Flight of the Navigator (1986)

(Disney Streaming, August 2021) I spent the first half-hour of Flight of the Navigator wondering why I hadn’t heard of the film before, and the rest of the film understanding why I hadn’t. It does start on an intriguing note, as (after many fake-out of UFOs not quite appearing on-screen) a 12-year-old boy of 1978 finds himself in 1986 without interruption or explanation. His home is inhabited by strangers, and the police struggle to figure out what to make of him until they find trace of him as a missing person… from eight years before. Things take a turn for the wilder side, as a strange UFO (well, UUO — Unidentified Unmoving Object) is taken in by NASA, an organization with a secure facility to keep kids locked in. (Albeit with the hottest 1986 toys.)  A young and cute Sarah Jessica Parker has a supporting role as a likable liaison, and our protagonist is soon revealed to have a lot of information locked away in his mind. At this point, we’re probably 35 minutes into Flight of the Navigator and there isn’t much to criticize: it’s a capable science-fiction adventure for 12-year-old boys, the likes of which (along Explorers, DARYL, and The Last Starfighter) were particularly robust in the mid-1980s. But it’s also the kind of film that the entire family can watch and enjoy. But then, well, the family can take a hike, because the level of the film drops down a few notches as soon as the boy gets inside the mysterious craft and makes friends with the ship. The dialogue, events and preoccupation become quite juvenile all of a sudden, and the plot almost entirely stops in favour of the now-UFO zooming around the place. There’s some interesting early-CGI special-effect work considering the limited technology of the time, but the plot really takes a break during that last half. Even the third act’s tension is an obvious cheat that will obviously be resolved using the most obvious way, which is to say, ”Never mind!”  I do like that first section of Flight of the Navigator. The second one, though… eh, a return to the norm and then some. Yes, I was almost 12 in 1986 and should have seen the film then — but I wasn’t watching first-run films at the time, and the tight grip of Disney (plus the film’s unabashed Americanism) probably explains why it didn’t make its way to French-Canadian TV.