See You Later, Navigator

It’s amazing how, sometimes, films that you liked when you were a child completely fail to amuse you once you grow up. I, like most any kid born in the 1980s or 1990s (and, hell, maybe beyond), was a huge fan of The Goonies, and while, as an adult, I can see it’s charm still, it’s not a movie that speaks to me nor works on a deeper, writing and filmic level. It’s the kind of movie that you can get into when you’re eight years old (and, let’s be honest, have no taste) but once you have enough cinema knowledge under your belt you see all the flaws: bad characterization, a limp story, a shallow adventure. That’s not to crap on the film for anyone that likes it or has rose colored glasses for it; I have my own copy of The Goonies that I would never get rid of, but it’s not a film that, as an adult, I could see fresh and enjoy and I know this.

I had this same thought while I was watching Flight of the Navigator, a film I hadn’t seen since around 1987 or 1988, after it fell off of reruns on basic cable. This was a film that I absolutely loved as a kid, a movie about time travel and aliens, and a kid caught in the middle of it. It struck me as such a cool idea for a story, and the fact that I was around the right age to relate to the central protagonist (who was eight in the movie) helped me attach to it. I watched it multiple times back in the day when it was on cable reruns, and I remembered enjoying that film for years to come.

But, man, going back to this movie I have to admit something: young me really didn’t know how shitty this movie really was. To be fair to Flight of the Navigator, it’s about two-thirds of a good film. It has a fantastic setup, an interesting hook, and characters I really liked. The whole vibe of the story is like a kid-friendly The Outer Limits sci-fi yarn, and to have something like this set up in a family-friendly film really made it something I wanted to see. But then, right around the hour mark, the film fumbles its big reveal and, from that point on, it becomes a tiresome chore to sit through. This is a film that could have stood the test of time if some creative decisions were made differently, but whoever was in charge of finishing the last act of this film really failed it on every level. It just stinks.

It's the Summer of 1978 and David Scott Freeman (Joey Cramer) hates his little brother, Jeff (Albie Whitaker). David and Jeff are at each other’s throats, much to the chagrin of their parents, Helen (Veronica Cartwright) and Bill (Cliff DeYoung). On the eve of the Fourth of July, Jeff goes off to play with his friends and then, later, David is sent to go and fetch his brother for dinner and fireworks. David heads through the woods to find his brother, but Jeff pops out of a tree, scaring him before running off. Startled, David gets turned around, and then finds something strange in a ravine nearby. Falling in, David knocks his head, passing out for a time before waking in the dark.

Running home David finds that his parents don’t live in his house. The kindly old couple that live there now call the cops, who take David in. Then bring him to his parents, who live somewhere else now and are… older. Hell, his brother Jeff is now 16 years old (and played by Matt Adler), and it’s pretty clear that something has happened that made David miss eight years of his life and not age a single day. NASA scientists show up, led by Dr. Louis Faraday (Howard Hesseman), and they want to study David to find out what happened. They have their suspicions that his disappearance and reappearance is tied to an alien space ship that recently appeared and, as they study the boy those thoughts are confirmed. What happened to David? Why is he still eight? And what does the ship want with the boy?

As I noted, I think the setup for this film is fantastic. David is a boy out of time, a scary proposition for any child. While the film doesn’t veer into full thriller territory, it doesn’t shy away from the emotional stakes of the situation. David is a lost kid who suddenly finds himself in this dark mirror of what he knows. His house is different, his parents are missing (and then look older), and nothing is familiar anymore. For him it was only seconds, but for everyone else it was years and there’s no easy explanation for why.

Credit where it’s due, child actor Joey Cramer (for whom this film was his big break and, also, his last major role) handles his character perfectly. He does a fantastic job of playing out all the emotions David would be going through seeing himself in a world he suddenly doesn’t understand. He’s confused, scared, and just wants to go home. Whatever flaws this film might have, Cramer is not one of them. As an adult I felt for the kid going through all this, and the film is able to use this to sell its story.

The issues come in that last act. This is when (and spoilers for a nearly forty year old movie which, if you didn’t want to be spoiled, you would have seen by now since you had plenty of time) David finds the spaceship, is allowed on board, and goes off on an adventure with his new robotic-alien friend. The big problem is that the film takes a complete tonal left turn at this point., going from a family-friendly sci-fi thriller into a rip-roaring adventure film. While this isn’t bad in concept, the way the film handles this left turn just doesn’t work.

For starters, if this was going to be the plot of the movie then Flight of the Navigator needed to spend more time in this section of the film. From the point David gets on the ship he has to: learn what the ship is; learn what it’s pilot alien, Max, is; learn how he got into the future; learn how to control the ship; give the alien a new personality (after just meeting him); and then find a way to transport him back through time so David can go home. That’s enough plot for its own film and all of that is condensed into the last thirty minutes of the film. Instead of cramming all of that in, the film needed to spend more time in this section of the film, letting us slowly acclimate to the sudden change in the story. It does, instead breezing through all of this because the film needed to be a perfect 90 minutes, and so the big twist is squandered and ruined, killing the climax of the film.

Worse, Max is just absolutely obnoxious. The character is voiced by Paul Rubens and the voice actor was clearly hired so he could do his “Pee Wee Herman” thing, and, once the alien and David bond, that’s exactly the performance we get. Max is actually an interesting character in his first few scenes, but then he bonds with the eight-year-old and essentially becomes an eight-year-old (personality wise) himself. At this point forward Max, as a character, is like nails on a chalkboard. I just wanted him to shut up so the movie could end. It’s awful.

Frankly, I wish the film didn’t even have this last act. It would have been much more interesting if the creative team on the film had found some other way to get David and the ship to connect, to find a way to use it to send him back to his time. There’s a really solid two-thirds of a film here, with the boy out of time and the scientists that don’t know what to do with him. All of that is thrown out in the last act when it was the most compelling storytelling in the film. It feels like someone on the production got cold feet over making a family-friendly thriller and decided they wanted a talking alien movie instead. That’s what they got but it just ruins the whole experience in the end.

I wanted to like Flight of the Navigator. Hell, I did for the first hour of its runtime. But once that alien ship comes into view for David, the whole thing goes right off the rails. What could have been a fantastic sci-fi movie for the whole family becomes a terrible, toy-selling, cash grab of a film. I loved where this film was going but, man, I really hated it once I got there.