Flight of the Navigator
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| Flight of the Navigator | |
|---|---|
 1986 theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Randal Kleiser |
| Produced by | Dimitri Villard Robert Wald |
| Written by | Mark H. Baker Michael Burton Matt MacManus |
| Starring | Joey Cramer Paul Reubens Veronica Cartwright Cliff De Young Sarah Jessica Parker Matt Adler Howard Hesseman Albie Whitaker Iris Acker |
| Music by | John Farrar Alan Silvestri |
| Cinematography | James Glennon |
| Editing by | Jeff Gourson |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 30 July 1986 |
| Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States, Norway |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Flight of the Navigator is a 1986 Disney science fiction film about a 12-year old boy, David, who is abducted by an alien space craft. Due to time dilation, David is gone for only a few hours, but when he is returned to earth, eight years have gone by. David has no memory of his abduction, and finds the world, and his family to have changed drastically. He eventually winds up at NASA to discover what happened. There he reunites with the ship. It was written by Mark H. Baker and Michael Burton and directed by Randal Kleiser.
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[edit] Plot
David Scott Freeman (Joey Cramer) is an average, twelve-year-old American boy living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1978. On the night of July 4, his parents ask him to go retrieve his younger brother Jeff from a friend's house, which is located on the other side of the woods that are behind his house. While in the woods, David falls down an embankment into a ravine and is knocked unconscious. He awakes after what seems like a few moments. He returns home, only to find that he is now in the year 1986 and that everything has changed but himself.
Meanwhile, an extraterrestrial spacecraft has crashed into some power lines. NASA agents convince the police that the craft is theirs and take it to their base, intending to study it. The NASA workers find the ship seamless and impenetrable.
David has meanwhile been taken to hospital to try to determine where he has been for the last eight years, and to discover the reason for which he has not aged. The scientists have begun performing tests on his brain and find it to contain accurate information pertinent to the alien spacecraft that is at the NASA base; further scans reveal that his brain contains alien data and star charts leading to the fictional planet of Phaelon. This planet is described as being exactly 560 light-years away from Earth. The travel time used by the spacecraft to reach it is 2.2 solar hours, implying a speed of approximately 2.25 million times the speed of light. The concept of time dilation is therefore used to explain the fact that David has not aged and is unaware of more than a few hours' passage.
David befriends an intern named Carolyn McAdams (Sarah Jessica Parker), telling her to let his parents know that the institute's staff plan to keep him longer than promised. David hears the ship calling to him in his mind and gets in the service robot to David's room by the ship. Ignored by security, this robot takes David to the hangar where the ship is stored. As if made of liquid metal, an opening and stairway appear on the underside of the hovering spacecraft, and David climbs inside. Once inside the ship, he meets its robotic pilot, whom he subsequently nicknames Max (voiced by Paul Reubens, credited as "Paul Mall", who would later provide the voice of Captain Rex on the Star Wars-themed amusment ride Star Tours). When David enters the ship and takes the pilot seat, Max briefly speaks in Bulgarian (apparently the film-makers' approximation of an extraterrestrial speech), saying "Vnimanie! Oblegni se! Chui me!" (Внимание! Облегни се! Чуй ме!) which means "Attention! Sit back! Listen to me!". Max insists on referring to David as "Navigator".
They escape the NASA base, subsequently to hide in the Gulf of Mexico. To travel more quickly, Max causes the spaceship to dilate into a different shape; a streamlined, point-nosed form designed to penetrate thicker atmosphere than that of Phaelon. The craft shows at several points of the film the abilities to hover in one place; to accelerate to and proceed at tremendous speeds (up to Mach 10, or ten times the speed of sound); to become transparent; to travel underwater; and to move in virtually any direction. It appears to have no discernible power source, and shows no signs of hull flaws or loss of power.
Max informs David that his mission was to traverse the galaxy, collect biological specimens, and take them back to his home planet of Phaelon for analysis before returning them to the place and time from which they were taken. Max's analysers had discovered that humans only use 10% of their brain; as an experiment, they abducted David at random and filled his brain with information. During this procedure, David's brain inexplicably "leaked". Max then returned David to Earth, but did not take him back to his proper time, fearing that humans were too delicate to survive time travel. When trying to leave Earth and return to Phaelon, Max accidentally crashed the ship into a power line, which collision erased all the star charts and data necessary for returning home from the ship's computer; hence, Max needs the information placed in David's brain to complete his mission and return to Phaelon.
