Flight of the Navigator
Flight of the Navigator is a 1986 Disney science fiction film about a boy, David, who is somehow transported in time eight years into the future without aging.
Template:Spoiler David (Joey Cramer) is an average twelve-year-old American boy living in Miami, Florida in 1978. One night his parents ask him to go retrieve his younger brother Jeff from a friend's house on the other side of the woods that are behind his house. While in the woods he falls down an embankment into a ravine and is knocked unconscious. He awakes after what seems a few moments, and returns home, only to find that it is now inhabited by an elderly couple. The couple turns David over to the police who find an eight-year-old missing persons report on David. David's parents and brother are found to be now living in Ft. Lauderdale, and are eight years older. David quickly learns that the year is now 1986 and everything has changed but he.
By this time a subplot has begun, involving an alien spacecraft that has crashed into some power lines. With little effort, NASA agents convince the police that the craft is theirs and take it back to their base.
David has meanwhile been taken to hospital to try to determine where he has been for the last eight years, and, most importantly, why he has not aged. The scientists have begun performing tests on his brain and find it to be filled with a strange language. David is uncomfortable about the tests, but is somehow convinced by the scientists to allow them to take him to the same base as the strange ship and keep him for 48 hours to continue the tests. David is connected to a machine, whereupon further scans reveal that his brain is full of alien data and star charts. The scientists are also able to query David's brain directly, without requiring David's permission.
David hears the ship calling to him in his mind, but he doesn't know who it is. With the help of an intern named Carolyn (Sarah Jessica Parker), he manages to escape his room and make his way to the hangar where the ship is stored. As if made of liquid metal, an opening and stairway appear on the underside of the hovering spacecraft, revealed to be a Trimaxion Drone Ship, letting him inside, even though no NASA technicians have been able to gain entry. Once inside the ship, he meets its robot pilot, whom he nicknames Max (voice of Paul Reubens). Max is attached to the spacecraft and moves along tracks on the walls and floors, and he calls David "The Navigator". He escapes the NASA base somewhat haphazardly, only to stop at a cow field, than later on under the sea. Then Max informs David that his mission was to travel the galaxy, collect specimens, and take them back to his home planet, Phaelon, for study. After this, he would return the specimens to the exact time and place from which they were taken, and it would be as if they had never left.
Max's creators had discovered that humans only use 10% of their brains. As an experiment, they abducted David at random and filled his brain with information. The only problem that occurred with this procedure is that David's brain "leaked", although this is never fully explained. Max then returned David to Earth, but did not take him back to his proper time, fearing that humans were too delicate for time travel. Upon trying to leave earth and return to Phaelon, Max was distracted by some flowers, and accidentally crashed the ship into a power line. The crash erased all the star charts and data necessary for returning home from the ship's computer; hence, Max needs the information in David's brain to complete his mission and return to Phaelon.
Max scans David's brain to extract the information. Max's personality and voice change, becoming less robotlike and more human and erratic. It is left to the viewer to assume that in addition to the navigation data, Max has acquired part of David's personality.
David and Max travel the Earth trying to decide what to do next, tracked and chased by NASA all the way, and get quite lost in the process. David finally decides that he cannot stay in 1986, and that he must return to his own time, despite the risk of being vaporized. After Max takes him and the space ship back through time to July 4, 1978, he awakens in the woods, makes his way home, and finds everything the way he left it before he was abducted – except for a small souvenir pet he brought along from his journey.
Trivia
- Many had seen in the movie trailer that a silver acorn-shaped vessel would constitute the Alien spacecraft. The movie opens with the shot of such a vessel flying across a cityscape (presumably Miami) but as the camera pans back the object turns out to be a silver frisbee.
- In the credits, Paul Reubens (who provides the voice for Max) is credited as "Paul Mall".
- Tim Blaney, who provided the voice for the robot, Johnny 5 in the movie Short Circuit which was released earlier that same year, also helped with puppeteer work on Max and the alien creatures.
- When Max explains to David why it is now 8 years later, the cows in the background inexplicably change positions from shot to shot.
- This movie is one of the first films to use CGI, used for the Trimaxion Drone Ship when its changes shape and, creates stairs.
- In the movie's trailer, Max has a different voice.