Solarbabies

Name: Solarbabies
Director: Alan Johnson
Released: 1986

Alan Johnson

1986

Synopsis

In a future in which most water has disappeared from the Earth, we find a group of children, mostly teenagers, who are living at an orphanage, run by the despotic rulers of the new Earth. The group in question plays a hockey based game on roller skates and is quite good. It has given them a unity that transcends the attempts to bring them to heel by the government. Finding an orb of special power, they find it has unusual effects on them. They escape from the orphanage (on skates) and try to cross the wasteland looking for a place they can live free as the storm-troopers search for them and the orb.

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Cast

Recommendations

50
Chicago Sun-Times
This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.
50
Miami Herald
Richard Jordan, who can be uniquely menacing (see: The Mean Season, Flash of Green) is here reduced to lampooning himself in leatherette storm-trooper garb. Charles Durning, looking wonderfully rumpled as the warden of the orphanage, does as little as possible in the heat. The skating stunts are routine. [2 Dec 1986, p.B4]
30
The New York Times
There are times when it appears that Solarbabies might be sending itself up. All of the time, it's an embarrassment.
30
Los Angeles Times
Instead of coming to a high, flavorful boil, the whole thing quickly overcooks and begins evaporating into hot air.
30
Time Out
All-purpose sci-fi rip-off, set on a planet where evil Jordan lords it over a cadre of roller-skating minor brat-packers who call on ancient mystical force - 'Bodhi' - to escape his sway. A misbegotten Brooksfilm which sank without trace in the US.
30
Washington Post
Solarbabies is a hilariously bad movie that doesn't make much sense and isn't much good when it does. Director Alan Johnson has stolen most of his visual ideas from Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner") and George Miller ("The Road Warrior"), and he hasn't the slightest idea how to direct actors. That said, the movie has its campy pleasures.
25
Chicago Tribune
Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.
25
Christian Science Monitor
The movie's most original features are the awfulness of the dialogue and the hamminess of Richard Jordan's performance as a Nazilike policeman. He seems to have given up on the project long before director Alan Johnson ran out of film. [28 Nov 1986, p.39]