Flight of the Navigator: The Boy Out of Time

Everyone remembers the ship. That is the problem with Flight of the Navigator, and also the reason it survives. Randal Kleiser’s 1986 Disney picture has been filed for nearly forty years under chrome — the seamless mirrored teardrop that hovers over Florida pine woods and does impossible things with light — and the filing is accurate enough that almost nobody talks about the forty minutes of quiet dread the film builds before the ship does anything at all.

Because the first act of Flight of the Navigator is a horror film. A boy walks into some woods and comes out eight years later, and the family that gets him back is not the family that lost him.

The premise, kept above the line

David Freeman (Joey Cramer) is twelve years old in the summer of 1978, sent out on an errand across a Fort Lauderdale neighbourhood on 4 July. He falls into a ravine, knocks himself cold, and walks home. The house has different curtains. The people in it are strangers. His parents (Veronica Cartwright and Cliff De Young) are found across town, older and grief-worn, and his little brother Jeff is now a teenager taller than he is. It is 1986. David has not aged a day.

NASA takes him in — Howard Hesseman plays the scientist who runs the tests, and Sarah Jessica Parker turns up as an intern who becomes the only person in the building who talks to David like a person. Meanwhile something has come down in the same area: a craft with no seams, no rivets and no way in, sitting in a hangar while men in suits stand around it with clipboards and no ideas.

That is the film’s whole engine, and it is a good one. Kleiser had made Grease in 1978 and The Blue Lagoon in 1980, and the thing he brings from those pictures is patience with faces. He lets the reunion scene run long. He lets David’s mother reach for a child who has been dead to her for eight years and then flinch at the fact that he is twelve and she is not the woman he left. Disney sold the film on a spaceship and delivered, first, a family sitting in a kitchen being quietly destroyed by good news.

The chrome, and why it still works

The ship is worth the reputation. Its hull is mirror-smooth and mutable, flattening and swelling and rippling like mercury under a thumb, and it reflects the Florida sky, the trees, the road, the boy. The film is regularly cited as one of the earliest sustained uses of computer-generated reflection mapping in a feature — the technique where a synthetic surface is told to mirror an image of its surroundings rather than to be lit conventionally — and the reason it lands is that Kleiser used it on the one object in the film with no interior life to express.

That is the craft argument. Reflection mapping in 1986 was expensive, slow and brittle, and the temptation with any new toy is to make it the subject. Kleiser instead made it a character trait. The ship shows you the world back and gives you nothing of itself, which is exactly what the film needs it to do for an hour: the mystery has to stay opaque while the boy inside it slowly opens. When the hull finally softens and admits him, the effect reads as consent, because the film has spent forty minutes establishing that this surface does not yield.

Alan Silvestri’s score does the other half. He was fresh off Back to the Future and Romancing the Stone, and what he writes here is not the brass-and-strings adventure cue the marketing implies. It is a synthesiser score, cold and glassy and full of held tones, which puts the film’s sound much closer to Tangerine Dream than to John Williams. Silvestri understood the assignment better than the poster did. The music treats the ship as a haunted object.

The Paul Reubens problem

Then Max starts talking, and the film’s nerve wobbles.

Max is the ship’s intelligence, voiced — under the credit “Paul Mall” — by Paul Reubens, at the exact height of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The performance begins as a flat, synthetic drone and gradually acquires Reubens’s own voice as the machine absorbs David’s memories and slang, which is a genuinely clever bit of writing: the ship becomes a child because it has been reading a child. As an idea it is the best thing in the script.

As execution it is where Disney’s hand shows. Once Max is doing the voice, the film turns broad — a sunglasses gag, a run of wisecracks, a menagerie of alien creatures collected as specimens who are there to be merchandisable rather than strange. The unease of the first act does not survive the joke. There is a version of this picture where the ship’s acquisition of a human personality is the most disturbing thing in it, and Flight of the Navigator can see that version from where it stands and declines to walk over.

I do not think this ruins the film. I think it makes it a compromised one, and worth understanding as such — a studio picture where the commercial instinct and the eerie instinct are visibly wrestling in the same reel.

