A piece of retro science fiction, seemingly rooted up from an early-days issue of Amazing Stories, and set appropriately in the very period, or at the very end of the very period: 1938. You have for starters your straight-arrow hero, a daredevil aviator with never-combed hanks of hair framing his chiselled face. You — or rather, he — has his slightly comical (i.e., hard-of-hearing) sidekick and father figure, an aviator in his own day and an ace mechanic in the hero's. He — the hero, not the sidekick — has also his girlfriend, an aspiring Hollywood starlet who serves none of the purposes of an ordinary girlfriend, but exclusively the purpose of a girlfriend in a boys' adventure yarn: that of getting kidnapped and rescued. And then you have your inventor (none other than Howard Hughes), your gadget (a "rocket pack" worn in the manner of a parachute), your spy, your gangsters, your Nazis, your Feds. The Indiana Jones films will come to mind, followed (or perhaps preceded) by those of Batman, Dick Tracy, others. One small difference between this one and those others is that it is played, not exactly straight, but certainly straighter. And by the kind of paradox that eludes the dull-minded and literal-minded manipulator, patronizer, panderer, exploiter (synonyms for Steven Spielberg), it is the straighter treatment that stands the better chance of being at the same time the funnier and the more exciting. The Rocketeer has all the production values you could sanely want (and, in truth, a little bit more), but once you get past the static ingredients and the Industrial Light and Magic displays — once you get past the things, in other words, that Batman or Dick Tracy stop at — it is also a thorough job of filmmaking, a putting of things in motion and keeping them there, a connecting of such things with logic and foreshadowing, a tight regulating of tone and tempo, a holding of something in reserve. Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton, Paul Sorvino; directed by Joe Johnston. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd