Flight Of The Navigator Review

26th January 2013

By Daniel King.

Released in 1986 and apparently soon to be remade, Flight Of The Navigator is a mish-mash of familiar elements from a number of well-known and better movies. A young boy is shunted forward eight years in time after being abducted by an alien life form and taken aboard its faster-than-light spaceship. The story tells of the boy’s attempts to escape from the clutches of NASA – who want to study his brain for the alien data it contains – and return to his family. Kids’ stuff then and who better to deliver it, you might think, than Disney.

David (Joey Cramer) is a pretty ordinary 12 year-old boy – parents (Cliff De Young and Veronica Cartwright) are a bit square, annoying kid brother, starting to get interested in girls, faithful dog – until one day he tumbles into a ravine in the woods behind his home and knocks himself out. When he eventually comes to, he dashes back home only to find that his home isn’t there, or rather it is but there are strangers living in it. It turns out he’s been gone for eight years – not that’s he’s aged at all in that time – and his parents had given him up for dead and long since moved house. At this point you can check Back To The Future off your crib sheet.

Pretty soon you can tick War Games off too, as David is carted off to virtual imprisonment at NASA after he starts emitting complex spaceship schematics in binary code during a routine ECG. Unscrupulous government boffin Dr Faraday (Dabney Coleman, sorry, Howard Hesseman) hooks him up to all sorts of hi-tec equipment, allowing the director Randal Kleiser to include lots of shots of computer screens, data printouts and so on. David’s only ally is Carolyn (a youthful Sarah Jessica Parker) who helps him escape via the cute little robot that helps deliver the internal mail. This being a mid-80s kids’ sci-fi flick this cute little robot has an acronym name: R.A.L.F. [Tick The Black Hole off your crib sheet now]

As the film trundles along we take in alien abduction (Close Encounters), cute furry creatures (Gremlins) and aliens who just want to go home (the daddy of all these movies, E.T.). None of this rampant plagiarism would matter at all if the film wasn’t quite so bland on a visual level but Randal Kleiser brings all of the maverick invention and off-the-wall flair we might expect from the director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Kleiser, being a follower rather than a leader, crams in as many cultural icons that were en vogue at the time – executive desktop toys, portable brick phones, MTV, Twisted Sister – with the result that his film is now terribly dated. But by far the worst element in this regard is the score: a horrifically bland synth pop effort by Alan Silvestri that DeBarge would have rejected as being too naff.

You might think I’m being too harsh on what is essentially a harmless piece of family entertainment and you’re probably right. I expect kids seeing it for the first time today would almost certainly thoroughly enjoy it, although the prospect of a remake suggests that someone somewhere also thinks it’s badly dated. The effects are decent enough (although the Blu-ray edition I saw was unforgiving on some of the creature models) and there plenty of juvenile gags to pep up the fairly routine action. But if I am being harsh it’s only because there is no reason to accept cynically rehashed and perfunctorily made films, such as this one, simply because they’re aimed at kids.

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