Flight of the Navigator
“Flight of the Navigator”
plays with the imagination of children better than almost any other movie of
the eighties. Every kid believes there is life outside our own world. Space is
an never-ending realm of other planets, stars and UFO’s. How cool would it be
if one of the UFO’s visited Earth? And ever better – you got to fly it!
Young David has a small
world; consisting of his parents, his annoying little brother, and his dog
Bruiser. David’s the kind of kid who blends into the background. He doesn’t
cause trouble and can’t get the attention of the girl he likes. It’s the summer
of 1978, but so far it’s a pretty lousy one for him.
On just another night,
David’s parents give him the job of going to collect his younger brother Jeff
from a friends place. The little brat surprises David in the woods, scaring the
crap out of him. Losing his bearings a bit, David wanders off through the
woods, and slips, falling into a deep ditch. When he comes to, it seems to
David that only a few minutes have passed. He climbs out of the ditch and heads
home. But when he gets there, a strange looking lady answers the door “What are
you doing in my home?” David asks, then runs in, up the stairs and into his old
room. But it’s completely different, and an old man sits in there, asking the
boy what’s wrong. Obviously confused and terrified, David cowers down at the
bottom of the stairs and asks the couple “Where’s my mum and dad?”
The police pick him and
realise the boy has been reported missing – for the past eight years. Asking
him the same questions over and over, the police can’t make sense of why David
has just reappeared, and why he insists on telling them he’s twelve years old
and the year is 1978. David is then taken to a house he’s never seen before
where the police go to the door, which is answered by a man who looks strangely
familiar. It’s his dad. David jumps out of the car, and runs up to the house to
see both his parents, who have aged. With grey hair and wrinkled skin, they
look completely shocked to see their son.
Taken to the hospital for
some tests, the doctors and David’s parents can’t figure out how David has
returned after being missing for eight years, and for some reason hasn’t aged a
day past twelve. The last thing David remembers before everything got wierd was
falling into the ditch, passing out then waking up to climb back up. This only
felt like minutes to him, but it’s in fact been eight whole years. In that
time, David went somewhere but he has no memory of it. His mind
seems to know what happened, even if he can’t remember. When hooked up to some
machines at hospital, strange images start to appear on screen; looking like an
orb of some kind, David can’t explain why he is somehow able to send these
picture from his mind to a computer. But NASA has a theory, and approach David
to offer him some answers to his personal mystery.
David decides to follow
the NASA stiffs in suits back to their base, where they run a series of tests.
With their special equipment, they’re able to scan David’s mind and download
the massive amounts of data stored in there, which include blueprints for that
orb shaped thing from before, as well as pages of words written in an
unrecognisable language. Then the icing on the cake is the location of a planet
in a galaxy far, far away where the originator of the information comes from. For
some reason, this alien chose David to carry all his information, and before
David even realises it, this being from another world wants to reconnect with
the boy.
David is beckoned to a
hangar on the NASA base, by a voice. Unable to hear him clearly or make out
what he’s saying, David tries to follow where it’s coming from. Although he’s
being kept under constant supervision in a locked room, one of the bases
assistants Carolyn (Sarah Jessica Parker in one of her earliest roles) helps
David to slip out of the room and past the guards, to the hangar where the
voice that calls him is waiting. Not sure what to expect, David finds himself
in a room with what can only be a UFO. A silver orb that is seamless and
hovering above the ground. NASA has been unable to open it, but it lets David
in with no hesitation. Stepping aboard, David enters the heart of the ship, and
it’s nothing less than beautiful and magnificent.
Once aboard, the ship
wakes up and speaks to David, addressing him as “The Navigator”. As NASA storm
the bunker, the ship begins to move, following every instruction David gives
it. Taking off, flying fast and low above the ground, David starts to learn he
can control the ship and go wherever he wants to. The ship informs David that
he picked him up after he fell into the ditch. The ship unloaded all his
information and directional coordinates into David’s mind, and then returned
him to the place he found him. The ship crashed and was discovered by NASA who
hauled it off to their base. The ship tells David it had been trying to call
him to get his information back and the directions to his home planet, hence
the reason why the ship calls David, The Navigator. David feels overwhelmed by
this responsibility, so in exchange for helping the UFO, who he calls Max, to
get back to his world, David wants Max to take him home.
Flying across the world to
get home, David forms a relationship with Max (voiced by Pee Wee Herman),
learning about his journeys across space, whereas David educates the ship on
more human things such as music and the name of the various locations they fly
over.
Flight of the Navigator is
one of those rare movies, that has the 1980’s written all over it, but tells a
story that is modern and was quite ahead of it’s time. What makes this film
stands out is its brilliant musical score, which was electronically
orchestrated using a Synclavier, which was one of the earliest digital
synthesizers used for making music. The soundtrack perfectly accompanies scenes
of the UFO flying over cities, deserts and oceans. To listen to a sample of
this music click here.
The concept of this movie
is just awesome in every single way. When we’re kids, we don’t just believe
there is life in outer space – we know there
is life out there. We spend more time looking up at the night sky with it’s sea
of stars, searching for anything that resembles a spaceship. We sit and wait in
hope that we will be the one who gets to see a UFO flying above the earth, and
if we’re lucky enough, meet the Little Green Man inside it. David is the
character we get to live that fantasy through. And not only does he meet the
robotic alien inside its craft, he gets to fricken fly it! It doesn’t get any
cooler than that. At age 12 he’s not even old enough to drive or go many places
on his own, but when chosen by Max to be his navigator, David is in charge and
learns to fly the ship over cities, through forests and even under the ocean.
At its heart, Flight of
the Navigator is about the importance of home. Both David and Max want to get
home and inevitably help each other out to get there. David is faced with the
choice of whether to return to the home of his future, or return to the home of
his past, where he really came from. But that won’t be easy.
Jump on board with Flight
of the Navigator. It’s a classic kid’s film you’ll want to experience time and
time again. A real gem.
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