Reegs selected the 1986 Disney sci-fi classic FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR for our viewing entertainment. Joey Cramer stars as David Freeman, a 12-year old boy who falls into a ravine in 1978 rendering himself briefly unconscious and presumably sustaining terrible brain injuries, explaining the events of the rest of the movie which involves time travel, an initially hostile sentient machine from the planet Phaelon named Max (Paul Reubens) and the villainous NASA agency headed up by Dr Faraday (Howard Hesseman, POLICE ACADEMY 2: THEIR FIRST ASSIGNMENT) who is desperate to get David alone with his staff for a few days.
I'm being silly but this is by anyone's standard a strong first act, with a creepy Amblin style atmosphere and a barrage of childhood fears distilled into pure nightmare fuel; the idea that your home might not be a safe place, that your family can disappear or change in an instant, that you might be taken away by the government and subjected to experiments and that those experiments might reveal strange things about yourself. It's a shame that the final stretch of the movie sees Max devolving into a braying idiot, with all the charm of, and vaguely visually resembling, a sort of futuristic speculum.
There were a few first time viewers as Dan sat down to watch this with his daughter and Sidey did the same with his as the pair of them enjoyed their inaugural viewing. Without the veneer of nostalgia and with this movie being almost 40 years old now, will any of the new viewers find something to enjoy?
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