For those of us who grew up in the golden age of Spielbergian 80s kids’ adventures, Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985) is an excellent love letter to that specific time in childhood… when the summer air felt electric with possibilities and a BMX with a basket strapped to the front was a hard ticket to adventure. It’s a film that understands the power of friendship at that age – when your friends weren’t just people you knew but extensions of yourself, co-conspirators in your schemes.
Watching Explorers as a kid felt like looking into a mirror, but one with better lighting, cooler gadgets, and a soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. Watching it now feels bittersweet – like rediscovering an old notebook full of pencil-sketched spaceship designs and realising you’ll never have that kind of time or belief in the impossible again. It’s not a perfect movie – far from it. But perfection isn’t the point. The point is that Explorers gets it. It gets you. Or maybe, it gets who you were.
I’ve always thought of this film as the nerdy cousin to E.T. and The Goonies. It’s not as polished or as widely remembered, but that’s also part of what makes it special. If Stand By Me is about letting go of childhood, Explorers is about holding onto it for just a little longer. It’s about those last, fleeting days when you could still believe that a dream, a sketch, and a bit of backyard engineering were all you needed to touch the stars.
I remember first watching it in the spring of ’86 just as 6th grade was coming to a close. And I think it helped me hold onto that fragile bubble of time when anything felt possible – right before the real world started happening.
-Pop