After my failure to watch a romantic movie with my wife a couple of weeks ago (see Ladyhawke), I decided instead to watch a kid’s movie with my three girls. This week, it was 1986’s Flight of the Navigator, and I was curious to see how this classic film stacks up.
Flight of the Navigator follows the story of David Freeman, a typical American kid struggling to find his confidence. In 1978, he gets lost in the woods on the way home, then wakes up to find that eight years have passed and everyone thinks he is dead. Meanwhile, a military base recovers a strange alien craft, which will only open for the boy adrift in time…
The pacing of this film has the typical 80s slow-burn plot, where the entire first half is character setup, and the story doesn’t really get underway until David finally enters the spaceship, operated by the robotic droid Max. While this gave my daughters a chance to connect with David, who was well written as a scared 12 year old boy who just wants to go home, the UFO road trip in the second half of the film was where my girls really perked up. The plot then takes off, figuratively and literally, when Max accidentally downloads David’s personality and becomes a wise-cracking, sillier version of the original soulless drone.
There are a few plot holes here. What the hell was the army base robotic food server RALPH for? In a film with cutting edge CGI, why did David need to escape the army base in what looked like the crappier cousin of K9 from Doctor Who? I also have questions about the alien ship’s motivation here. You travel light years across the galaxy to study life on the distant alien planet Earth (ok), you kidnap a child of the most dominant species (dodgy as hell), then, for no apparent reason, fill his head with intergalactic star charts… to see what would happen? And then it turns out you just happen to need those charts back later on? I feel like David should be asking more questions about this.
As a side note, I’ve just learnt that the robotic Max who first kidnapped David was voiced by Pee Wee Herman. I’m fairly certain there’s a joke in there somewhere but I don’t want to get sued to lets just keep moving on…
The ending is ok, David’s adventures in the UFO giving him the confidence he needs to step away from a sheltered life within his 1986 family and risk the dangerous route of travelling back in time to reunite with his original 1978 family. That’s fine, but David is strangely disconnected from the final conflict. They enter the time storm and he… just kinda sits there with a pained expression on his face for a minute, then he’s back in the woods in ‘78. If would have been nice if he had been able to apply some kind of lesson that he had learned on his adventure, perhaps have to manually pilot the ship if Max was stricken from the time storm.
Then again, I’m a cynical middle-aged man. What did the girls think? Overall, they absolutely loved this movie. They enjoyed the road trip part of the story, they thought Max was hilarious, and gasped at how cool the ship’s interior looked. Credit where credit is due, I love those 80s practical sets, and the shiny chrome interior of Max looks just as impressive now as it did 36 years ago.
With the dominance of 1980s classics proven once again, I think it’s time to go from a highlight to a lowlight. Next week I want to review a terrible movie. Give me a beautiful trainwreck you’ve seen. A film that was so bad you still think about it twenty years later. It’ll be fun, promise!
Leave a Reply