Kid empowerment films had it going on in the 80s. You could argue Home Alone was the ultimate culmination of the genre, but the 80s were where the groundwork was laid. You had films, to varying degrees of quality, such as Stand by Me, E.T: The Extra Terrestrial, Wizard, Gremlins, Mac & Me, and 9-1/2 Weeks. And life was good. It’s also when Flight of the Navigator came out.
Flight, if you never saw it, was about a little boy who hit his head in the woods only to wake up eight years later. Except he hasn’t aged, and when NASA runs tests on him they find a whole bunch of starcharts in his head because NASA has that technology – if there’re starcharts in your head, NASA’s gonna find them.
As this is happening, a mysterious spaceship crashes into some heavy-duty power lines and is taken to the same NASA facility where this young David is being housed*. To escape, David hides inside a hallway monitoring robot that brings him to the spaceship where he meets Max, basically a droid that hangs from the ceiling and sees with a disco ball. Also, he’s Paul Reubens – and it was he who puts those star charts in David’s head! Together, and with Max’s alien pets, they go on wild adventures through the skies.
Come to think of it, this movie was fucking awesome.
Anyways, the director and writer of the excellent Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, respectively) will be doing the remake. So yeah, this likely means Trevorrow’s out of the running for Star Wars. It also means I have a DVD to buy.
*NASA was kind of the bad guy here. There’s a direct correlation between this film and their budget getting slaughtered, a statement in which I have no evidence to back up.