Explorers

The world needs dreamers – people with their heads in the clouds thinking big ideas. We need people like this for without them we would never have gone into outer space. Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985) champions dreamers in a refreshingly earnest way that never feels forced and is not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. Unfortunately, the film was rushed into production and Dante was never allowed to edit it properly. As a result, the ending feels a little awkward but does nothing to diminish the heartfelt sincerity that exists in every frame. Sadly, mainstream moviegoers weren’t interested and Explorers was a box office failure but has gone on to develop a small but devoted cult following.

It’s no coincidence that the film begins with Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke) dreaming that he’s flying through the sky and then over some Tron-esque landscape while War of the Worlds (1953) plays on a television in the background of his bedroom. It’s a sly commentary on Dante’s part as his aliens will be nothing like the ruthless ones in that film.

Ben tells his best friend Wolfgang Muller (River Phoenix) about it on the way to school the next day. They share a common nemesis in the form of schoolyard bully Steve Jackson (Bobby Fite) who enjoys tormenting them with his friends on a daily basis. Ben befriends Darren Woods (Jason Presson), a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, who helps him out with Steve.

Dante does a nice job early on of developing the dynamic between Ben, Darren and Wolfgang who, on the surface, are unlikely friends. Darren is a mechanically-inclined cynic from a broken home while Wolfgang is a nerdy bookish type that is ruled by logic and comes from a family of eccentric geniuses. Ben is the bridge between these two polar opposites – a nice kid from a stable home who isn’t particularly cool but not a nerd either – he’s a dreamer. He’s the glue that keeps them together.

Ben draws a circuit board he saw in a dream and gives it to Wolfgang who assembles a piece of technology that creates a transparent bubble. It can be resized, moves at incredible speeds and is seemingly indestructible. Over several nights out in the woods, the boys build a crude craft out of a tilt-a-whirl seat that allows them to all be in the bubble. They decide to use it to explore the galaxy for alien life. Dante takes this fantastical premise and grounds it in a kind of matter-of-fact realism via scientific jargon Wolfgang frequently spouts but without losing a sense of wonderment that is the film’s strongest attribute.

The three young lead actors are perfectly cast. Ethan Hawke is excellent as an idealistic dreamer that yearns to be a space explorer and live out his sci-fi fantasies. He avoids slipping into cheesiness by imparting a sincerity that feels authentic. Jason Presson is also good as the cynical yin to Hawke’s idealistic yang. He provides the practical knowledge to help build their craft. Finally, River Phoenix disappears into his bookish scientist constantly clad in a tie and suit jacket like a pint-sized college professor. While these kids are smart and resourceful, Dante doesn’t let us forget that they are still kids who have to face bullies, have crushes on girls and do their homework. It makes them relatable so that by the time Explorers takes a turn to the fantastical we are invested in their journey.

The three actors play so well off each other and are completely believable as good friends, each bringing their own distinctive personality to the table. Just watch how they interact with each other as they launch their craft for the first time. These are resourceful young boys living out their dreams. Dante includes all kinds of nice touches that fleshes out these rich characters, like Ben’s love of 1950s science fiction movies and novels, or Wolfgang’s chaotic family life complete with noisy siblings and an absent-minded professor (wonderfully realized by James Cromwell) for a father.

Dante pulls out all the stops for the last third of Explorers with visually dazzling special effects that are tangibly old school, like the boys’ craft that is made out of a hodge-podge of junk they found, and include some impressive makeup work by the legendary Rob Bottin. It makes me sad to think that nowadays this would all be done with CGI because the practical effects give the film a timeless quality. All of this visual eye candy does a decent job of distracting one from how jarring the last third of the film is from what came before it.

After writing two screenplays that were tailored to what was popular with little success, Eric Luke decided to work on something he really “wanted to do when I was a kid. And who cares if it’s commercial or not?” He grounded his script in real-life trials and tribulations from his own childhood, including an unrequited crush on the girl next door. While the character of Wolfgang was based on a scientific kid he knew and befriended over his extensive comic book collection, Ben was the one that Luke most related to and he also had friends like Darren and Wolfgang.

Luke was working in a Los Angeles effects house when his Explorers script was discovered by producer David Bombyk. He showed it to his associate Edward Feldman and told him, “Read this. The first 65 pages of this script are terrific.” Feldman read it and agreed but felt that the rest “went into a Flash Gordon-type adventure and got kind of hokey.” He felt that it showed enough promise and gave the first 65 pages to Paramount Pictures. Within 24 hours they bought it and Luke was brought in do all the rewrites.

