The 1985 Cult Classic Explorers is Joe Dante's Pleasingly Prankish Take on E.T
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m pleased to announce that the very kind patron who had me watch and write about all of Oliver Stone’s movies has now contracted for me to write up River Phoenix’s complete filmography for this column as well.
That suits me just fine! I am a big fan of River Phoenix as well as his brother Joaquin. The Stand By Me star’s filmography is full of movies I’ve vaguely wanted to revisit.
Phoenix’s life and career were cut way too short when he died of an overdose at twenty-three in 1993. It’s a tragedy that Phoenix didn’t get to see his twenty-fourth birthday while that piece of shit Matthew Perry will probably live to a hundred.
Every day I curse God for taking an extraordinary talent like Phoenix so soon while inexplicably letting Matthew Perry wake up each morning a non-corpse. Why? Why? Why did good, gifted, charismatic souls like River Phoenix and Chris Farley die young instead of Matthew Perry?
Phoenix was barely in his teens when he made his film debut in Joe Dante’s 1985 science-fiction fantasy Explorers but he had lived and suffered enough for multiple lifetimes. As a child Phoenix and his family were members of the abusive Children of God cult.
They eventually escaped but River had no formal schooling and spent part of a traumatic childhood singing for spare change for passerby. That’s where River and his family were discovered by a prominent talent agent who got the handsome young actor with the aura of ineffable sadness steady work in commercials, television and eventually motion pictures.
Phoenix may have been a newcomer to film when he scored a starring role in Dante’s big-budgeted follow-up to the smash hit 1984 horror comedy Gremlins but he was a show-business veteran, an old pro even as a child.
The heartbreakingly beautiful child star is cast against type in Explorers as boy genius Wolfgang Müller. Phoenix had such an ethereal quality and was so heartbreakingly gorgeous that it seems counter-intuitive to cast him as someone defined by their genius level intellect.
Thankfully Phoenix had the smarts and the substance to convincingly play a super-genius the likes of which the world has never known, a child capable of single-handedly besting pretty much every adult since the beginning of time in creating a homemade spacecraft capable of traveling to deep space.
Phoenix’s science wizard has help from friend Benjamin "Ben" Crandall (Ethan Hawke, in his film debut), a starry-eyed, science-fiction obsessed dreamer whose mind travels to fascinating and unexpected places while he sleeps.
Ben’s innocent boyhood dreams contain a blueprint for a microchip that makes it possible to create a sphere of seemingly unlimited possibilities, a sphere that can travel at great speeds in any direction, even into the farthest reaches of space.
They say that when science passes a certain threshold it crosses over into magic. That’s the dynamic at play here. Explorers is pure fantasy that puts the fiction in science fiction but because Phoenix’s mad scientist is so confident and authoritative in explaining the miracle that makes it possible for three ragged kids to go to outer space we believe it all the same.
Ben and Wolfgang bond over their shared dream of traveling the cosmos using the strange information embedded in Ben’s subconscious. Jay Presson costars as Darren Woods, a blue collar misfit who befriends Ben and Wolfgang and sets about helping them realize their precocious dreams of intergalactic travel as a way of getting out of an abusive home ruled by an alcoholic father.
Before it blasts off into outer space on the adventure of a lifetime Explorers first grounds the action in the all too relatable emotions of childhood and adolescence. The film is filled with novelistic details that tell us everything we need to know about the characters and the world they inhabit.
Wolfgang’s house, for example, is a riot of chaos and disorder, a Wild West where a wiz kid can set up a world-changing lab in the basement without seemingly anyone noticing. In a particularly clever touch, a baby in the Muller household sports both a Halloween mask and a Christmas-themed bib.
Darren’s life of working class misery is equally well-drawn. There’s a heartbreaking moment when Darren, with a sense of weary resignation, says that his dad “taught him how to run” by chasing his terrified son in a furious drunken rage, with ferocious punishment as the inevitable result if he catches him.
Explorers hit me right in the nostalgic sweet spot. Like many Gen-Xers I have an intense spiritual and emotional connection to the Spielbergian suburbs of the 1980s, which were wonderful and fantastical and full of fear and terror and dread all at the same time. The happiest moments of my traumatic childhood were spent dreaming out loud in the dark about these magical places.
It’s a world defined by loneliness and a fierce longing for connection and meaning as well as the exhilaratingly unexpected presence of the wondrous and fantastical. The boys use a Tilt-A-Whirl car purloined from a junkyard Darren hangs out at and transform it into an adorably homemade spacecraft they deem the Thunder Road after the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name.
It’s a name that reflects Darren’s working class roots as well as its low-budget and crudely improvised yet successful construction. Outcasts who never quite felt at home on planet earth blast off into outer space and discovers that someone, or something, has taken over the ship’s controls for unknown purposes.
Dante liked Eric Luke’s screenplay for Explorers but felt it lacked a satisfying third act. In a Q&A for the film at the New Beverly he said, “At the end when the kids went to the planet, they go and play baseball. That was the plot. It seemed that wasn't quite enough.”
So Dante and Luke concocted a climax where the boys go to outer space and find, at the end of the cosmos, what is essentially a rerun. Slimy space alien Wak (Robert Picardo, a beloved member of Dante’s study repertory company) gets all of his ideas about Earth and its curious inhabitants from compulsive television consumption.
Wak consequently isn’t capable of genuine communication or connection. As a pure product of television and American pop culture, he can’t listen, understand or empathize. All he can do is entertain in a manner the children find mildly amusing at first and then not particularly entertaining.
Dante and Luke’s audacious idea for their primary alien is that he’s essentially a ten year old extra-terrestrial version of Tony Clifton, with a more PG vocabulary and aesthetic. The boys travel to space for an awkward playdate with aliens decidedly lacking in social skills.
Dante was faced with a dilemma. How do you make a movie about kids who meet space aliens and are underwhelmed and disappointed to learn that they’re pretty much socially awkward kids without making the film itself underwhelming and anti-climactic in the process? I’m not sure Dante ever quite figured that out but he nevertheless created an eminently worthy addition to the pantheon of Spielbergian 1980s science fiction fantasies.
Explorers faced impossible competition from Back to the Future and Live Aid. Explorers underperformed at the box-office but has gone on to attract a sizable and devoted cult following.
Is Explorers as good as E.T, Back to the Future or Gremlins? Of course not. That’s setting the bar impossibly high. Is it fair to compare it to such all-time classics? It is not. It’s also not fair that Matthew Perry is still alive while countless more worthy entertainers have died horrible deaths.
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