Explorers (1985)
Directed by Joe Dante
Middle schooler Ben spends his free time watching sci-fi films, playing video games and reading comic books. Surprisingly, his affinity for all things fantastical yields a real result – when he has a vivid dream about technology, his prodigy best friend Wolfgang manages to create a working spacecraft. Joined by their buddy Darren, the boys take off into outer space and encounter some very odd extraterrestrial life.
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What critics compared Explorers to
…a familiar stew of tropes that would make any fan of Super 8, Explorers, or Starman feel like they might have a case of deja vu.
The kids have the group dynamics of Stand by Me and the adorable nerdiness of the Explorers.
Or that he’s waxing nostalgic more generally — quoting the 1980s sci-fi he grew up on, like Joe Dante’s Explorers , Randal Kleiser’s Flight of the Navigator and Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter .
Youth activists resemble the media-saturated aliens of Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985), who pick up radio and TV signals as if comprehending human history.
It’s the mid-tier kids’ movies like Explorers and Flight of the Navigator, both of which were also about regular kids making interstellar friends…
Take 1985’s “Explorers,” excise Joe Dante’s twisted brand of humor, add a healthy dose of Spielbergian sentiment (mostly via “E.T.”) and sprinkle Pixar animation wizardry profusely over the result, and you’ll have something very close to “Elio,”…
A riff on R.L. Stine’s enormously popular series of children’s horror stories, at its best it’s a kids’ movie like Joe Dante’s Explorers or some of the better Pixar entries.
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The thing about those movies is that even though they were all produced under Spielberg's watchful eye, the best of them were those done by directors who possessed enough of a distinctive cinematic style to keep their films from simply coming across as Spielberg clones--people like Robert Zemeckis or Joe Dante, whose lovely and underrated "Explorers" feels like more of an influence on the tone of "Super 8" than the likes of the oft-mentioned "The Goonies."
More brain-teaser than action film, this is an elegantly-wrought piece of thinking-person’s science fiction that, in a weird way, toys with the template established by Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in a very different but comparable fashion—serious rather than satirical—to Joe Dante’s reworking of the “E.T.” mold in “Explorers.”
If you saw Joe Dante's 1985 River Phoenix/Ethan Hawke movie, "Explorers," you won't be terribly surprised by their rubbery, globby appearance.