The Rocketeer (on DVD)

The Rocketeer
[DVD Rocketeer] 

The Rocketeer is one of my all-time favorite films! It was released by Disney in 1991, and is a live-action adaptation of a popular series of comic books and graphic novels, created by writer/artist Dave Stevens in 1982. The comics pay homage to the style of serial adventure movies from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and the film captures the look and feel of that old-style of film-making while still putting a high-tech gloss on it. 1940s Test pilot Cliff Secord (William Campbell, in my favorite of all of his performances) comes into the possession of a backpack style flying rocket suit, being sought by Nazi agents. Together with the help of an eccentric engineer (Alan Arkin) and Cliff’s nightclub-singer girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), Cliff takes on a famous silver screen star (Timothy Dalton), who’s working with the Nazi’s to get back the missing rocketpack. The Rocketeer is filled with rollicking adventure, spectacular special effects and stunts, an endangered romance, singing and dancing, humor and clearly defined good guys and bad guys. And the soundtrack by James Horner is spectacular! I can’t recommend this one highly enough. The only disappointment is that The Rocketeer didn’t do well enough at the box office to generate one or more sequels, which were set up by the end of the movie.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Rocketeer Soundtrack, or any of the many The Rocketeer comic books and graphic novels available through our Hoopla downloadable service.] [The movie was also novelized in paperback by ace TV Tie-In writer Peter David, but that can be hard to track down.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official The Rocketeer Wikipedia page ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!