The subject of this week’s film essay in the Reader, James Gray’s Ad Astra, imagines a future in which humanity has united in the mission to find and make contact with intelligent life outside our solar system. I won’t reveal whether the film’s characters succeed in their quest, though I’ll note that Ad Astra is a distinctive sci-fi picture in that it focuses on the hard science of how space travel and interstellar communication might work in the future as opposed to the science fantasy of how extraterrestrial life might look and behave. That speculation, of course, has inspired untold amounts of genre fiction over the past century, as authors, illustrators, and filmmakers have imagined all sorts of intelligent species from other galaxies. One branch of narratives, likely stemming from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, imagines alien life as malign and hoping to conquer us humans. A second, perhaps epitomized by Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), imagines friendly creatures from outer space who initiate welcome relationships with earth people. Then there’s another variation, recently represented by Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), that depicts alien life as so downright alien that human efforts to understand it take up most of the narrative.
Explorers Joe Dante’s 1985 film seems to crystallize the tragic position of a strong directorial personality in the assembly-line 80s. With one hand, he builds up a slick, pseudo-Spielberg fantasy about a 12-year-old’s innocent dreams of reaching the stars; with the other, he slashes into the burnished, sentimental drama he has worked so hard to create with a savage satire that exposes those innocent dreams as grubby, media-induced hallucinations. When our hero (Ethan Hawke) and his two buddies (River Phoenix and Jason Presson) do reach the great unknown, it turns out to be a ripoff—a drab, awful place populated by creatures even more cretinous and childish than those they left back on earth. But where Dante’s cynicism ultimately carried the day over Spielberg’s piousness in Gremlins, Explorers remains a hopelessly schizophrenic film, obscenely eager to compromise its own originality. With Dick Miller and Robert Picardo. —Dave Kehr
