved in a conflict not his own, and who, largely, is rather stoic, allowing actions speak louder than words.  Similarly, Waterworld’s Mariner is frequently tagged as a silent brooder, and by film’s end has even become equated with “Death” Himself for his accomplished – if taciturn -- application of lethal force.

From this...

To this...

To this.

Beyond the obvious inspiration the film draws from the Mad Max mythos, Waterworld succeeds mostly because of the “reality” of the world it assiduously constructs. The film is one of the last sci-fi epics to emerge from the pre-digital age of Hollywood blockbusters and, accordingly -- and for all its apparent flaws -- boasts this heightened sense of texture or verisimilitude. 

Everything (or most everything…) our eyes witness had to be arduously constructed and set afloat, and that herculean effort pays off in a visual and imaginative sense.  You can practically smell the salt water and the burning fuel…

In terms of negatives, Waterworld takes an unnecessary dive into sentimentalism, a wrong turn that The Road Warrior never falls prey to, though Beyond Thunderdome certainly did. 

The film’s final act also consists of one generic action movie trope after the other, from the hero’s ability to outpace blossoming fireballs, to last minute, physically impossible rescues.  These almost cartoon-like moments tend to mark Waterworld as a product of eager-to-please Hollywood, and make it rather decidedly unlike its spare, gritty, Australian source of inspiration.

Still, some of the overt sentimentalism and action clichés in Waterworld might be overlooked because of the film’s absolutely original setting, and the skill with which that setting is presented.  The film’s lead characters -- when not grinding the gears of expected generic conventions -- are interesting enough to spend two hours with, certainly.  In keeping with the tradition of the post-apocalyptic genre, Waterworld also makes an earnest statement about man’s self-destructive nature.

“Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!”

In a world of the future -- a world of ubiquitous oceans -- the silent, rugged Mariner (Costner) seeks to re-supply at a nearby atoll.  Unfortunately, he is arrested by the local Elders as a “muto” (or mutant) because he has webbed feet and gills behind his ears. 

The Mariner’s arrest comes at a bad time, because the leader of the eco-unfriendly Smokers, The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) is planning to launch an attack there and grab young Enola (Tina Majorino), a girl with an indecipherable map to the mythical “Dry Land” tattooed on her back. 

Enola and her stepmother, Helen (Jean Tripplehorn) free the Mariner from captivity in exchange for passage out of the atoll on his boat.  They barely escape with their lives, and the Deacon commits to pursuing them.

On the high seas, the Mariner and his “guests” have difficulty getting along at first, but soon he becomes fond of the women, and they of him.  One day, the Mariner takes Helen to the bottom of the sea and shows him man’s drowned cities there.  That lost world is the only (formerly) “dry land” he knows of, he insists.

When the Deacon captures Enola, it’s up to the Mariner to rescue her, and more than that, to lead other rag-tag survivors to “Dry Land.”  Enola’s map, properly understood, holds the key to man’s future…

“He doesn't have a name so Death can't find him!”

The quality I admire most about Waterworld is its physicality.

That may not be the best word, but it gets the job done in a pinch.  I could also describe this ingredient as “texture” or “atmosphere,” perhaps, but physicality better gets at the film’s rugged and powerful sense of setting, of place.  I love the Rube-Goldberg-style devices, the trinkets from the “old world” re-purposed for Waterworld’s tech, and the sheer mechanical nature of the world.  It’s a place of whirring hydraulics, tugging pulleys, fold-out sails, and endless, ubiquitous sea.  As a whole, I find it all rather compelling and even believable. 

As I noted above, most of this setting, at least in terms of the human dwellings and conveyances, had to be constructed and then set afloat.  I like the tactility and verisimilitude of this world, and realize that if the film were made today, it would be a different beast all-together, one “rendered” with digital landscapes and CGI.  

In other words, it would likely seem a whole lot less real.  But some of the little, almost throwaway touches in the film are really quite spectacular, and contribute to the idea that "Waterworld" is a real place, and one boasting a deep and long history.

A world that you can touch.

A world that had to be built.

A world that works.

And a world that speaks of another time.

