With the help of their new friend Darren Woods, they create a homemade spacecraft and embark on a secret adventure to another galaxy where they find that things are not always as different as they seem. But one night he has a vivid dream of flying over a space-like circuit board and shares his visions with his best friend Wolfgang Muller, a young scientific genius who is able to translate his dreams into a complex computer program that actually works.
Ben Crandall is a young visionary who dreams of space travel while watching late-night B monster movies, pouring over comic books, and playing Galaga in the confines of his bedroom. This space adventure stars Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as misfit best friends whose dreams of space travel become a reality when they create an interplanetary spacecraft in their homemade laboratory.
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But any movie that has a bad guy dissolved by the protagonist's stomach acid puts a smile on my face, especially when Dante punctuates this mini-cannibalism with a burp punchline.
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The screenplay is a little ungainly, especially in its first half-hour, which I ascribe to a desire to cram the movie as full as possible with extra subplots and bits of business.
Innerspace turned out to be a surprise flop for Dante, which is really a shame because it has just about everything you could want in a 1980s adventure-comedy: an engaging odd-couple pairing with the alcoholic, womanizing test-pilot Dennis Quaid injected into nebbishy Martin Short after a miniaturiation experiment is sabotaged by corporate bad guys a great supporting cast including Kevin McCarthy and Robert Picardo fun action scenes terrific non-digital special effects of Quaid's capsule floating around inside Short's body and Dante's standard wry sense of humor (my favorite bit: Kenneth Tobey sees Martin Short in a men's room, seemingly talking to noone, and says to him "Play with it buddy, don't talk to it"). After completing its initial mission in 1982, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) and sent to comet Giacobini-Zinner. The results are mixed because, sadly, the aliens really are pretty irritating, but the film as a whole stands up regardless, especially thanks to Jerry Goldsmith's score. Amazingly, over the last two decades a variety of spacecraft have done just that voyaged to 6 of these denizens of the heavens. But the movie still ends on a transcendental, mystical note, meaning that ultimately Dante's experiment was to reframe the genre, to make a film less about escapism (each of the three boys is trying to get away from divorcing parents, poverty, etc.) and more complex.
It's a perverse choice for Dante to make, to take some of the hot air out of the transcendental streak of pop sci-fi, and I'm sure it hurt the movie at the box office, just as his snarky sense of humor and unwillingness to give a mass audience quite what it wanted ended up throwing viewers out of Gremlins 2 or Small Soldiers. My fuzzy memories of seeing this when I was 8 are of being totally jazzed at the movie's hour-long setup, hinting at a wondrous close encounter with beings unknown to us, yet possessed of superior technology and apparently mystical abilities, and then being confused and let down when it turns out that not only are the aliens banal, but they're actually kind of annoying.
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Even though it looks like the perfect mid-'80s Amblin production, it surprisingly didn't involve Steven Spielberg at all, which makes me wonder if he passed on it after reading the screenplay and getting to the third-act twist where (SPOILERS!) the boys discover that the aliens aren't the same kind of Spielbergian transcendental figures of awe but merely a couple of teenagers themselves who've stolen the family spaceship for some joyriding around our planet, and who speak mainly in pop culture gibberish they've picked up from TV and radio transmissions. The pitch had to have been simple, a scaled-down kids' version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Some lingering business after the Joe Dante festival at the New Beverly here in Los Angeles, I rewatched a couple more of his movies for the first time in a long time.Įxplorers was Dante's follow-up to the wildly successful Gremlins, a story about three boys (including a young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix) who build their own spaceship out of plans transmitted to them in their dreams and travel to an outer-space alien encounter.
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