tek's rating: maybe "meh", or up to "meh and a half"

Explorers (PG)
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Okay, there's a kid named Ben (Ethan Hawke), who had a dream he's flying over this weird landscape that turns out to look kind of like a weird circuit board or something. He draws it- or at least a small part of it- the best he can from memory, when he wakes up. He shows the drawing to his friend Wolfgang (River Phoenix), who builds a circuit board, which he attaches to his computer, to figure out what it does. This, of course, is in like 1985, and it's an old computer even then, I think, so it's not very powerful. But whatever, it produces a bubble, and they can alter its dimensions, and enter coordinates to move it around, and stuff. Later, they make a larger bubble, and discover that within it, there's no inertia. So they can use it to travel really fast. The kids, along with another boy named Darren, build a little ship out of some junk, including a tilt-a-whirl seat.

So then, they use the bubble to encase the ship and move it around, and go for a joyride. Then the computer gets taken over by some outside source, which takes them into space. And they meet a couple of weird aliens, who talk mainly by repeating stuff they heard on TV. And later the kids return to Earth. There isn't really anything else I want to say about the plot, I guess.

Though I thought it was a reasonably interesting little story, and had some mildly amusing moments, I mainly didn't really care for it much. Especially the part with the aliens. Definitely worth having seen once, and I wouldn't blame anyone who rated it much higher, for reasons of, I dunno, nostalgia or whatever. But I'm afraid I just wasn't feelin' it, and I definitely have no desire to ever see it again. (I might have liked it more if I'd seen it when I was a kid, but I didn't see it until more than a couple decades after it came out, because I happened to read about it in some old magazine I'd picked up somewhere, which prompted me to get the DVD. Which I didn't bother keeping.)


meh index