"Explorers" 1985

I saw Joe Dante’s “Explorers” around my twelfth birthday. I remember that it had a lot of promise starting out, but that it really fell apart in the third act. If you read around it looks like the studio got tired of waiting around for a finished product and released the film in a near “working print” status. Showing it to my kids today, it gets the same reaction. They like the premise and the build up, but the ending just doesn’t seem fully cooked.

That is a shame, really, because the idea is one worth pursuing.
What would it be like if another culture had to base their entire knowledge of ours entirely on our entertainment output? There would be an interesting mixture of insight and misunderstanding. It is actually all too accurate a picture of a lot of the intercultural exchange that occurs in our world. Far too many of our opinions of other cultures are based of stereotypes, old historic events or perpetuated misunderstandings.