This is a story about a trio of very early adolescent boys: the dreamer, the geek and the "tough." Pretty typical, right? Except the dreamer is Ethan Hawke and the geek is River Pheonix, both in their movie debuts, though Phoenix had already appeared a number of times on TV. The story itself is rather dated: cobbling together a sophisticated computer and then later a spaceship from junk probably isn't going to go over too well with today's savvy youth. Also, it descends into rather awful silliness in its second half. Nevertheless, many fans rank this film in the upper echelons of "boy movies" because of the exceptional characterizations performed by the young actors. Ethan Hawke's serious talent is apparent, and as always River Phoenix instills a dark undercurrent into his character which derived obviously, at least in retrospect, from the darkness within himself. The third boy, Jason Presson, was also exceedingly skilled, but he appears to have dropped out of the cinema business in his twenties. To sum up, very young kids may find this movie hysterically funny, while aficionados of the genre will appreciate what extremely talented child actors can do with a terrible script.