Max performs a scan of David's brain to extract the information. Max's personality and voice immediately change, becoming less robotlike and more human and erratic (similar to Reubens' Pee-wee Herman persona), possibly as a result of having extracted information irrelevant to his mission from David's brain.
David and Max travel the Earth trying to decide what to do next, tracked and chased by NASA all the way, and become lost in the process. To find the way to David's family, David asks the use of a gasoline station's telephone. This is much to the stupefication of the attendant "Big Al", who is shocked to see a "flying saucer" appear on his ground and to have its passenger make such a mundane request. As they leave, Al utters the phrase "He just said he wanted to phone home"; this is an obvious reference to E.T..
Upon returning to his home and seeing the NASA people waiting for him, David decides that he cannot stay in 1986 because they will treat him like a guinea pig for the rest of his life. David bids his family goodbye and tells Max that he must return to his own time. David knows that there is a risk of being vaporized, but insists that Max take him back. After the return to July 4, 1978, he makes his way home, and finds everything the way he left it before he was abducted, with the exceptions of his attitude toward his parents and brother (whom he now values more than he had before his abduction) and the presence in his backpack of the Puckmaren, an extraterrestrial specimen collected by Max. The Puckmaren has no other home, his species having been destroyed by a meteorite's collision with their planet, whereas David has no means of returning it to Max; therefore it remains with David, as a sort of pet.
[edit] Background information
When the film was initially released in the summer of 1986 it came and went at the box office, grossing only around $18 million; however, in later years it went on to become somewhat of a cult classic by Generation Y, who remembered the film as kids in the 1980s. The film also marked the beginning of a renaissance for Disney's live action film branch, which had spent most of the decade in financial trouble. Many had seen in the movie trailer that a silver, acorn-shaped vessel would constitute the alien spacecraft, which is called a Trimaxion Drone Ship by Max (hence his nickname). The movie opens with the shot of such a vessel flying across the Miami skyline; however, a dog suddenly catches the object, revealing it to be a silver Frisbee.
[edit] Visual effects innovations
Released at the dawn of 3D animation technology, Flight of the Navigator was the world's first 35 mm feature film to use environment mapping, creating the illusion of a chrome object occupying a live-action frame, considered by many to still hold up to today's standards. The CG shots were produced by Omnibus Graphics, one of the first computer animation companies, responsible for most of the classic advertising 3D animation of the 80's.
Contrary to popular belief, CGI was not used to depict the suspended steps leading into the ship. The effect of the door liquefying to form the steps was achieved through stop-motion animation by creating a series of metallic sculptures for every frame of the animation. The suspended steps appeared to support David's weight with a simple optical illusion. The steps were mounted on thin beams which were angled in such a way that the steps themselves hid the beams from the camera's lens. This arrangement even allowed for slight camera movement as can be seen the first time David climbs the steps. Also note that when David presses on the middle step, all the steps move slightly.
The two full-scale spaceship hulls used in most of the shots throughout the film (one with an open entrance, the other sealed) were constructed out of thin, curved sheets of wood over a metal framework and finished with primer and reflective paint. One of these spaceship hulls can be seen on the backlot tour at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida. The hull is now in a state of disrepair however, with extensive weathering and discolouration of the paintwork.[1][2]
[edit] Soundtrack
The music score for the film was composed by Alan Silvestri. It is distinct from Silvestri's other scores in being entirely electronically generated, using the Synclavier, one of the first digital synthesisers and samplers.
- Theme from "Flight of the Navigator"
- "Main Title"
- "The Ship Beckons"
- "David In The Woods"
- "Robot Romp"
- "Transporting The Ship"
- "Ship Drop"
- "Have To Help a Friend"
- "The Shadow Universe"
- "Flight"
- "Finale"
- "Star Dancing"
[edit] References
- ^ IMDb :: Boards :: Flight of the Navigator (1986) :: the ship and the way Disney is treating
- ^ WDWMAGIC Photo Albums - Slade Gallery
