Don't you wonder what's out there? I mean, up in the universe, on other planets?
Joe Dante holds something of a rarefied place in film fandom since he's one of the dreamers who was able to break into the industry and put his own fantasies on the screen. He started out by writing reviews of genre films for fan magazines (which were later reprinted in Video Watchdog) and eventually got a job cutting trailers for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, which led to directing gigs like Hollywood Boulevard and Piranha. It was after he went out on his own to make The Howling that he was tapped by Steven Spielberg to direct one of the better segments of Twilight Zone: The Movie (the gonzo reimagining of "It's a Good Life") as well as Gremlins, which was such a major hit that it allowed him to develop a more personal project. That turned out to be 1985's Explorers, a feature-length wish-fulfillment fantasy for sci-fi geeks everywhere.
Best known today for marking the screen debuts of Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, Explorers is mostly seen through the eyes of Hawke's pop-culture obsessive (obviously patterned after Dante), who gravitates to science fiction epics like War of the Worlds and This Island Earth. Phoenix is much more down-to-earth, the rational proponent of science fact who is able to translate an image from Hawke's recurring flying dreams (which feature some Tron-like landscapes) into an actual circuit capable of creating a force field that he can control with his 128K Apple computer. To complete the trio they enlist gearhead Jason Presson, the product of a broken home who helps build and christen their spacecraft, the Thunder Road, which quite appropriately has a television screen as its main window. This is because when our three young explorers finally make it into space, they find that television has most emphatically preceded them.
Dante loves to pack his films with in-jokes and movie references and it's quite possible that this one incorporates the most. He even includes a couple sly nods to his own films among the headlines of a prop newspaper ("Homewood School Teacher Reported Missing" and "Kingston Falls 'Riot' Still Unexplained"). He also gives plum roles to Mary Kay Place as Hawke's mother and James Cromwell as Phoenix's absent-minded father, as well as Dante regulars Robert Picardo (as the strong-chinned hero of Starkiller, a cheesy space opera seen playing at a drive-in) and Dick Miller (as a helicopter pilot who encounters the boys during their maiden flight and appears to be a threat but turns out to be sympathetic to their cause).
If the film has a major flaw it is that it takes an hour for Hawke, Phoenix and Presson to actually leave Earth, and when they do they don't get to explore much before they're zapped through space to the alien ship that has been the source of the mysterious broadcasts. As they set out on their journey Hawke exclaims with wonder, "It feels like a dream, doesn't it? I mean, it's all so perfect." After the three of them have spent several minutes wandering around the seemingly abandoned spaceship, though, he glumly concedes, "I hate to say this, but this isn't the way I thought it would be at all." I'm sure many filmgoers in 1985 felt the same way, even if Rob Bottin's creatures (once they appear) are pretty nifty. You just wish they had been given more to do than spout pop-culture catchphrases and make obvious points about the way human beings treat aliens (or misfits of any kind, really) on Earth. Of course, that's only in the movies, right?