D.A.R.Y.L.
Dir: Simon Wincer
1985
***
1985's D.A.R.Y.L. comes so close to being an 80's kids classic but unfortunately never really hits the high notes it needs to. It's a little bit like E.T., has elements of The Boy Who Could Fly with slices of Flight of the Navigator about it by way of War Games but doesn't really have the same impact as any of them. I think the big problem is that as a boy I didn't want to be any of the characters in the film. I didn't think it would have been cool to have been D.A.R.Y.L. or his friend Turtle. I did however want to have an Alien best mate, would love to have been able to fly, wanted to ride in a spaceship voiced by Peewee Herman and if I was good at computers, I wanted it to be because I was clever, rather than because I was a robot. Robots are cool but no one really wanted to be one. People want to be friends with them but only if they're Johnny 5 or Metal Mickey. D.A.R.Y.L. was a modern but rather cold version of Pinocchio with sickly sweat overtones. Who wants to live behind a white picket fence in middle-America when you can conquer the world, print money and fly fighter jets for the rest of your life and get away with it. I want a sequel whereby D.A.R.Y.L. goes through puberty and goes bad, destroying everything in sight. I give it three stars purely because Barret Oliver is very convincing as a robot child and the car chases are brilliant.