In terms of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, Waterworld  escorts the audience on an ominous trip to the bottom of the sea, and provides a haunting view of an old metropolis turned to dust at the ocean floor, a clear analog for the Statue of Liberty moment in Planet of the Apes (1968) or the “empty cities” of The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959) or Night of The Comet (1984).  But that’s as close to conventional end-of-the-world imagery as Waterworld gets, instead setting its action on an unending, dangerous, but eminently beautiful sea.  I have always been impressed by the visual qualities of the ocean, a realm that is both beautiful and incredible dangerous.  And the ocean, as we detect in the film, also does a good job of burying secrets…

In terms of its narrative, it’s plain that Waterworld owes a great deal to The Road Warrior, and indeed, the entire Mad Max cycle.  The Mariner, like Max, is a man who lives outside of human society and who boasts some disdain for it. 

Both characters live as scavengers and traders, contacting civilization only to re-supply.  Both the Mariner and Max form meaningful relationships or friendships with children (Enola, and the Feral Kid, respectively), and both eventually come around to the idea of “helping” an endangered civilization find a new home (either Dry Land, or the gasoline truck’s promised land destination in The Road Warrior).

Finally, both sagas end with that new home established, but the warrior himself returning to the “wasteland” arena to continue his lonely travels.  Mad Max and the Mariner are violent men with a code of ethics, and so they both realize it is better for them to remain “outcasts” in the wild rather than to seek domesticated lives inside a new culture. In Beyond Thunderdome, the new city-dwellers light candles for the wanderers who haven’t come home; in Waterworld, Enola and Helen watch as the Mariner returns to the sea, the realm that nurtured him.   

In both The Road Warrior and Waterworld, a central scenario depicted is the “siege” of a pre-existing civilization.  Outsiders on a variety of crafts try to “break in” and pillage either Oil City or the Atoll.  The beleaguered city, naturally, fights back, but the walls are breached by attacking vehicles, either flying motorcycles or launched jet skis.  Both cities eventually fall, leading to a dedicated trek to new home. 

These factors -- the siege and the trek – make the films origin stories of a mythic type.  As Aeneas had to flee fallen Troy to found Rome, so do Max and the Mariner lead homeless survivors to greener pastures…literally in the case of Waterworld.

In one moment in Waterworld, we even get a deliberate mirror image composition of a famous frame from The Road Warrior.  There, in the first harrowing action scene, we saw the savage Wez perched on his motorcycle, another goon seated behind him on the bike, looking at his prey.  We see very much the same framing in view here (also in the first action scene), except, of course, on a water craft instead of a motorcycle.

Despite the obvious aping of the Mad Max universe, Waterworld’s unique, water-bound setting gives it a lot of “juice,” at least visually speaking.  The images are so lush and convincing you can make yourself forget, essentially, that the movie is a pastiche.

A city shall fall.

And so will this one.

And a child shall lead the people to a better future.

And so will this one.

The bad guys watch.

And so do these bad guys.

As we have come to expect from post-apocalyptic films, there is an environmental message in Waterworld that suggests man’s self-destructive nature. The “Ancients” caused rapid global warming, and now, similarly, the Smokers are running through the last of their oil, trying to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle. 

Their need to live that life-style of relative leisure (replete with cigarettes, electricity,and even cars…) dooms the Smokers to a life of war and conflict, stealing what they need from other nation-states/atolls at the barrel of a gun.  The fact that the Smokers inhabit the Exxon Valdez, a poster-child for environmental irresponsibility, pretty much says it all.  And this too is America's fate, if we don't tap alternative energy sources.  We'll have to fight resource wars to maintain our culture's high standard of living.

Even the film’s villain plays into this leitmotif.  At one point, the Deacon attempts to flick a lit cigarette into an open oil tank, an act which could have instantaneous, catastrophic results were he successful.  The message is clearly that he is self-destructive, but there’s more.  By wantonly, thoughtlessly using up the Earth’s resources, we’re essentially lighting a spark that could destroy everything we hold dear too. 

“We outgrew it,” one Smoker says of the Exxon-Valdez, and indeed that’s precisely fear of many environmentalists.  What happens when we outgrow the planet’s capacity to sustain us?

This environment message is leavened some by the film’s many action sequences, which grow progressively less satisfying and less convincing as the film continues.  The opening battles on the sea and at the atoll are genuinely awe inspiring, and feature death-defying stunts.  By the end of the film, however, rear-projection and cartoony explosions dominate the proceedings and some element of reality is sacrificed.

