a5c7b9f00b In a post-apocalyptic future ruled by the military, a group of renegade teenage orphans find a legendary orb, Bohdai, that can supposedly bring the rain back to dried up Earth.
In the future, a nuclear war has left the Earth as a desert wasteland where the ocean has dried up leaving the Earth as a vast desert landscape. Most of the water supplies are controlled by the elite corporation E-Protecorate, where the E-Protectcorate takes children away from their families and are forced to live in a orphanage, where they are to be trained as E-Police, the E-Protectcorate's security army led by the cruel commanding officer Grock. After playing a game of Skateball (Hockey on Rollerskates) against their rival team 'The Scorpions'. Daniel, the youngest member of the Solarbabies discovers a glowing orb from another galaxy called Bodahi in a mineshaft and Bodahi heals Daniel's deafness. The Solarbabies learn Bodahi has amazing powers. And the discovery of Bodahi convinces the Solarbabies to escape from the Orphange and fight back against the E-Protectcorate. Pursued by Grock, who is after Bodahi, The Solarbabies travel across the desert wasteland, where Bodhai is the key in their quest to defeat the E-Protectcorate and liberate the world from it's control.
This movies plot is simply horrible. However, the whole movie is just insanely random and great. You never truly know what is happening. People riding roller skates through the desert and playing a game called "SkateBall". There is a general that wears a blue M. Bison suit. Water is State-controlled. The world is a desert, and children live is camps to be "educated" to serve the Eco-Protectorate. Then Bodhai arrives - a being found by one of the children, Daniel. And that's when the story kicks into gear. The effects are a little on the cheesy side when compared to present day, but the story is there.<br/><br/>This movie was a true product of the 80's, the kind of "Mad Max Lite" for the kiddies to watch when the adults are in the next theater watching "Kramer vs Kramer." If you are a fan of the 80's movies, this will definitely put you in a nostalgic frame of mind. Jason Patric fills the role of the Patriarch and Jamie Gertz the Matriarch. But to the performances... Everyone of the kids but Jamie Gertz (who told her she could act?) were enjoyable enough very harmless. The soundtrack needs to be muted... awful. Lots of Roller Skating, I guess it was a thing at the time. Silly movie and predictable but harmless enough.<br/><br/>Overall rating: 6 out of 10.
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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.