Blast From the Past Review
by Christian Pyle (tlcclp AT aol DOT com)April 19th, 2000
Blast from the Past (1999)
Reviewed by Christian Pyle
Directed by Hugh Wilson
Written by Bill Kelly and Hugh Wilson
Starring Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone, Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek, and Dave Foley
Grade: C+
It's 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis has everyone worried that nuclear war is imminent. But inventor Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) is ready. He's got an elaborate fallout shelter under his backyard. Just as Calvin takes his pregnant wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) underground, a fighter jet crashes into their house. Thinking that the Bomb has dropped, Calvin seals the door with a timelock that will open in 35 years, when the radioactivity will have dissipated. The shelter has a complete house and a warehouse full of supplies. Adam Webber (Brendan Fraser) is born down there and grows to manhood in a sanitized 1950's fantasy.
Up top, a malt shop is built over the ruins of the Webber home. Eventually it becomes a bar, and the neighborhood goes to hell. In 1997 when Calvin comes up to take a look, he finds weirdoes, lunatics, transsexual prostitutes, and adult video stores. Horrified, he decides that his family should continue to live in the shelter, but Adam has to go out to restock their supplies. Raised in an artificial world, Adam is ill equipped to deal with modern day Los Angeles and quickly finds himself lost and confused. But Adam meets Eve (Alicia Silverstone). Eve and her gay best friend Troy (Dave Foley) adopt the manchild and introduce him to the pleasures and perils of life outside the shelter. Adam and Eve fall in love, of course, with the usual "boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl" complications.
Brendan Fraser seems to be type-cast as the "dopey good guy." This project could just have easily been "George of the Jungle Takes L. A." "Blast" tries to get a lot of mileage out of Adam's wide-eyed innocent response to all the things he's never seen or done. For example, when he sees his first black person, he shouts, "Oh my lucky stars! A Negro!" Fraser's amiability carries such jokes. The funniest moments, though, come from Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek. In the scenes showing the passage of time in the shelter, Calvin prefers his orderly underground world while Helen becomes an alcoholic, a fact to which Calvin and Adam are oblivious. These extremely conflicting reactions are played for comedy and have more bite than anything else in the movie.
This premise could have been used for effective satire on the 90's or the 50's or both. However, screenwriters Bill Kelly and Hugh Wilson ignore that potential and opt instead for light comedy in the fish-out-of-water vein. Pity.
Bottom line: Pleasant distraction that neither taxes nor stimulates the mind.
© 2000 Christian L. Pyle
Read my reviews and others at the Mad Review:
http://www.madreview.com/main.html
More on 'Blast From the Past'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
