Flight of the Navigator
| Flight of the Navigator | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Randal Kleiser |
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| Screenplay by |
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| Story by | Mark H. Baker |
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| Music by | Alan Silvestri |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures |
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Running time
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90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $9 million |
| Box office | $18,564,613 |
Flight of the Navigator is a 1986 American science fiction adventure film directed by Randal Kleiser and written by Mark H. Baker and Michael Burton. The film stars Joey Cramer as David Freeman, a 12-year-old boy who is abducted by an alien spaceship and finds himself caught in a world that has changed around him.
The film's producers initially sent the project to Walt Disney Pictures in 1984, but the studio was unable to approve it and it was sent to Producers Sales Organization, which made a deal with Disney to distribute it in the United States. It was partially shot in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Norway, it being a co-production with Norwegian company Viking Film.
On the night of July 4, 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 12-year-old David Scott Freeman walks through the woods to pick up his 8-year-old younger brother Jeff from a friend's house when he accidentally falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, he discovers that 8 years have passed and the year is now 1986; while he hasn't aged at all, his parents are now middle-aged and Jeff is 16 years old. Meanwhile, an alien spaceship crashes through power lines and is promptly confiscated by NASA. David is taken to a hospital for tests, but is sent to a NASA research facility when his brainwaves reveal images of the spaceship. Dr. Louis Faraday, who has been studying the spaceship since its arrival, discovers that David's mind is filled with alien technical manuals and star charts covering expanses of the galaxy far exceeding anything humans have recorded. David's subconscious mind tells the scientists that he was taken to a planet called Phaelon, 560 light years away, in just over 4.4 hours. They realize that David has experienced severe time dilation as a result of having traveled faster than the speed of light, explaining why eight years have passed on Earth, but not for him. David is unable to comprehend what Faraday tells him and flees the room, leaving Faraday muttering that 48 hours will be insufficient to finish his investigation.
The next morning, following a telepathic communication from the ship, David secretly boards it and meets its robotic commander called "Trimaxion Drone Ship" (or "Max" for short), which refers to David as the "Navigator". After they escape from the facility, Max tells David that its mission was to travel across the galaxy, collect biological specimens, take them to Phaelon for analysis, and then return them to their homes. Phaelon's scientists discovered humans only use 10% of their brain and, as an experiment, filled the remainder of David's with miscellaneous information. This includes all of the star charts discovered by Phaelon's astronomers, some of which were shown to the NASA scientists during David's interrogation. Max then returned him to Earth, but did not take him back to his own time, having determined that a human would be unlikely to survive a trip back in time. Before leaving Earth, Max accidentally crashed the ship, erasing all the computer's star charts and data. Therefore, Max needs the information in David's brain to return home.
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