So much of the popular press still terms Waterworld a bomb (though it eventually made back its budget and more), but this is hardly a terrible science fiction film. Waterworld may not be a truly great science fiction film, but nor is it the epitome of Hollywood disaster, as many still make it out to be. 

Waterworld’s biggest problem, I submit, is that the film’s first half elaborately sets up a world and characters of tremendous interest, and then the last half spends all its time blowing things up, and resolving all the conflicts with fireballs and explosions.  In other words, it’s lot like many other examples of mainstream 1990s filmmaking.  And yet, the film doesn't open that way at all.  In fact, Waterworld's opening is a kind of brilliant "screw-you" to conventional  standards and decorum.  How many Hollywood blockbusters can you name that open with a shot of an established star, like Costner, pissing into a cup, refining his urine, and then drinking it?

And in terms of last shots, Waterworld finishes strong. The Mariner heads off to the next horizon and the next mystery.  Perhaps it’s the mystery of his very creation, or the mystery of the end of the world.  It’s kind of a shame we never got to see that second adventure. 

After all, Mad Max and The Man with No Man each got three attempts to get the equation right…

40 Years Ago: The Black Cauldron (1985)

The Black Cauldron (1985), an animated epic fantasy film from Walt Disney Studios, boasts a long-standing reputation as a box office bomb.  

Reports indicate that the movie, now 40 years old, cost 44 million dollars to produce, and it recouped well under half that amount. 

The movie -- very loosely based on Lloyd Alexander’s award-winning Chronicles of Prydain pentalogy -- was also the subject of protracted battles in the editing room. The first PG-rated Disney cartoon, The Black Cauldron was also denied a home video release for many years after its theatrical engagement.  

The source of the pre-release conflict?  

The original cut was deemed too violent and much too dark, and roughly twelve minutes were excised from the final cut. Much of the trimmed material involved the final battle, and the deaths of the Cauldron-Born, creatures who are, essentially, skeleton zombies.  Studio executives were so concerned about the film's violence that its release date was pushed back from the Christmas season to the following summer.

Today -- some thirty years after The Black Cauldron’s release -- it’s difficult to understand what all the fuss was about.  

This film hardly seems any more violent than any other fantasy film, animated or live action, of the 1980s.  

In fact, in 21st century terms The Black Cauldron now seems like, well, a typical child's movie. It's a little goofy, a little scary, a little emotional and never less than entertaining.

Although the film’s villain, The Horned King remains menacing and effective, he is well-in-keeping with long-standing Hollywood movie villain tradition, which has provided audiences the Wicked Witch of the West, Darth Vader, and other iconic monsters that might accurately be termed “nightmare fodder.”

It’s a little strange to write about it in this fashion, but The Black Cauldron was for many years ahead of its time, and now, contrarily, perhaps time has finally caught up with it. Yet I believe it still carries relevant value as a work of art, however, because it pokes and prods at the very narrative structure it adopts.

And what is that structure?  

Well, The Black Cauldron is an example of the Monomyth, or the heroic journey. And as I've written before, this is the standard (and oft-repeated) mode of the fantasy genre today. Often to the genre's detriment.

But The Black Cauldron seems quite wary, or suspicious of the hero's journey paradigm, even as it apes it. And that embedded conflict signals a creative, imaginative and worthwhile way to tell this story.

In other words, The Black Cauldron looks to be your standard issue hero's journey movie, very much in keeping with Star Wars (1977), The Dark Crystal (1982), or Krull (1983).

Scratch the surface a bit, however, and one can see that the film is actually a critique -- or more accurately a rebuttal -- to this popular and pervasive story structure.

"No more dreaming."

A young assistant pig-keeper, Taran (Grant Bardlsey) dreams of being a great warrior, a great soldier who experiences untold adventures.  In real life, his master, an elder named Dallben (Freddie Jones) takes care of a pig, Hen Wen, who has been gifted with the power of prophecy.

When the pig foresees a future in which the Horned King sweeps across the land thanks to the Cauldron born -- an army of zombies -- it is decided that Taran must hide Hen Wen at a cottage on the edge of a forbidden forest.