What it is really descended from

Here is the collector’s note. The lineage everyone reaches for is E.T. and Spielberg’s benevolent-visitor mode, and Disney certainly reached for it — 1986 was thick with children befriending machines, and the same year gave us Joe Dante’s backyard engineers building a ship out of junk. But that is the shelf the film was sold from, and it is not where the film’s actual power comes from.

The real ancestor of Flight of the Navigator is the uncanny-homecoming film. It is a story about somebody who was lost and comes back unchanged into a world that has changed without him, and the horror is entirely on the side of the people who waited. Bob Clark’s Deathdream — the Vietnam homecoming as a slow, unbearable haunting — is the same premise played without the ship: the boy walks back through the door, the family gets what it prayed for, and everyone discovers that the prayer was the easy part. Strip the chrome out of Kleiser’s film and the first act is Clark’s film with the volume down.

Behind both sits folklore proper: Rip Van Winkle, the fairy hill, the changeling — the whole body of stories in which time runs at a different rate somewhere else and the returning traveller is a wound rather than a gift. Disney’s marketing department would not have put it that way. The film keeps putting it that way anyway, in scene after scene, right up until Reubens starts doing the voice.

For the other end of the eighties’ relationship with the alien machine, Disney’s own grim space gothic from 1979 is the studio’s previous attempt at this exact tension — a family film built around something genuinely frightening — and it is instructive to see the house make the same bet twice and flinch in a different direction each time.

The case against

Flight of the Navigator is a first act in search of a film. The NASA middle section is thin: Hesseman’s scientist is a set of institutional obstacles with a face, and the security apparatus around David behaves however the plot needs it to behave that minute. Sarah Jessica Parker is given nothing except warmth and does a lot with it, which is not the same as the film having written her a part. Once the ship is airborne the picture becomes a travelogue, and travelogues have no stakes.

And the ending — which I will get to below the line — resolves the film’s great subject by disposing of it. That is a real cost. A film that spends its best hour on the idea that lost time cannot be given back should be very careful about how it lands.

Where it stands

It stands higher than its box office suggested and lower than nostalgia insists, and the gap between those two positions is where the interesting film lives. Watch it for the reunion scene, which is the best thing anybody involved ever shot. Watch it for Silvestri’s synthesisers, which know what kind of film they are in. Watch it for a mirrored hull that still reads as genuinely alien four decades on, at a moment when far more expensive effects from far later films have curdled into obvious.

Mostly watch it for the thirty-five minutes before the ship opens, when a Disney family adventure is quietly doing the work of a ghost story and does not yet know it is going to lose its nerve.

It circulates on disc in decent transfers and turns up on the Disney service; the chrome rewards the best picture you can find.

Spoilers below

What David is carrying, it turns out, is a map. The Trimaxion Drone Ship — Max — collected him from Earth in 1978 as a specimen, took him to the planet Phaelon, and downloaded a full set of star charts into his skull for the return trip. The eight-year gap is relativistic: a few hours’ travel at the ship’s speeds, most of a childhood at home. Max cannot leave until the charts come out of the boy, and the boy cannot go home in any meaningful sense at all, because the home he wants is eight years gone.

The resolution is a time reversal. Max takes David back to 1978, drops him at the ravine on the night he vanished, and the film closes on the boy running into a house where his brother is still small and his parents are still the people he left that morning. Nobody remembers. The eight years are unhappened.

I understand why they did it, and I think it is the film’s one real failure of nerve. Everything good in Flight of the Navigator comes from the irreversibility of what has happened — from Veronica Cartwright’s face doing arithmetic it does not want to do, from a twelve-year-old meeting his teenage brother and finding a stranger wearing the family nose. Undoing it is a mercy extended to the audience rather than an answer to the question the film asked.

And yet the last shot complicates its own let-off. David goes back, and Max leaves, and the boy is the only person on Earth who knows that any of it occurred. He has been handed his family and his decade back on the condition that he carry the loss alone. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, the changeling story arriving at its proper ending after all: the child comes home, the family is whole, and only the child knows he has been somewhere the rest of them cannot follow.