Kids first lines: “I’ve waited all my life to say this… we come in peace.” A stunner from the aliens: “ehhh, what’s up doc?” Cartoony sound effects everywhere, kids don’t seem to know what’s going on, layers of TV shows and static all over the screen. Some wacky shenanigans with a giant spider aboard the alien craft that captures them, then they meet the aliens, a boy and a girl. After another dream which reveals the circuitry for a magical oxygen-generation board (?), they head out to infinity and beyond. After teaming up with bully-baiting Jason, a tough loner kid from an unhappy home, they build a ship (called the Thunder Road, using a seat from a tilt-a-whirl) and test it out, surrounding it with the force field and buzzing their town, using alien technology to peep through Amanda’s window. Both begin to have a shared dream (the circuit board above), so River builds the board to the dream’s specs and has himself a computer-controlled floating forcefield. They love drive-ins, sci-fi and horror movies (hello, Joe Dante).
Nerdy German kid River is friends with picked-on dreamer Ethan.
Not at all a bad movie, but I have a hard time summoning up much excitement for it… just a cute little journey with a refreshingly unexpected conclusion. A villain, perhaps, a stuffy adult authority figure come to put an end to their fun, but when he arrives at the clearing and sees them taking off in the ship, his reaction is unexpectedly sweet… he just smiles and stays behind the trees.Ĭomputer effects by ILM, makeup by Rob Bottin (fresh off The Thing), music by Jerry Goldsmith, with James Cromwell as River’s absentminded father… a respectable crew. There’s a schoolyard villain, 17-yr-old Bobby Fite, but the coolest character is of course Dick Miller (above) as a helicopter pilot who sees the kids’ spaceship and single-mindedly tracks them down. Ethan kisses her at the end in the above cloud-flying dream-sequence, to show that he has grown up a little bit from his adventures, and to show that despite all this fooling around in basements with his boy friends, he sure ain’t gay. She was barely in this movie, the token female character.
Little did I know I was witnessing the feature film debuts by two new stars, Ethan Hawke (left) and River Phoenix (with the glasses).Īlso this kid, Jason Presson, who was just as good but never got as far as his costars in the movie world (despite a cameo in Gremlins 2).Īnd Ethan’s love interest Amanda Peterson, who got her own romantic comedy starring role two years later before disappearing from the screen. Otherwise I remember it being a pretty cool, very weird space movie which no other kids would discuss with me when I got back home to Texas because no one else had seen it. Mostly memorable for being the only (?) movie I ever watched with aunt Nora.