Unfortunately, the dragon minions of The Horned King capture the pig, leaving Taran to partner with a strange little creature, Gurgi (John Byner), a minstrel (Nigel Hawthorne) and a beautiful princess, Eilonwy (Susan Sheridan) to rescue the precious animal and gain possession of the mystical black cauldron before The Horned King can harness its power.

Unfortunately, the cauldron is in possession of three sinister witches.

"We never give anything away. We bargain. We trade."

The Black Cauldron is indeed a hero's journey story. It focuses on a young hero who must answer the call to adventure when he hears it. 

Young Taran -- much like Luke Skywalker -- dreams of escaping a life of drudgery, and becoming a great hero or soldier. He actively fantasizes about that life, so much so that he can't focus on the present, or the chores before him.  Instead he is called instead to his visions of majestic adulthood. At one point, Taran literally imagines himself as a knight in shining armor.

Taran is aided on his quest in the film by a mentor (Dallben), and a motley band of friends like Gurgi, Fflewddur Fllam, Eilonwy, and Hen Wen.  Not a one of them is particularly imposing, and yet they travel with Taran on his "road of trials," another crucial aspect of the Monomyth paradigm.  Before the movie's end, they must defeat the villain and make the return home.

As I've noted many times on the blog before, the Hero's Journey has been done to death. It's a 'universalist' concept used and re-used by many movies of the fantasy genre.  Sometimes it can serve as a short-cut to thinking, or innovation, or even imagination. 

Yet The Black Cauldron provides an intriguing twist on the material. In the typical Monomyth structure, the young hero rises, succeeds on his trials, receives the ultimate boon (the achievement of the quest) and brings peace to his people or land.

By contrast, The Black Cauldron doesn't appear to accept the idea that wars make for great heroes. 

Throughout the film, the screenplay pushes back hard against the very structure it utilizes. Taran is told, flat out, "war isn't a game. People get hurt." for example.  His fantasies of being a great warrior are thus revealed for what they are: childish, juvenile, or unrealistic dreams.  "Is the burning and killing still going on out there?" One character asks, caustically.

War, such dialogue informs us, is not some romantic, rarefied thing in which destinies are forged and heroes rise.  It is ugly. It hurts people.

Later, Taran must make a (bad) deal with the three witches that costs him one object of his quest: his magic sword.  

Again, consider that Luke Skywalker doesn't have to give up his father's light saber in the first Star Wars. Colwyn doesn't trade his glaive to battle the Beast and save the world in Krull (1983).

Yet to accomplish his "heroic" mission, Taran must forsake the very tool that traditionally, marks him as a hero, and allows him to win wars.  He loses his weapon.  He loses his ability to win a fight.

But if you accept that war isn't a game, Taran's trade makes abundant sense. The film's climax follows that point rather explicitly. Taran is not allowed to die in a heroic sacrifice, nor win a victory with a weapon.  Instead, a silly, unimposing little creature, Gurgi -- ostensibly the film's comic relief -- steps up and sacrifices his life instead.  

Thus Taran's quest is resolved through no traditionally heroic deed of his own. Instead, his ability to make a friend is the thing that saved his world from the Horned King.  What he did right was not win a fight, but win a friend.

The antidote to evil, then, according to The Black Cauldron is not great strength, not battle training, and not combat.  

Instead, friendship is the key.  

People succeed against evil by making connections to one other.  This idea, actually, is replayed (and replayed well, despite conventional wisdom) in The Phantom Menace (1999), a film that features a seemingly foolish creature like Gurgi (named Jar-Jar Binks), who also provides a key link in a "symbiotic circle" of his world. Without Gurgi (or the Gungans, actually) the heroes on their respective journeys cannot succeed. 

Taran is not a great hero in the traditional or stereotypical sense. He is not a great fighter, especially without the gimmick of his magic sword (which he trades away).  He also is not a "Chosen One" with great inherent powers.  Instead, a special pig has the power of second sight, or prophecy.  The hero's special sight, in this case, has been transferred to livestock.

These notions have always struck me as being very anti-hero's journey in a significant sense. 

In terms of villains, The Black Cauldron's most powerful moments arrive in the careful enunciation of a subtext about this fantasy world, and about real world history too. 

A cauldron is not just a metal pot, after all, but a situation characterized by “instability and strong emotions.” The world depicted in the Disney film qualifies as being an example of such instability. 

