Bill & Ted's Excellent AdventureEven the dopiest of slackers have unrealized potential, and can speak simple truths like wisdom from the mouths of babes. (No, not that kind of babe.) Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a comedy about two high school skater/metalheads--Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves)--who are on the verge of flunking their history class. Little do they know that their music--or rather, what their music will become--forms the foundation for a utopia seven hundred years in the future. To ensure Bill and Ted pass history, Rufus (George Carlin) gifts them with a time-travelling phone booth, so that they can become history.
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For a film which deals in heavy doses of implausibility, one of the biggest head-scratchers is how these two simpletons could pave the way for a future free from poverty and war, where everyone is "excellent to one another". Bill and Ted are--at their core--pretty okay dudes, who are so good-natured as to be almost completely guileless. They represent a goodness that Rufus sees in the future, which comes from their overall positive attitude toward life and their unselfish worldview. They are not deep thinkers, but every so often, they comprehend the various paradoxes in which they find themselves. For example, they are convinced that in order for their band, "Wyld Stallyns", to become a hit, they need a promotional video to attract famed guitarist Eddie Van Halen to join their band, which will circumvent the problem that they don't know how to play guitar. In their eyes, to learn how to play guitar, they need Eddie Van Halen, but to attract the guitar hero, they need to show that they can play guitar. This is one of many "closed loop" logical paradoxes which adds uncharacteristic complexity to what is superficially a stoner buddy movie. Also consider the surprising attention to detail when Bill and Ted travel back in time to abduct (er, recruit) Socrates (Tony Steedman) for their class presentation, and the Ancient Greeks are actually speaking Ancient Greek. (Credit to an excellent philosophy professor of mine, Justin Miller, for pointing it out.) Bill and Ted have Rufus to thank for cluing them into their significance to the future of mankind, who introduces the film like the Chorus from a Shakespeare history play. Rufus also fills a similar role to Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life; he is "sent" to lead someone with a higher calling back onto the path of righteousness. Bill and Ted witness who they are destined to become after a detour takes them not into the past, but into the future, where they are revered like messiahs. Bill and Ted never let this overwhelming destiny get to their heads or intimidate them, though; their foremost concerns are more localized. Bill is dealing with--as he puts it to none other than Sigmund Freud (Rod Loomis)--"a minor Oedipal complex", due to his dad (J. Patrick McNamara) marrying a woman Bill's age named Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton). Ted is under the proverbial gun when his police officer dad (Hal Landon Jr.) threatens to ship him off to military school in Alaska, which (unbeknownst to him) would threaten all life on Earth. Bill and Ted's immediate concern is not global harmony, but avoiding dropping out of high school. Because they are figures on a much larger, cosmic stage, and because they confront paradoxes in time travel and reality itself, they share elements in common with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" by Tom Stoppard.
To say that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is akin to reading the "Cliff Notes" of history isn't even close, given the predominance of anachronisms and its interpretations of historic "dead dudes". To be fair, who knows if Napoleon (Terry Camilleri) wouldn't have loved water slides or ice cream, or if Joan of Arc (Jane Wiedlin) wouldn't have loved aerobics. The radical duo's method of travelling through the "Circuits of History" is via a vintage telephone booth (with a surprising amount of room on the inside) that has a TV antenna on top. (Only now that "Doctor Who" has made a much larger international splash can comparisons be made between the phone booth and the TARDIS.) This unorthodox method of time travel (is there an orthodox method?) also draws comparisons to Back to the Future; although Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure boasts more air guitar, the Oedipal complex remains. The phone booth is doubly out of place today, considering their virtual absence in our society, not to mention in centuries past, where it is decried as the instrument of witches during the Dark Ages. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure suggests that there are "rules" to time travel, such as how the "present" is always in motion, even when Bill and Ted jaunt from places like the Wild West to bag Billy the Kid (Dan Shor) or lure Genghis Khan (Al Leong) away from his pillaging with a Twinkie. (He loves the sugar rush.) Bill and Ted eventually figure out how they can use their sophisticated phone booth as a proverbial deus ex machina, with moments of serendipity that presage films like Groundhog Day. Like many high school kids, Bill and Ted's concerns are as simple as they are. Even in the midst of their quest across history to collect famous figures, they are not above flirting with "historical babes" like Princess Joanna (Diane Franklin) and Princess Elizabeth (Kimberley LaBelle). Like many kids their age, they have a lot of potential they have yet to realize if they can only deal with the small stuff along the way that doesn't seem so small at the time.
Recommended for: Fans of a delightfully absurd comedy that has thrived as a cult hit due to its unusual premise, simple protagonists, and wacky portrayals of figures from history; Abraham Lincoln (Robert V. Barron) belting out, "party on, dudes!" springs to mind. One also has to wonder how many employees at the Circle K in San Dimas, California had to endure being asked "when did the Mongols rule China?" after the release of this film.
To say that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is akin to reading the "Cliff Notes" of history isn't even close, given the predominance of anachronisms and its interpretations of historic "dead dudes". To be fair, who knows if Napoleon (Terry Camilleri) wouldn't have loved water slides or ice cream, or if Joan of Arc (Jane Wiedlin) wouldn't have loved aerobics. The radical duo's method of travelling through the "Circuits of History" is via a vintage telephone booth (with a surprising amount of room on the inside) that has a TV antenna on top. (Only now that "Doctor Who" has made a much larger international splash can comparisons be made between the phone booth and the TARDIS.) This unorthodox method of time travel (is there an orthodox method?) also draws comparisons to Back to the Future; although Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure boasts more air guitar, the Oedipal complex remains. The phone booth is doubly out of place today, considering their virtual absence in our society, not to mention in centuries past, where it is decried as the instrument of witches during the Dark Ages. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure suggests that there are "rules" to time travel, such as how the "present" is always in motion, even when Bill and Ted jaunt from places like the Wild West to bag Billy the Kid (Dan Shor) or lure Genghis Khan (Al Leong) away from his pillaging with a Twinkie. (He loves the sugar rush.) Bill and Ted eventually figure out how they can use their sophisticated phone booth as a proverbial deus ex machina, with moments of serendipity that presage films like Groundhog Day. Like many high school kids, Bill and Ted's concerns are as simple as they are. Even in the midst of their quest across history to collect famous figures, they are not above flirting with "historical babes" like Princess Joanna (Diane Franklin) and Princess Elizabeth (Kimberley LaBelle). Like many kids their age, they have a lot of potential they have yet to realize if they can only deal with the small stuff along the way that doesn't seem so small at the time.
Recommended for: Fans of a delightfully absurd comedy that has thrived as a cult hit due to its unusual premise, simple protagonists, and wacky portrayals of figures from history; Abraham Lincoln (Robert V. Barron) belting out, "party on, dudes!" springs to mind. One also has to wonder how many employees at the Circle K in San Dimas, California had to endure being asked "when did the Mongols rule China?" after the release of this film.