I don’t remember seeing Reagan in the movie, but he would not have been in the public eye as a presidential candidate since he didn’t announce his candidacy until November 1979 and wasn’t the party’s nominee until summer 1980.
Three Mile Island was earlier in the year, so it doesn’t quite fit with the summer of '79.
One interesting omission that was caught by the author of an article I read online was that there was no mention in the movie about Skylab falling. I remember people talking a lot about Skylab falling and fantasizing about horrible consequences of it. Seems like something they might have brought up, more so than the Red Scare/Russian Invasion stuff, which I associated more with the 1980’s and Reagan.
The issue of middle schools versus junior highs was not an anachronism at all. It’s more of a regional thing. My family moved from Pittsburgh (where we had and still have middle schools) to St. Louis in 1975, where we found the concept of junior high schools to be a bit unusual.
I found the post-train crash intact car for the kids, and the only-half-destroyed truck and still-living teacher, to be very jarring moments. Not only was the car intact, but it was pretty well blocked in by debris in one shot, and shouldn’t have been that easy to speed away in.
That’s a very good point. The imminent fall of Skylab was a national obsession in the summer of '79. It would have been a good cultural touchstone for the movie.
Also, the movie Alien was released in May, 1979. That might have been another appropriate thing to mention in passing. Maybe a movie marquee or something.
I really liked it, a lot. It was a throwback to the Spielbergian movies of the 80’s - ET, The Goonies, Close Encounters, etc. Easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.
There were flaws, but they didn’t bother me. The ending was cheesy, but ET’s flying on bicycles was too. I think a little bit of that is a perfect fit for this kind of movie, which is really a kid’s (young teen) movie. And the two main kids were great, especially Fanning.
As I remember the Three Mile Island clip was during the funeral of the main character’s mother, and then the main part of the film was four months later, just after the end of school. If you remember, the father wanted to send the kid to a football summer camp, but the kid wanted to stay to work on his friend’s film.
BTW, I wonder what would have happened to the kid. I imagine him going to work for ILM eventually.
I don’t remember seeing Reagan in the film, either, but then, I wasn’t looking for him.
Anyway, he’d already run for President in 1976 (the nomination was still up in the air until the '76 GOP convention), and was certainly in the public eye in early '79, as an influential member of the GOP, even if he had not yet announced his candidacy for the '80 election.
I was just thinking about this again, and I just realized I conflated it with another movie I hapened to see the same day - the American remake of Let the Right One In. That movie was set in the 80’s, and that’s the one that had Reagan on TV all the time. My drug damaged memory transposed the Reagan stuff into Super 8. My bad.
Ha, no worries, it happens. I feel better now because I’m scratching my head trying to remember any scene with Reagan in it, much less where he’s referenced as POTUS. heh.
I saw this with some friends from work yesterday. We all liked it quite a lot, in a MST 3000 way. All four of us were born within five years of when the movie was set, and we were pleased to figure out within the first few minutes exactly when it was set due to the Three Mile Island ref on the tv.
I have to say, that was the best train explosion that I have ever seen. Seriously, it’d be hard to top that.
D_Odds, I thought the same thing about a script rewrite, but what clued me in was Alice’s horror when she explained that her dad missed work. It would have made more sense if…well, you know.
Joel Courtney impressed the hell out of me given that this is his first professional acting role. And Elle Fanning, it’s hard to believe how grown up she seems after having first seen her as a three-year-old in Taken.
And I thought the kids’ movie was priceless
The thing that creeps me out a little about the movie is that it was set just two or three months before my earliest memories start, but I can’t really explain why I have that reaction beyond the vague feeling of unease that weird things* could *happen before you’re old enough to be aware of them.
Again, I was the same age as the main character in this movie in 1979 and I went to a Middle School, and hearing about people who went to “Junior High” was jarring to me when I first heard it. I’ve seen the movie twice in the last two days, (with different people, but i enjoyed it a lot).
I agree that I thought about why they’d be moving something like this via train after all these years (that was something the humans chose to do), but there were some things that I figured were better left unexplained. I mean, some people had a problem with Cloverfield and War of the Worlds because things weren’t adequately explained. In both those movies, there were no scientists proclaiming “This is what the aliens want and this is why they are here!” To me, that’s refreshing because in real life, you might not get an explanation. Who knows why the alien needed what he needed in this movie? Humans on this planet cannot adequately explain why other species on Earth do what they do. Why do we think we’d know how alien technology or physiology works? Who knows why he built/did the things he did? That’s not the point of the movie. The point of the movie is how people move on after a tragedy.
Saw it tonight and just loved it to pieces – turned to my friend at the end, and even before the credits ran and we saw the finished film, said “This was the best movie ever made.”
