Blast from the Past (film)

Infobox Film
name = Blast from the Past


caption = cinematic poster
director = Hugh Wilson
producer = Sunil Perkash
Claire Rudnick Polstein
Amanda Stern
writer = Bill Kelly
Hugh Wilson
starring = Brendan Fraser
Alicia Silverstone
Christopher Walken
Sissy Spacek
Dave Foley
Joey Slotnick
music = Steve Dorff
cinematography = José Luis Alcaine
editing = Don Brochu
distributor = New Line Cinema
released = January 27, 1999
runtime = 112 minutes
country = USA
language = English
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
amg_id = 1:176002
imdb_id = 0124298

"Blast from the Past" is a 1999 romantic comedy film starring Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone, Sissy Spacek, Christopher Walken, and Dave Foley.

Plot outline

Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) is a brilliant, eccentric, and paranoid Caltech nuclear physicist (see mad scientist), living the stereotypical happy 1960s life during the Cold War. His extreme fear of a nuclear holocaust leads him to build an enormous self-sustaining fallout shelter beneath his suburban San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles home. One night, while he and his pregnant wife, Helen, are entertaining guests, a family friend comes to inform him that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev are getting into a debate. The family turns on their television, and watch in horror. When the Cuban Missile Crisis begins, they ask their guests to leave, and they head down into the shelter. Meanwhile, a USAF pilot has engine problems with his F-86 Sabre; he is ordered to eject, believing his jet will crash into the Pacific Ocean. Just as they descend into the shelter, the plane veers off and crashes into the Webber household home, leaving their friends and family to believe the family has died. The family, having seen the resulting fireball just as they lock themselves in their shelter, believe that the unthinkable has happened and that they are the sole survivors of a nuclear war. The locks on the shelter are set for 35 years and cannot be overridden by anyone inside or outside the shelter - for "their own protection" according to Calvin Webber. They also realize they had accidentally left the radio upstairs; it is now destroyed.

A few days after the locks have been engaged, Mrs. Webber goes into labor, and gives birth to a baby boy, who they name Adam. During the roughly 35 years they are down in the shelter, the world above drastically changes, while the Webber's life remains frozen in 1962. Adam is taught in several languages, all school subjects, dance, boxing, and many other things. The family passes time watching black and white movies via a projector. Adam is given his father's baseball card collection, and shares in IBM, Polaroid, and AT&T.

In the present (which would have been October 1997, though this is not specifically stated in the film) the timer on the locks release, and Webber Sr. decides to check out the surroundings above the shelter, which has turned into a ghetto. He mistakes this for a post-apocalyptic world and wants his wife and grown son (Fraser) to stay in hiding, but suffers from heart pains. Adam, who is naïve but well-educated, is sent for supplies and help, thus beginning his adventures.

Much of the humor in the film is derived from his being unaccustomed to the lifestyle of the present (such as using the term negro, and believing "shit" is a French compliment), believing "gay" means happy, and finding awe in simple things of modernity. Early on, he meets Eve Rustikoff at a card store, where she works, and where he went to sell his father's classic baseball cards. She stops the store owner from ripping Adam off and is immediately fired. In exchange for a few of his cards, she agrees to help him with the supplies and his search for a "non-mutant" wife from Pasadena. Meanwhile, Adam meets Eve's homosexual roommate (Dave Foley), who offers advice and commentary as Adam and Eve fall in love.

Eventually, Adam's father and mother move into a home at the surface that their son has had constructed with the wealth he has acquired from selling stocks, which acquired great value from splits over the years. Only his father is informed that the catastrophe they went into seclusion for was in fact a plane crash, for fear his mother would be incredibly angry at her husband for her years of mistaken confinement. The film finishes with Adam's mother at peace with her newfound freedom from the shelter, Adam and Eve engaged to be married, while Calvin, certain that the "Commies" have faked the collapse of the Soviet Union, starts measuring for a new fallout shelter.

External links

*imdb title|id=0124298|title=Blast from the Past