With some good friends and some good beer, this can be one of the best movies of all time. Although a sleeper when released in 1985, Explorers is worthy of attention for several reasons.

This was director Joe Dante's follow-up to Gremlins, which had established his name the year before. Joining Joe were Dick Miller and Robert Picardo, whom he had worked with in The Howling some years prior. Miller is one of those faces everyone knows, but no one knows his name. Picardo carefully avoided recognition until his inclusion as the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. Picardo deserves particular kudos, since he plays four parts in the movie. You won't realize which parts until the end credits.

Explorers was the first movie for both Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix. Phoenix demonstrated his acting ability, presenting a character unlike any other that followed in his brief career. In this movie, he sports a thick accent and baby fat - just about as far away from My Own Private Idaho as you can get. Hawke, however, is the runaway star of the show. Dante couldn't have picked a better young actor for the part. Hawke at that age had an infectious smile and a gleam in his eyes that draws you in to the wonder he's experiencing. It's easy to see how Hollywood was destined to notice this future star of powerful pieces like Alive, Dead Poet's Society, and Gattaca.

This was the second movie for a young man named Jason Presson. He impressed everyone the year before in another sleeper known as The Stone Boy. He made a couple of bad movies after Explorers, before dropping off the face of the earth. I don't know what happened to him - it certainly wasn't his talent that held him back, but then it seldom is.

This is just a damned fun movie. It's not terribly fast paced, but it continues to move quick enough to draw you in. The story is a wash. Forget plausibility - it's a pure fantasy - but the cast, direction, and music is so well done that you just don't care. In a nutshell, three boys dream the design for a spaceship and go to meet the creatures who gave them the design. I hate to try to outline the story any further, because it's so silly it turns people off. You have to quit worrying about the story and let the movie take you. This is an excellent example of the importance of the various parts of creating a movie. If all the various technical aspects hadn't been so well done, it never would have gotten off the ground.

Jerry Goldsmith deserves recognition for his work on the soundtrack. Jerry's widely criticized for using the same tricks over and over, and those criticisms are valid when leveled against a man as widely acknowledged as he. He does the same here - compare the music of the launch scene in Explorers with the shuttle ride to unveil the Enterprise in the first Star Trek movie. Still, Goldsmith manages to capture something of the spirit of the conquering adventurer in this movie, and it becomes the perfect accompaniment to the action.

The effects are almost flawless. I can fault them in only two places. The space ship crashing through the snack bar looks terribly cheesy - they obviously slowed it down so as not to give the impression that anyone was hurt. You can probably see the wire or whatever other device they used to drag it through if you look closely. Then later one of the aliens turns a control and her hand doesn't grasp it. Her fingers should have been better built. But now I'm picking nits.

I guess I enjoy this movie so much because it reminds me so much of the joy and wonder I felt as a kid - and still feel from time to time. If you can agree to suspend belief and open yourself to it, Explorers has the ability to bring that wonder back for a time. All the various pieces of the movie come together to pull you out of your everyday world and lift you above the maze. Even after all these years, sitting here writing about it makes me feel better about myself and my world. Explorers is one of very few movies that's made me laugh till I almost got sick, but funny as it is, that's only secondary to the real point of the story. This is one of my all time favorites because it gives you another opportunity to feel that yank on the ol' human spirit, and allows you (at least for a time) to look at the world through new eyes. What more can we ask of a movie?