The studio was interested in hiring Wolfgang Petersen to direct. He had just come off making The NeverEnding Story (1984) and wanted to shoot Explorers in Bavaria. Feldman felt that an American story like Explorers would be “very hard to duplicate those little American nuances in a foreign country.” He also felt that Petersen would have given the film “a more serious, dramatic look,” and hired Joe Dante instead. At the time, the director hadn’t finished work on Gremlins (1984) and was tired from making it and his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and wasn’t sure he could do it. Paramount was persistent, however, and Dante finally agreed. The director found himself drawn to “the story [that] exists to serve the characters. This is different for me: it’s more of a stretch. Although, the story has many of the same elements that I like to work with, there is more emphasis on the characters.” Once onboard, the director worked closely with Luke on script revisions.

For the three young leads, a nationwide casting search was conducted with Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson chosen to play the protagonists. Dante found that working with his three 14-year-old lead actors reminded him of what it was to be like a kid: “We tend to always romanticize childhood a little bit, but working with kids reminds you that it’s a tough period to go through.”

In order to realize that aliens in Explorers, the production hired makeup effects wizard Rob Bottin who started work right after finishing Ridley Scott’s fantasy epic Legend (1985). Originally, Dante wanted the aliens to be puppets but Bottin felt that doing it that way would slow things down: “They’re going to want to pump this stuff out, yet these aliens have pages and pages of dialogue.” He wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before and recommended they have people in suits – blending body makeup and wire-controlled appendages. He wasn’t interested in the typical men-in-suits look because “doing that limits you to all these head shapes which have already been done to death.” Bottin designed stalk eyes that could move independently from the rest of the head.

Dante was thrust into a rushed production schedule mandated by the studio and “if a scene didn’t work out, we would just have to think of another way to do it, rather than take time to get it right.” He also had to contend with script changes, which resulted in changes to the last third of the film due to “the expense of creating this otherworldly environment,” and only had seven pages of material covering the boys’ encounter with the aliens. Dante and his collaborators ended up adding material on the fly.

To make matters worse, the studio changed hands during the post-production phase of Explorers and the new regime told Dante, “This picture is coming out two months too late. We’ve got to have it two months earlier.” This forced Dante and his editor to rush cutting the film and what was released was essentially a rough cut. Dante said, “The basic conceptual problem with the movie is that it’s the opposite of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) … The kids believe that they are going to find the meaning of life and God in space and they find only a reflection of themselves distorted through pop culture. That didn’t turn out to be that popular!”

Explorers received generally positive to mixed reviews with most of the criticism addressing the film’s third act. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Explorers, which is lively but largely familiar until the point when it reaches its batty pinnacle, frequently shows off Mr. Dante’s sense of humor to good advantage.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote, “Explorers itself is bubble-thin, but it glides by gracefully on the charm of its three young heroes and their vividly envisioned adventure in space. It’s also a truly gentle film, one of the precious few that actually is suitable for children.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, “The effects are ho-hum and the scenes are repetitious – there’s really only about an hour’s worth of movie here.” Finally, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Unfortunately, in Explorers – the latest kids space travel movie – the human kids are far more interesting than the aliens they meet. Maybe the movie’s script is making the wry comment that it’s not so interesting ‘out there,’ but I doubt it.”

With Explorers, Dante has created a sci-fi film for kids but one that doesn’t condescend to them but rather shows the world through the eyes of its youthful protagonists. The director is one of the great chroniclers of 1980s American suburbia, from the Norman Rockwell gone horrible wrong of Gremlins (1984) to the paranoid comedy of The ‘Burbs (1989) to exploring its quirky avenues in the Eerie, Indiana T.V. show. Dante is a rare filmmaker that remembers what it is like to be a kid and to see the world through their eyes without dumbing things down or getting mired in nostalgia. Explorers achieves its sense of wonderment honestly with the help of Jerry Goldsmith’s sometimes wistful, sometimes rousing score that compliments the suburban atmosphere of the first two-thirds and the otherworldliness of the last third.

Dante has always had a subversive streak as a filmmaker and it pops up in the last third of Explorers when our heroes finally make contact with aliens. Ben expects to meet some solemn being a la The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and instead is confronted with two beings educated by American T.V., communicating mostly in famous soundbites. It has a bit of a jarring effect after the earnestness of the first two-thirds but one can see that Dante wasn’t interested in repeating what Steven Spielberg did with E.T. and instead present aliens that kids would find funny and entertaining. Dante refuses to resort the manipulative sentimentality of this film and opts instead for the sense of wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) only on a smaller, more intimate scale.

SOURCES

Lofficier, Randy & Jean. “Exploring Director Joe Dante.” Starlog. September 1985.

Lowry, Brian. “Eric Luke: Exploring His Dreams.” Starlog. October 1985.

Lowry, Brian. “Rob Bottin: Crafting Fantastic Faces.” Starlog. February 1986.

Sayers, John and David McDonnell. “Edward Feldman: Guiding Young Explorers into Adventure.” Starlog. June 1985.

Tonguette, Peter. “What You Can Get Away With: The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante, Part 2.” Press Play. January 14, 2012.

The Mosquito Coast

The Mosquito Coast (1986) is one of Harrison Ford’s most fascinating performances and it came at a time when he was able to use his box office clout from the lucrative Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises to push through the Hollywood system more challenging films. This certainly applies to the film which focuses on a brilliant inventor who decides that western society has become too corrupt and materialistic and moves his family to the jungles of Central America where he attempts to manipulate a small village into his idea of a civilized society. Not exactly the most accessible project but Ford and director Peter Weir, hot off their successful collaboration on Witness (1985), teamed up again on The Mosquito Coast, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Paul Theroux.

The film is about a man obsessed with imposing his will on others to the degree that he exhibits self-destructive tendencies. What better person to realize this than Paul Schrader who was brought on to write the screenplay. He knows a thing or two about these types of protagonists as evident with Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), both of which he wrote. The Mosquito Coast also allowed Weir to continue his fascination with strangers in a strange land, which he had explored previously in The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) and Witness. So, the trifecta of Ford, Schrader and Weir was an inspired one but the end result was too extreme for mainstream audiences and the film was a box office flop and received mixed reviews.

The film is narrated by Charlie Fox (River Phoenix) and done after the events depicted in the film. He is a young, teenage boy who clearly idolized his father: “I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.” Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) is a brash and brilliant inventor. Right from the first shot, he expresses his disappointment with what America has become as he tells Charlie, “Look around you. How did America get this way? … This place is a toilet.” Weir cuts to a shot of Allie and his son driving down a street dominated by fast food restaurants, their large signs almost completely obscuring several trees and a grassy hill as the visuals only serve to prove Allie’s point and will be eerily relevant towards the end of the film.

Allie continues his rant as if he were channeling Travis Bickle’s disgust for society from Taxi Driver: “The whole damn country is turning into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers, criminal millionaires and moral snakes.” Amazingly, these words come out of a film released during the height of the supposedly “Greed is good,” Ronald Reagan-era 1980s in America when the country’s economy was booming. However, these sentiments also apply to our current situation with the war in Iraq, the Enron scandal, 9/11, and the collapse of the global economy. Allie is disgusted by what America has become and is “sick of dealing with people who want things I’ve already rejected.” Ford delivers this angry monologue with just the right amount of self-righteous indignation.

The first inkling we get that Allie is losing touch with reality is the cooling system he was supposed to make for a nearby farmer. Not only is he late with the device but it isn’t what the man wanted. Ford is brilliant here as he shows how Allie takes a rejection and deflects it, and ignores his mistake as a shortcoming of the farmer. This incident only confirms his beliefs. The farmer’s parting shot is probably the best observation about Allie: “A know-it-all who’s sometimes right.” After observing some poor migrant workers, Allie begins to think about how valuable ice and his cooling system would be in the jungle where it is always oppressively hot. He laments that these workers left the jungle to work basically as slaves for the farmer and muses about how much courage it would take to leave civilization and go live in the jungle.

So, Allie uproots his family – wife (Helen Mirren), two sons and two daughters – and heads for the jungles of Belize. En route, he and his family cross paths with the Reverend Gurney Spellgood (Andre Gregory) and his family. Spellgood is a man who will play a prominent role in their lives. Allie has little time for Spellgood and religion, referring to The Bible as “God’s owner’s handbook.” He is even able to quote Scripture back to Spellgood. Like Allie, Spellgood is zealous in his beliefs, they just happen to be based in religion and not science.

