Flight Of The Navigator 1986 Story by Mark H Baker, screenplay by Michael Burton and Matt MacManus, directed by Randal Kleiser. That's a badly painted poster.
David is a 12 year old boy who falls down a ravine in the woods, when he awakes it's 8 years later and everyone is older but him. He wonders home to find strangers in his house. David freaks out, the cops come, they take him to his now older parents. David freaks out some more and they take him to the hospital for observation. No one can make head nor tail of the situation.
At the same time NASA captures a downed alien spaceship and tries to study it. Eventually NASA finds the connection to David and scans his brain, weird alien writing pops up on the screen and no one knows what that's about. The head scientist wants to scan his brain and David's parents hope he can do some good. David starts telepathically communicating with the alien spaceship, he escapes and locates the spaceship. Once he enters, David finds a powerful AI behind the controls. Paul Reubens plays the IA, occasionally his Pee-Wee Herman voice comes out of the AI. David calls him Max.
Max's memory has been damaged by contact with some power lines and some of his star charts have been corrupted. Lucky for Max the charts are in David's head. Max tells David that he is on a mission to study alien life, he picked David that night and took him to a planet 2.2 light years away from Earth. The trip each way was only a couple of hours for the ship but 4 years had past on Earth. The alien scientists study David and determine humans don't use much of their brains. They pack David's noggin with data and send him back to Earth. They had determined that it was unlikely David would survive the standard trip back in time to return the specimens to the moment they were taken so he's left in the forest.
Max convinces David to let him download the charts he needs and during the transfer the normally straight forward AI takes on some of David thoughts and becomes a bit more human. NASA is on their tail but the incredible spaceship doesn't give them a chance to catch up. David determines he wouldn't like staying in the present and gets Max to take him back in time. David wakes up in the woods again but this time he's back in his own time and his family isn't any older than they should be.
I hadn't seen this Disney film since it came out but I had bought a two dollar used copy a couple of years ago. It's been languishing on the Too Be Watched Shelf all this time. Today was it's lucky day, now it can go rest, it's job done. I thought it was OK, nothing to exciting but entertaining still, I wouldn't get rid of the DVD now, I might want to watch it again. It also makes he want to go find a copy of Explorers.
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