posted
This was a film that I enjoyed as a child, and I returned to it many years later and like it even more. Something that many people talk about is the last third of the movie - they strongly dislike it. I've never felt this way and enjoy the scenes very much, and can't really see why they feel this way. What is it that you dislike exactly? [IMG] Posts: 168 | From: Bedfont, England | Registered: Apr 2003 | Site Updates: 0
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I think the trouble is everybody like's the feel good factor of the first part of this movie and lot's can relate having been lucky enough to grow up in 80's suburban America but as it develops the surroundings became un-familiar and less cosy, of course there needed to be a point to the film, but this movie could have gone in many different directions and the trouble is we all have our own thoughts and opinions on what the conclusion should have or could have been!
MM
Posts: 165 | From: Coventry, United Kingdom | Registered: Jul 2007 | Site Updates: 0
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Well, in a word, the ending is 'silly'. The problem is, the first part of the film captures that childhood feeling of wishing something amazing would happen so well, that when the ending happens you just feel disappointed. Especially when that ending reveals the whole meeting as a kind of cosmic prank. The start of the film was so sincere, that when the tone shifts and it becomes more humorous, it doesn't fit. You’re set up for an E.T./Close Encounters-esque meeting of different worlds, and what you get is bad stand up comedy and b-movie aliens. Not only that, but the actual meeting is very short, they just start talking and then the father turns up and they have to go. So even if they could have salvaged the end a bit better, they didn't spend the time in space to do it. It was both disappointing and short.
Dante was clearly trying to pay homage to the 50's movies he grew up with, the problem with that is, by the time he made Explorers the bar for children’s entertainment had been set much higher by things like Star Wars (and the movies above). Kids in the eighties just weren't prepared to be satisfied with a tongue-in-cheek ending featuring a guy in a rubber suit. Dante would manage to mix homage/childhood much more successfully years later with 'Matinee'. But with Explorers he made two different films and tried to fuse them together. What did the soaring Jerry Goldsmith theme have to do with the stand up comedy of the aliens at the end? Nothing. As Spielberg once said (I think), it doesn’t matter whether you’re making movies for children or adults, you should take the subject totally seriously. And that’s what Explorers did at the start… but far less so at the end.
It's pretty clear from everything that Dante says about it (and from the film itself) that the ending hadn't been fully realised when they were shooting the film, and because the studio moved up the release date and took the film off him, any chance he had to save it was lost. It wasn’t that the humorous ending had no merit whatsoever, it’s just that (as MM said above) the different possibilities for the ending were enormous, and the right build up was there, but what they gave you just left you thinking… “Oh, what might’ve been”.
Posts: 3383 | From: England | Registered: May 2003 | Site Updates: 21
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I'd say that was a very well thought out summary of it Logan Posts: 1026 | From: The '80s | Registered: Feb 2000 | Site Updates: 407
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