Film Review - Flight of the Navigator

 

Released: 1987
Director: Randal Kleiser
Starring: Joey Cramer

I remember watching this when I was a kid and thought it was awesome. Boy let loose in an alien spaceship! What's not to love?

 Funny how things change when you get older.. I used to not get affected by films and TV much, but I did find that the early part of the film where David falls in the woods in 1978 and wakes up 6 years later the best part of the film. The whole "man out of time" theme and despair and confusion this brought on I thought was handled well. Particularly when David was brought to his parents' new house and saw how much they had changed and how they just embraced him instead of asking questions like "why are you the same age?", this really got to me. That moment shows instantly what 8 years of not knowing what happened would do to a person, and then the feeling of being reunited... wow.

After that it trails off a bit. It was a Disney film after all, so maybe I shouldn't be expected to get a lot out of it now as an adult. So why did the alien spaceship dump it's vital star charts into David's brain? Why did it not just fly home and drop him back off in 1978 straight away? Ne'ermind. A pleasing entertainment romp.

Also David came across as really spoilt and whiny....

5/10