Hacker Cinema
Explorers
1985 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Joe Dante
Science FictionAdventureFamily
Middle schooler Ben spends his free time watching sci-fi films, playing video games and reading comic books. Surprisingly, his affinity for all things fantastical yields a real result – when he has a vivid dream about technology, his prodigy best friend Wolfgang manages to create a working spacecraft. Joined by their buddy Darren, the boys take off into outer space and encounter some very odd extraterrestrial life.
4 positive8 neutralfrom 12 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
13 comments on Hacker News
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Explorers (1985) where kids built a spaceship from a Tilt-A-Whirl and other parts. It was an inspiration. Like you, I enjoy programming, but I haven't built a spaceship yet. Hehe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Glad to see that kindness is finally going viral.
I'm Gen X, raised feral like the rest. Movies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Explorers feel like biographies. We were vicious to one another before the arrival of political correctness in the early 90s, which received backlash like today's woke. But kindness is always on the right side of history.
I agree though about feeling like some kind of crass <expletive> around young people today. I have a hard time staying domesticated as I watch society crumble under the guise of gentrification. I just want to act out so badly sometimes, deface something, watch it all burn like the good old days, SLC Punk style. But the real punk is to be ruthlessly human to one another.
There's a certain thrill in sacrificing one's ego to help someone achieve their dreams that just can't be replaced. The biggest baddasses are teachers, nurses, your mom, and everyone knows it.
That's just an Explorers remake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)
When I was in 7th grade we were learning about Black Holes - and the movie "Explorers" had come out where the kids are able to make a forcefield sphere surrounding an abandoned car from a carnival ride/roller coaster --- and they fly into space and meet aliens and stuff...
Welp - 7th grade me postulated that if you had one of those force spheres, and you could accelerate at the same rate or slightly faster than the speed at which matter is pulled into a black hole, could you stay ahead of the gravity wave and "surf" it safely into the black hole?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al75vXD6koc -- Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQKGxrfwsk -- Trivia
It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)
Drop the occulty aspect and this is the premise of the 1985 movie Explorers:
A kid sees in a dream what he thinks is a circuit board, so he takes a drawing to a techy friend of his who fills in the missing parts and builds it. Turns out to create a solid floating sphere, that they get the idea to use for space travel - and end up meeting the aliens that sent them the dreams.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al75vXD6koc
(That said, the stylized form of the circuit in the dream could totally be the source of the occulty aspects - a gear looking like a sun, for example, as seen in the trailer at about 0:23, not to mention the flying aspect)
Wow, just realized the movie Explorers has that model of computer!
I knew I wasn't the only one who watched Explorers in the 80s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114
That is the premise of "Explorers", albeit aliens, not AI.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
Hi Mike, the movie you ask about in your footnote #3 (the one with the force bubbles powered on a 9v battery) is "Explorers"[1] - which stars River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke in their screen debuts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack