Solarbabies (1986)

Director:

Alan Johnson

Writers:

Walon Green (screenplay) and
D.A. Metrov (screenplay)

Release Date:

26 November 1986 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Drama | Sci-Fi

Tagline:

Who will rule the future?

Plot:

In a future in which most water has disappeared from the Earth, we find a group of children, mostly teenagers...

Plot Keywords:

Desert | Children | Utopia Quest | Teen | Roller Skating

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Richard Jordan	...	Grock
Jami Gertz	...	Terra
Jason Patric	...	Jason
Lukas Haas	...	Daniel
James LeGros	...	Metron (as James Le Gros)
Claude Brooks	...	Rabbit
Peter DeLuise	...	Tug
Peter Kowanko	...	Gavial (as Pete Kowanko)
Adrian Pasdar	...	Darstar
Sarah Douglas	...	Shandray
Charles Durning	...	The Warden
Frank Converse	...	Greentree
Terrence Mann	...	Ivor
Alexei Sayle	...	Malice
Bruce Payne	...	Dogger

Also Known As:

Solar Warriors

Runtime:

UK:94 min | USA:94 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:16 | UK:15 | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | USA:PG-13 | West Germany:16

Filming Locations:

Almería, Andalucía, Spain

Company:

Brooksfilms

Trivia:

The movie was filmed on location in Spain, a country selected for its abundant desert landscape. Ironically, production was held up for several weeks due to...rain!

Goofs:

Continuity: Metron's skates disappear as he pole-vaults over the fence to get into the Aqua Bunker, then they re-appear as he lands

Quotes:

Grock: [after the skateball game/attempted Earth Police-bust] Scorpions. You've had special treatment, favors, and training by experts from my maiming squads. Do you deny that...?
Gavial: No, Strictor Grock.
Grock: Yet you just allowed yourselves to be TRASHED, by left-brain rollers using homemade gear.
Gavial: Strictor, if we just had...
Grock: *Cut your breath*, before you betray your putrid thinking!

Movie Connections:

References Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Soundtrack:

Love Will Set You Free

A Distant Dream

Solarbabies is a film that still remains in my head as a film, and not a production; which is very rare and hard for a person like me; one who constantly maps out the boundaries of the world of movies and their magic and experience, by devouring and disenchanting that world through personal obsession for all knowledge and nuances on a reviving daily reoccurrance.

Despite the film's easily written-off ineptitudes, cheesy sentiment, borderline incoherent silliness and visual limitations, it still manages to possess a strange magic;…….a sense of wonder, imagination, adventure and a youthful excitement towards limitless possibilities of a close but distant horizon of an unknown world, destination and future. Those wondrous currents that have surged through us all about what lay out there and ahead in our immediate and distant futures are here channeled in a sci-fi context, specifically a "what-if world"; a gift blissfully inherent to the post-apocalyptic genre but rarely fully capitalized on. And even if by the end of the film, what has actually passed before you has not fully realized your imaginative and spirited involvement, you still feel that an unspoken realm of something has traversed a larger sense of place and time and adventure. The fictional world (summoned up vicariously through small phrases and lines and referrals and emotions) feels bigger than what has actually been fleshed out in the end-product on screen.

I still feel that funny feeling of wanting to go beyond when the end credits begin to roll, and behind them the final images of the group running across a beach (did releasing the water also create an instant beach?…just another example of the film's either inept illogistics or ungraspable sense of self and place? Either way, the experience is there.) up to the water/ocean's edge and begin to splash about in the fulfillment(?) of their destination. It still feels like only the beginning of a story that I want to see.

Perhaps if a commentary track by anyone involved in the making of the film, had been put together and included on the recently released MGM DVD, which I so desperately wished it had been, maybe part of this distant wonder I carry for the film would have been slowly metamorphosized into an understanding of its all-to-real and finite existence/production within the realty of the real world (as it has happened many times before with other films). But as it stands, even with its easily recognizable faces and markings, Solarbabies still remains to me a large, distant occurrence collectively dreamt into existence by an unknown number of unknown people at an unknown place in the world (ok, Spain) at some nostalgic point in history, that was just slightly too far back for me to have been aware of its specific creation at a disenchanted adult hour of my life.