Friday Film - The Goonies (1985)
There are some films you happen upon while surfing the multitude of channels on your Sky Box. As you make good your escape from almost anything that could be termed ‘reality TV’, there’s always a chance you’ll land on a film you’ve seen dozens of times before, yet still find yourself leaving it on and if you’re paying attention, you’ll see another layer you didn’t notice the previous times you watched it.
The Goonies is a total classic. Despite being set stateside, it captures a universal spirit of adventure we can all get behind. There was a time when being a child meant leaving the house in the morning, disappearing for several hours and returning home with a grazed knee and stories. Nobody knew exactly where you'd been, and provided you arrived home before it got dark, nobody seemed particularly bothered. Life seemed safer back then.
The Goonies takes this approach to childhood freedom and pushes it to its logical conclusion, involving pirate treasure, underground tunnels, organised crime and a large man called Sloth.
Released in 1985 and directed by Richard Donner, the film follows a group of children from Astoria, Oregon, who discover an old treasure map and set off on an adventure that makes your average Duke of Edinburgh expedition look like a supervised visit to the garden centre.
Their neighbourhood is threatened by redevelopment, their families face losing their homes, and the only apparent solution involves finding the lost fortune of a seventeenth-century pirate called One-Eyed Willy.
Obviously.
What's particularly brilliant about The Goonies is that its characters look exactly like ordinary American children from the mid-eighties. Nobody appears to have been styled by a fashion editor. Their clothes are a mixture of sportswear, denim, colourful windbreakers and whatever happened to be available in their bedrooms that morning.
Mikey's yellow rain jacket is particularly good, while Data's gadget-covered outfit suggests somebody who's spent rather too much time studying the contents of a Radio Shack catalogue.
The clothing reflects a period when outdoor equipment was becoming increasingly visible in everyday American life. Lightweight synthetic jackets, trainers and practical backpacks were no longer exclusively associated with hiking or camping. They were simply things people wore.
And the film is all the better for it.
Astoria itself deserves a mention. Situated near the mouth of the Columbia River, the Oregon town provides a wonderfully atmospheric setting of wooden houses, steep streets, coastal weather and dense greenery. The surrounding Pacific Northwest landscape looks exactly like the sort of place where you might reasonably expect to discover a forgotten pirate ship. There is also a faint whiff of the combustible relationship between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, painting the main protagonists as underdogs, which only helps you root for them.
The film subsequently became so closely associated with Astoria that fans began making pilgrimages to its filming locations. The Goonies house remains one of the town's best-known landmarks, although visitors should remember that it's a private residence. Don’t be rocking up in your hawaiian shirt doing truffle shuffles.
If you’re of a certain age and you’ve got your own kids, nieces and nephews, this is a perfect leveller. They want to watch Spiderman, you think it’s pathetic. You suggest this and hand them their new favourite film without them knowing it. It's adventure in its purest, and possibly most irresponsible, form and it’s relatable to most people no matter what age they are.
But there's something worth remembering about the excitement of exploring somewhere simply because you don't know what's around the corner.
The Goonies is a film about friendship, imagination and the sort of freedom that becomes increasingly difficult to recreate as you get older.
It's also a reminder that you don't necessarily need expensive outdoor equipment to have an adventure.
One of our taglines references Adventure in Ordinary places. If there’s one film that does that, it’s The Goonies.
