Explorers

Ben Crandall is a suburban boy absorbed by science fiction films, video games and comics, and obsessed with the idea that extraterrestrial life exists. A strange dream plants the design of an electronic circuit in his mind, and his brilliant friend Wolfgang turns that vision into working computer code. Together with their friend Darren, who supplies salvaged parts, the boys assemble a homemade spacecraft equipped with a force field and set off into space, where they make contact with alien beings far stranger than anything Ben had imagined.

Joe Dante directed the film, the fifth of the sixteen features he has made, arriving between Gremlins and Innerspace, from a screenplay by Eric Luke. Ethan Hawke plays Ben, River Phoenix plays Wolfgang and Jason Presson plays Darren, with Amanda Peterson, Bobby Fite and Dana Ivey among the credited cast of twenty-five. Released by Paramount in July 1985, it cost about 25 million dollars and returned roughly 10 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.4 out of 10 from around 25,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.3 from several hundred, while the critics' rating stands at 5.5 from 104 reviews, so audiences have been somewhat warmer toward it than reviewers.