Billy Campbell is Cliff, a young pilot living in LA in the late 1930s. His father and mentor, Peevy, played by Alan Arkin, is a hell of a mechanic and aerospace engineer. Together, the duo enjoy building and flying planes, although Cliff is the primary flyer these days. While test flying a new plane, a car chase crosses right through their mini-airport, causing a lot of chaos. Turns out, it was the FBI chasing down a group of criminals who stole some sort of secretive device.
The FBI believed the device — a highly advanced personal jetpack — had burned up in the crash. Instead, one of the criminals was able to hide the jetpack before being injured and arrested. Cliff and Peevy discover it, unsure of what the heck it is. Meanwhile, Timothy Dalton’s character, Neville Sinclair, has hired a group of local gangsters to find the jetpack and bring it back to him. Sinclair appears to be a popular Hollywood actor, but eventually you discover he’s something much more sinister. The FBI soon realizes that they were wrong about the jetpack being destroyed, and so they are in the hunt as well. Cliff and Peevy use the jetpack for good, and the Rocketeer is born, but with both Neville and his goons, as well as the FBI in pursuit, this isn’t something that can last forever. But can it last long enough to save the day, and the girl (Jennifer Connelly)?
The Rocketeer is a fun movie, hands down. It belongs in the discussion of classic family films like The Sandlot, The Goonies, and even Back To the Future. It has a lot of memorable scenes and characters, and it’s just a well told, feel good story with several time-tested themes (good vs evil, saving the girl). It’s the kind of rare movie that I can watch a few times a year and enjoy it each time.
The Blu-ray release is welcomed, but a underwhelming. Image quality is pretty good, but just a little short of being “great.” There is a slight grain and an overall lack of oomph, if you will. Technically speaking it’s not bad, just not as good as I hoped for. There are a lot of great scenes, plenty of outdoor shots and lots of great effects (flying the jetpack, the mask itself, the blimp) that could have really ‘wowed’ if done properly in HD but that isn’t quite the case here. The audio is more on target and not as disagreeable.
For a 20th Anniversary release you might expect some cool extra features, but fans of the movie will be disappointed to know that the only extra feature here is a trailer, and a very, very SD trailer at that. It looks terrible.
So what do we have here? A great movie, a pretty good presentation, and a shameful job on the extra features. It’s a perfect storm for a re-release at some point in the future, maybe on the 25th anniversary, if not sooner. For diehard fans of the movie it’s not a bad purchase, but it’s not a great one either.
To the summary…
