Justin’s rating: Beam me up, Chewbacca!

Justin’s review: For a good while now, I’ve been drooling at the thought of going through this five-hour documentary on ’80s scifi films. I don’t think there was a finer decade for original and envelope-pushing scifi than this decade, and so many of my favorite movies from that genre emerged over those 10 years.

In Search of Tomorrow is a documentary love letter to the genre, its creators, and the fans who have kept the love for it alive. This is expressed in a year-by-year deep dive into many of the scifi movies, both great and obscure, that came out in theaters from 1980 to 1989.

Helping with the commentary are interviews with many of the now-aging stars, including Sean Young (Blade Runner), Peter Weller (Robocop), Nancy Allen (ditto), Jenette Goldstein (Aliens), Dee Wallace (E.T.), Billy Dee Williams (Return of the Jedi), Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), Walter Koening (Star Trek II), Catherine Mary Stewart (The Last Starfighter), and so many more. There are also a few famous directors, such as Shane Black, Ivan Reitman, Nicholas Meyer, and Joe Dante, who are more than happy to provide their takes.

However, what’s notably lacking from the start is a central narrator to tie everything together. Don’t get me wrong — In Search of Tomorrow is wonderfully edited, but a project of this size really did need a host to take us through it.

The structure here is pretty simple: Year by year, film by film, many scifi projects of note gets a few minutes in the spotlight. If the actors or crew from that project were available to talk about it, they do; if not, then other actors or film critics share a few thoughts while clips from the movie play on the screen. It’s definitely a march, one by one, through a decade of scifi visions.

And yes, it needs five hours to deal with it all — and it’s not even close to every scifi flick that I could name!

I appreciated the passion that everyone shares for these movies instead of derision, and the extra little behind-the-scenes stories taught me a thing or two that I never knew. It’s a whole bunch of people (some of whom are getting quite up there in age, I might add) nerding out over geeky flicks.

Some of the interviewees are better than others, naturally. There’s this one futurist-predicting guy who gave me the serious creeps each and every time he was on camera. And I felt so bad for Joe Dante, because it felt like all of his stories were, “I poured my heart into this movie and it didn’t get studio support and bombed. Well, on to the next one!”

This format is occasionally interrupted for an examination of a broader topic, such as the fear of nuclear war, visual FX, music, practical creature effects, the space shuttle, or the imagination of world building. Part of me wonders if it might have been wiser to do a documentary exploring these themes without the sometimes-tedious movie-by-movie crawl.

But if this is your genre and time period — and you already know the answer to that — In Search of Tomorrow is a worthwhile watch for two reasons. First, it’s a total nostalgia trip that gives respect to a very specific subset of ’80s movies. And second, you’re going to walk away with at least a few new film recommendations that you may have overlooked in the past.