As soon as Allie and his family arrive, Weir immerses us in this strange new world with an audio-visual assault on our senses with local music and the hustle and bustle of the port city. Allie buys a small town and the next day, he and his family take a boat there. Weir shows a long shot of their journey along a curvy river that goes deep into the jungle and one can’t help but think of Willard’s river journey in Apocalypse Now (1979) only Allie is Colonel Kurtz ready to go native and impose his will on the locals. The river journey features some beautiful cinematography courtesy of Weir’s regular cinematographer John Seale. The vibrant greens of the lush jungle jump out at you and are in sharp contrast to the brown dirt that populates the jungle floor. As he did with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Year of Living Dangerously, Weir has a real knack for immersing us in the film’s setting, so much so that it almost becomes like another character. The Mosquito Coast is no different as we see how harsh the environment is, from the intense sun to the monsoon-like rain. This inhospitality is juxtaposed with the beauty of the trees and the serene river that winds through the jungle.

Allie puts his family and the natives to work, clearing the land and gathering up resources so that they can build his utopia. At times, he seems to do through sheer force of will. Everything seems to be going smoothly until Spellgood shows up and tries to win back the hearts and minds of the townsfolk only to have Allie spurn him yet again, much to the pastor’s chagrin. The confrontation is only a prelude to future conflict between these two headstrong men.

This is one of Harrison Ford’s best performances as he shows us the method to Allie’s madness. He is a charismatic despot of sorts. In a way, many of his diatribes about the wasteful nature of America are right on point. It’s his solution to its ills that don’t always make sense. Ford is fully committed to the role without a shred of vanity. He’s not afraid to play an unlikable character and approaches Allie Fox as someone who thinks that they aren’t crazy even though it is pretty obvious that he has a very skewed perspective on things. Ford nails the zeal of Allie’s beliefs but is still able to make him somewhat relatable thanks to his natural charisma. It’s a role that calls for the kind of physicality that Ford excels at as we see Allie building the town up with his own hands. He is so good at the physical aspects of acting – hence all the action roles he’s played in his career – and Allie is no different. More importantly, Ford shows how Allie’s megalomaniacal tendencies gradually consume him. It is small things, at first, like the way he belittles one of his sons for complaining about roughing it in the jungle.

Weir does a good job ratcheting up the tension during a sequence where three armed mercenaries arrive and Allie has to come up with a way to get them to leave. It is where Allie’s madness actually works to his advantage but at a horrible price, as he is willing to destroy everything he worked so hard to build up in order to get rid of them. Eventually, Allie’s epic vision becomes incredibly myopic as he alienates his own family. The actors that play the family members are all excellent, from Helen Mirren as the nurturing mother, to River Phoenix as the loyal son. Initially, they all believe in what their father is doing unconditionally but over time they gradually come to question his methods. They are decent people pushed to their breaking point by Allie.

Producer Jerome Hellman read Paul Theroux’s novel in 1982 and bought the film rights with his own money shortly after it was published. He felt that a great film was possible if the right people were involved but also had his reservations and admitted that he “didn’t fully appreciate how out of the ordinary the Establishment would consider this.” He soon hired screenwriter Paul Schrader to adapt the book and a first draft was developed in 1983. That same year, Hellman approached Peter Weir to direct based on films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Year of Living Dangerously. Hellman said, “the thematic harmony between Peter’s previous work and The Mosquito Coast was striking, but I was also impressed with the humanism in his work.”

After reading the first draft of the script, Weir met with Hellman and Schrader in Sydney, Australia where they spent a week discussing every aspect of it. Once he felt that it could be made into a film, Weir agreed to direct. Hellman then brought him to the United States and showed him the book’s New England locations. The producer also arranged a meeting between Weir and Theroux but the director was apprehensive because he had a bad experience with a novelist on one of his earlier films. Fortunately, the two men got along and Theroux encouraged Weir to make the film his own. Hellman and Weir then spent two years trying to get a studio interested in making The Mosquito Coast but with little success. Hellman remembered that they were turned down all over Hollywood, “most places three or four times.”

