A boy obsessed with '50s sci-fi movies about aliens has a recurring dream about a blueprint of some kind, which he draws for his inventor friend. With the help of a third kid, they follow it and build themselves a spaceship. Now what?
This space adventure stars Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as misfit best friends whose dreams of space travel become a reality when they create an interplanetary spacecraft in their homemade laboratory. Ben Crandall is a young visionary who dreams of space travel while watching late-night B monster movies, pouring over comic books, and playing Galaga in the confines of his bedroom. But one night he has a vivid dream of flying over a space-like circuit board and shares his visions with his best friend Wolfgang Muller, a young scientific genius who is able to translate his dreams into a complex computer program that actually works. With the help of their new friend Darren Woods, they create a homemade spacecraft and embark on a secret adventure to another galaxy where they find that things are not always as different as they seem.—Anthony Pereyra {[email protected]}
Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke) is a young teenage boy living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., who experience vivid dreams about flying through clouds and over a vast, city-like circuit board, usually after falling asleep watching 1950s sci-fi movies (The War of the Worlds (1953) is a favorite). Every night, upon waking from the dream, he draws the circuit board. Ben shows the sketches to his friend, child prodigy Wolfgang Muller (River Phoenix). At school, Ben develops a crush on Lori Swenson (Amanda Peterson), but he isn't sure whether it's mutual. Both boys meet punkish-but-likable Darren Woods (Jason Presson), with whom they share their circuit-board concepts. Wolfgang builds an actual microchip based on Ben's drawings. The chip enables the generation of an electromagnetic bubble which surrounds a pre-determined area. As the boys discover, the bubble is capable of moving at near-limitless distances and speeds without the usual effect from inertia. They construct a rudimentary spacecraft out of an abandoned Tilt-A-Whirl car; they named their ship the Thunder Road, after Bruce Springsteen's song of the same title. Their experiments with the Thunder Road draw attention from the United States government, which sends agents to scout the area for UFOs.
After Ben receives more dreams about the circuit board, Wolfgang discovers a means of producing unlimited sustainable oxygen; this means longer flights, whereas previously they were limited to whatever a typical oxygen tank could hold. They finalize their plan to explore the galaxy in search of alien life. The boys complete liftoff, despite interference from the authorities (one of whom silently wishes them well). Shortly after breaking Earth's orbit, something overrides the boys' personal computer-controls. The Thunder Road is tractor-beamed a much larger spaceship. They boys venture out to meet their captors, Wak and Neek; two green-skinned aliens whose knowledge of Earth comes almost entirely from junk culture, particularly television reruns. The young explorers develop a relationship with their extraterrestrial hosts, but the alien spaceship is intercepted by a larger-still alien vessel. Feigning an attack by space pirates, Wak urges the boys to leave. They are in the process of doing so when they are interrupted by a gigantic brown extraterrestrial, this one bearing a close resemblance to the other two, who gestures furiously while grinding out barely-comprehensible alien language. As this turns out, Wak and Neek are brother and sister; they have taken their father's ship out for a joy ride, sending the dreams to the boys in the hopes of meeting humans. Transmissions of old black-and-white movies have kept extraterrestrial populace at a distance -- except for the curious Wak and Neek -- due to the way humans generally depict violence toward alien life.
Wak and Neek's father allows the Thunder Road and its crew to depart, after Wak and Neek give the boys a parting gift: an amulet which, according to the extraterrestrials, is the stuff that dreams are made of. The boys succeed reaching safely back to Earth, but a malfunction results in them crashing the Thunder Road into their neighborhood lake. Now they are back to square one... or so they think. A week later, Ben has a dream at school in which he envisions another vast circuit board while flying though more clouds overhead. This time -- thanks to Wak and Neek's amulet -- Ben is joined in the dream by Wolfgang, Darren and Lori. They proclaimed that the circuitry is really complicated, and wonder where this one will take them once they have constructed this. Lori smiles at Ben while holding his hand.