The movie reveals a world in which there seems to be no established force for good, and no functioning infrastructure to stop the sinister plans of The Horned King.  Instead, this villain plans to use the cauldron, and revive the darkness of the past. The cauldron is the container that keeps alive the memory/soul of an evil king from that past. It is thus a repository for all the ingredients of mankind's history, ingredients that may yet endanger peace.  

So The Black Cauldron reminds us that the past is never really dead at all. 

Instead, it is always threatening to boil over, to spill into the present with dire consequences.  Old conflicts and hatreds -- prejudice, nativism, violence -- don't seem to truly disappear, only to hide for awhile before bubbling to the surface once more.  And the cauldron, we are explicitly informed, can never be destroyed; just like man's bloody past can never be truly expunged, either.

We have to go on living with that cauldron, just as we have to go on living with the mistakes of the past.  

That’s not a bad motif for a fantasy film, and many of The Black Cauldron's stirring, dark visuals, aid in telling of a story in which unlikely heroes rise to quell a new threat to the present. 

As I noted above, the film also makes a powerful point about sacrifice.  Here, a character who is not a great warrior -- nor even tall in stature -- saves the world out of friendship.

The typical monommyth or hero's journey gives us a hero (often selected by destiny or fate) to "answer the call" to adventure.  The Black Cauldron features a hero's quest, all right, but the hero succeeds not by fighting, not by battle, and not by killing.  He thrives, instead, because of the friends he chooses to make.

It's difficult to understand why Disney saw that as such a "dark" concept back in 1985.  Friendship -- not war and strife -- says The Dark Cauldron, is the proper antidote to darkness.

40 Years Ago: Explorers (1985)

Two movies wage a war for supremacy in Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985). 

One movie is a quasi-Spielberg film that lionizes childhood and pays tribute to the 1950s science fiction (and even no-science fiction) productions familiar to and beloved by baby boomers

The second film feels much more indicative of Dante’s creative approach and is an irreverent, subversive, film that depicts alien first contact by way of a Looney Tunes-like universe.

The problem with Explorers is that these two films and tones don’t fit together in the slightest.  

And since the film starts firmly in Spielberg mode, it is that mode which -- whatever its sentimental pitfalls -- should have carried the day.

However, the wonder, innocence and majesty of Explorers’ first half finds no purchase, no outlet and no resolution in the film’s disappointing third act. 

Even the film’s star, young Ethan Hawke, looks befuddled and dispirited by the alien stand-up comedy and rock-and-roll performance he must endure during the film’s movie-killing climax. 

The unspoken question roiling beneath Hawke’s expressive young face is one that all viewers of the 1985 film will share.  

We traveled all this way and fell in love with these characters…just for this?

For cut-rate, cartoon aliens doing bad imitations of Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope and Desi Arnaz?

I first saw Explorers at the Royal Theater in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in 1985, when I was fifteen years old.  Even then, I understood a simple fact about the film’s drama and structure. The film’s trio of young protagonists -- so open, enterprising, imaginative, and full of hope -- deserved a journey that honored their good character.  They deserved an odyssey like the one Exeter teased in This Island Earth (1951) and which is excerpted explicitly in Explorers. 

They deserved an opportunity to interface with a “vast universe…filled with wonders.” 

Instead, this triumvirate reached the stars only to find that even in space, it is impossible to escape TV reruns and baby-boomer nostalgia.

“I’m afraid my wounds can never be healed.”

Bullied at school, young Ben Crandall (Hawke) dreams of flying at night.  

One night, he dreams of flying over a landscape that transforms into a high-tech circuit board.  When Ben shares his notes about this dream with his friend, Wolfgang (River Phoenix) and they are put into a computer, Ben realizes that another intelligence is communicating with him.

Along with another boy, Darren (Jason Presson), who comes from “the wrong side of the tracks Ben and Wolfgang experiment with the alien technology, creating a force bubble that can mitigate forces of acceleration, gravity and inertia.

In other words, the bubble is a force-field of sorts, protecting any object or person that happens to be inside it.  Ben and the other boys resolve to build a spaceship, and visit the local junkyard to create a small craft, which they christen The Thunder Road. It is built from a Tilt-a-whirl.

After a second dream, which provides information about life-support inside their ship, Ben and the others take to the stars to visit their benefactors.  

They leave Earth, and a nosy police man (Dick Miller) behind, and travel to space to reckon with some very strange alien beings…

“It could be something we can’t even imagine.”

One brand of Spielberg’s aesthetic, as represented by E.T. (1982), and to a lesser extent, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters (1978), Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Invaders from Mars (1986) and Super 8 (2011), is clearly on view in Explorers’ first two acts.  

Like some of those films, this one involves precocious but disillusioned youngsters who, through a surprising connection with the supernatural/paranormal, re-discover magic and wonder in their often-disappointing lives.  

As we have seen in some Spielberg films (and the films of his contemporaries), “this boy’s life” in Explorers is one in which the traditional middle-class family has failed the enterprising child. Darren’s mother is dead, and his father’s attentions are elsewhere, even though he lives in suburbia (also the setting of E.T. and others).  Ben, meanwhile, seems to live in a world where parents are absent.  At school, he is the victim of a bully named Jackson. These views of childhood can be compared with instances of parental death or divorce in Super 8 and E.T., respectively.

A key location in all these films is the central boy’s bedroom, a sanctuary which he decorates with products/items that reflect his imaginative nature. In this case, we see that Ben has a poster of It Came from Outer Space (1953) on his bedroom wall, and that his disk is littered with Marvel Comics.  And playing on the TV while he sleeps is George Pal’s War of the Worlds. 

Thus we can extrapolate that Ben has escaped an unhappy (or at least unsatisfying) family life by escaping into his bedroom…and the fantasy worlds offered in popular entertainment.

Because Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, and Joe Dante are all boomers, they tend to imbue their adolescent characters with a love for older science fiction films, even though it is not, necessarily, a realistic quality. I was a kid at the same time as Elliott or Ben, or Billy (the 1970s-1980s), and I was into Star Wars, Space:1999, Planet of the Apes and Star Trek, not of the productions which get call-backs here: The Thing (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956).  I made it my mission to see all those films, of course, and I admire them all tremendously, but they were not bedroom poster-worthy to my generation, if that makes sense.

Therefore, it is not too difficult to understand that these tributes to older films -- in E.T., Explorers and the like -- represent the filmmakers’ reckoning with their own childhoods. They are re-imagining their own youth in these 1980s films, and that sometimes adds a self-indulgent quality to the art. It would be like me making a film about kids today, and decorating their bedrooms with Space:1999 (1975 – 1977) or Battlestar Galactica (1978 – 1979) posters. Fun as an allusion? Sure.  Realistic? Not particularly.

Ironically, in terms of science fiction movies, the 1980s works of Spielberg and his contemporaries -- all of whom I admire very much -- actually represent a paradigm shift away from 1950s and 1960s genre works. 

In older films, like Forbidden Planet or even Kubrick’s 2001, explorers in space and time voyage to the edge of reality, to the frontier, and are challenged to recognize new ideas there. By contrast, in some 1980s films brandishing the Spielberg aesthetic, explorers in space and time encounter the paranormal and find worlds and beings not that challenge their concept of the universe or their belief system, but that bring them emotional comfort; that reinforce their imaginative/fantastic belief systems. 

Elliott needs a friend, and E.T. teaches him how to connect to others. The kids in Explorers visit the stars, and meet there alien children who steal their father’s car/spaceship, and quake in fear from menacing parental figures. 

The message?  Kids and parents are alike all over.

The aliens’ reason for not visiting Earth in Explorers is even dramatized in terms of baby boomer cinema. The aliens show the human children a montage of humans treating aliens badly, including imagery from 20,000 Million Miles to Earth (1967), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), and so on. The sub-textual message is that aliens can’t visit Earth because our parents ruined everything, just as they ruined our lives.

Accordingly, Explorers lionizes innocence…so much so that alien beings are not different creatures to reckon with, but mirrors that validate a childhood perspective on life.  It’s the Peter Pan syndrome. Also in the film, an older policeman, played by Dick Miller recalls that he once dreamed of going to the stars, but that those dreams receded as he grew up. Again, a message is wrought: adults need not apply for the magical Explorers space program. Only the very young, and the very innocent, may board this flight.

Apparently, in space we can only expect to meet beings who will fill our empty spots, not beings who will challenge us to grow, and evolve, and become better than we are.

Clearly, this idea can work beautifully, and even feel magical on occasion, as E.T. and Close Encounters aptly demonstrate. They are great films. 

But Explorers seems to tread a step too far in the same direction, suggesting that imagination, tenacity, and optimism will be rewarded only with a world of perpetual boomer references or allusions, one where Ed Sullivan, Mr. Ed, Bugs Bunny and Tarzan are always on the tube, always repeating their greatest hits.  Explorers reduces all the wonders of the universe to a closed-loop of 1950s nostalgia, and therefore undercuts the very message of great films like Forbidden Planet, or even This Island Earth.   

The scenes here with the goofy, TV-quoting aliens, truly betray the film’s beautiful first half, which strikes a deep chord with me on a personal level in some regard. Specifically, much of the early portions of Explorers involve the building of a spaceship out of junk and spare parts. A tilt-a-whirl ride is the basis for the spaceship that Ben, Wolfgang, and Darren build, but other pieces are added on, and that little ramshackle spaceship is a wondrous thing: a manifestation of childhood imagination.

I remember very clearly when I was a young man, watching as two friends built -- out of whatever they could find -- a raft that they hoped to sail down a nearby river.  I remember seeing them in the neighborhood one day, spare parts on their backs, bags of snacks in their hands, as they prepared for the launch of their “ship.”  I don’t know if the raft ever proved sea worthy, but I have always remembered their joy at the possibility of building a vessel that could carry them…away, to the unknown.  

In ways profound and wondrous, the first half of Explorers captures that youthful feeling of assembling a dream; of building with your own hands a vehicle that could alter your destiny and carry you to new horizons. The early scenes in the film that find the youths experimenting with the alien force bubble and constructing their own ride to the stars remain magical, and meaningful. Indeed, they are so compelling, well-wrought and charmingly performed that the film’s final act plays as all the more disappointing.  If you watch the film closely, you can’t help but love Ben, Wolfgang and Darren.

The Thunder Road (the name of the ship, provided by Darren) and her crew ultimately deserved a journey of discovery and wonder, not one that found the final frontier was just…old TV.  

The promise -- as Ben clearly enunciates it -- is to “go where no man has gone before” (not just a TV reference, but a promise of new territory explored), and see something that humans “can’t even imagine,” something that could qualify as “the greatest thing ever.”

Ask yourself? Do the Looney Tunes alien fit the bill? As the greatest thing ever? As something unimaginable? 

If not, what could the aliens have looked like instead?  Perhaps they could have been being who understood that a dream is best when shared and when built, piece-by-piece with your own hands.  

In the film, Ben and Wolfgang (and eventually Lori and Darren) dream of the technology they need to touch the stars. They share a kind of “hive dream” universe, and yet the childish, bug-eyed aliens we meet in the finale don’t seem capable of having sent these dreams to them. That’s an important disconnect in the film.

Explorers needed aliens who were more like teachers, or benevolent parents, perhaps, than like Bob Hope-quoting bug-eyed juveniles.  Why?  So Ben and the others would see that life wasn’t just disappointment after disappointment, but the possibility of them building a brave new world together.

Explorers also hasn’t aged well in terms of its treatment of Lori (Amanda Peterson). I realize that the film is forty years old, but Lori is a virtual non-character in the film. She is a prize for Ben to “win” at the end of his adventure, and a character who never gets to ride in the Thunder Road, or visit the stars. 

Even when I was fifteen -- forty years ago -- I knew that was wrong. Girls dream big too and possess great imagination, so Lori should have been a major character in the film, not just Ben’s reward for reaching the stars. I trust the anticipated remake of the film will rectify this problem.

Before Explorers, Joe Dante was on something of a roll, having directed Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), and Gremlins (1984), all terrific films in my estimation. I have read that Explorers went into production, however, without the team settling on an ending. I’m afraid that the absence of a carefully-plotted, coherent third-act shows. It handicaps the film. The film’s first half -- while soaked in Boomer self-indulgence -- nonetheless captures the wonders of childhood, and the amazing feeling of building your destiny, one spare part at a time.  The last half of the film, which wallows in pop culture kitsch, is a misstep for the ages.

To misquote Exeter from This Island Earth, I’m afraid Explorers’ inconsistent approach to its narrative is a grievous wound, one that “will never be healed.”