In early 1984, they realized that due to the seasonal demands of the plot, they would have to delay principal photography for another year. However, Weir was chomping at the bit to direct a film and he received an offer to direct Witness. During the making of that film, he developed a close working relationship with its star, Harrison Ford. During this time, Jack Nicholson became interested in taking on the role of Allie Fox but when the deal fell through, Hellman and Weir agreed that Ford would be perfect to play the character. Ford was drawn to the role because it was so different from anything he had done before: “I was aware that there was opportunity here for more complicated characterization and because the character is so verbal and effusive, it goes against the kind of characters for which I’m best known.” Ford also wanted “the edgy feeling of the book still to be preserved. We didn’t want to abandon the balls of it because it’s not necessary for him [Allie] to be entirely likable as long as the audience can understand what he’s about.” Furthermore, Ford “worked hard not to make him too sympathetic, to keep an edge, to keep him bristling.”


After Witness was released and became a big hit (garnering several Academy Award nominations), almost every studio wanted to make The Mosquito Coast but Hellman, burnt out from shopping the film around and getting repeatedly rejected, wanted to find independent financing. He met with producer Saul Zaentz to ask for advice and to read the script. He did and was so taken with it that he offered to have his company finance, present and supervise the distribution of the film.

Seeing as how most of the film is set in the jungle, it was crucial that Hellman and Weir find the right location. They considered Costa Rica, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, and Hawaii before picking Belize, which had everything they needed: mountains, ocean, jungle and rivers – all within an hour radius of Belize City. It was also an English language country whose political situation was stable. While filming in the jungle, the cast and crew endured cuts and bruises, mosquito bites and heavy sunburn with large snakes common on the set. Ford found the shoot long and humid. It was more exhausting for him mentally than physically because of “the complexity of the role and the endless process of sorting out and reappraising where we were at.”

Weir drew inspiration for the visual look of The Mosquito Coast from a bulletin board he had on location that was adorned with postcards, pages from magazines, a pressed flower, a match box, and so on. “It’s a question of texture, a kind of mosaic of inspirations,” he said. Weir felt that it was important to shoot the construction of the town Allie owns to be filmed in continuity and so three versions of it were created. Each was a little more advanced than the one before. As the crew moved from one set to another, the construction crew would do additional work on the previous set. This allowed Weir to film in days what would’ve taken many months to do.

Not surprisingly, The Mosquito Coast did not fare well with critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “Allie Fox's madness is more of a drone, an unending complaint against the way things are. It is painful to watch him not because he is mad, but because he is boring – one of those nuts who will talk all night long without even checking to see if you're listening.” However, the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley enjoyed Ford’s performance: “Sooner or later a man of invention will pollute paradise, a grand contradiction that gives Mosquito its bite and Ford inspiration for his most complex portrayal to date. As a persona of epic polarities, he animates this muddled, metaphysical journey into the jungle.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat. Even its exotic melodrama fails to excite the imagination. The problem is not in the performances but in the way they have been presented, most of the time in a cool, dispassionate, third-person narrative style, stripped of Charlie's troubled thoughts and feelings that give the book its emotional force.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson criticized Weir’s approach to the material in her review: “He's orchestrated The Mosquito Coast's action to match Fox's progressive mental state, from rage to explosion to squalls and finally to hurricane velocity; however, the film leaves us not with an apotheosis, but exhaustion.” To his credit, Harrison Ford has no regrets about making the film: “I adored that movie. If people didn’t want to see me be mean to kids, I understand that. But I was thrilled to have made that movie.”

In some respects, one could see The Mosquito Coast as a commentary on the extreme nature of the cult of personality as both Allie and Spellgood are prime examples of someone who believes that their vision of society is the right one. At first, Allie’s vision is quite seductive and seems to work but as time goes on and outside forces threaten it, the cracks begin to show. Weir takes an unflinching look at the extremes of science and religion and this apparently turned off audiences and critics alike. It is time for this film to be rediscovered and recognized as one of his more thought-provoking efforts made within the system by a movie star with enough clout to make it happen.

SOURCES

Diehl, Digby. “The Iceman Cometh.” American Film. December 1986.

Honeycutt, Kirk. “Harrison Ford on Harrison Ford.” Daily News. 1986.

McGilligan, Pat. “Under Weir and Theroux.” Film Comment. November-December 1986.

The Mosquito Coast Production Notes. 1986.

Thompson, Anne. “Gamblers on the Coast.” The Globe and Mail. November 7, 1986.

Turan, Kenneth. “Still the Same After All These Years.” GQ. November 1986.