Woops!  Fell off the blogging wagon for a couple of days there.  I plead the sickness.  Back to Sci-Fi Month!

The Rocketeer

The Rocketeer is, in my opinion, one of the most criminally underrated films in Hollywood history.  Not CRITICALLY.  Critics, in fact, quite liked this film, and the science fiction community did too.  Audiences, however, passed over it in favour of other blockbusters like Robin Hood:  Prince of Thieves.

The problem, I think, was one of timing.  The Rocketeer is all about nostalgia, a throwback to pulp cliches and 40's sci-fi action heroes like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.  Aaaand in 1991, not a lot of people were very interested in those kinds of heroes.  They were riding the high wave of prosperity, looking to a future of cyberpunk in films like Terminator 2 or the Matrix.  They were interested in modern heroes, tough female characters, and progressive ideas.





BUT, if this movie had come out now, in a period where retro-futurism is practically a societal buzzword, I imagine it would have performed brilliantly.  In a society grown cynical with the current trend of world politics and economics, nostalgic movies find a comfortable place in the public consciousness.  They remind us of a time of hopes and dreams, childlike wonder and imagination.

Many critics have compared this movie to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the remainder of the Indiana Jones franchise, and it's easy to see why.  The key difference, of course, is that where Raiders poked fun at the cliches of 30's and 40's pulp (take, for instance, the infamous scene where Indie straight-up guns down the sword wielding antagonist), The Rocketeer instead embraced them as gospel.

The storyline to The Rocketeer is a perfect example of this devotion to reminiscence:  a likeable, daredevil pilot (Billy Campbell) and his father-figure / mechanic genius (Alan Arkin) stumble upon an experimental man-portable rocket pack.  Using this device, the pilot is transformed into a superhero, blazing through the night sky to battle fascists and a Hollywood supervillain (Timothy Dalton) while saving his forever girl(Jennifer Connelly).
Of course it's straightforward.  Pulp novels were like that:  good guys blasting bad guys, with little to no moral complexity.  There was a hero, he had a girlfriend, and he always had to save her.  Is it any surprise that audiences in the 90s found this all a bit...hard to take?

But The Rocketeer succeeds beautifully because it is so charmingly innocent with its content.  There is violence, yes, but it's downplayed in a fashion that makes it palatable.  The opening sequence really sets the stage; a warm, summer day, with 30's racing planes being set up in anticipation for the National competition, with a brilliantly composed score by James Horner in the foreground.

I think the reason I like this film so much is it effectively creates an atmosphere of wonder.  While there is a quiet longing to some of the photography and the soundtrack, it also dares us to think like those people who were inventing and creating in the 30s and 40s.  Like today, this was a period marred by economic depression (the Great Depression, in fact), yet it was counteracted by a sense of profound hope in the United States.  Under President FDR, citizens knuckled down and pulled themselves out of the worst economic disaster in modern history.

Pulp fiction celebrates that optimism, and The Rocketeer does as well.  Where some films look out and see a grim, hopeless, future, this movie brings out the dreamer in all of us, and that is something worth celebrating.