Just like The Princess Bride and The Breakfast Club, there are people in my generation who stand aghast when you tell them that you haven't seen this film. Though I suppose I do the same when someone tells me they've not seen Alien. Such was a conversation in a pub last week that lead to a friend of mine buying a DVD of BATEA (can I use this acronym?) just so we could watch it. The risk with these things is that the joy is in the nostalgia, and that by coming to it fresh, as an adult, 25 years after it was made, you lose all the context within which your peers elevated the film on to such a pedestal. I was very aware that for the people I was watching it with last night, BATEA is something of a Pythonesque sacred text, complete with context-dependent quotes that will have those in the know creasing up with laughter. I was very worried that I would offend people if I didn't like it!
Thankfully I was in luck. At no point in BATEA could anyone think that they're watching anything other than a manic stoner comedy where nothing is meant to make sense, and the point is to laugh at the absurdity of it all. The plot is brilliantly insane. Two slackers in late 1980s Southern California are in fact somehow the inspiration for the entire future of mankind. Therefore people from the future travel back in time from the year 2600ish to help them pass their history test, therefore preventing them from flunking out of school. To do this, they go on a time travelling adventure, collecting famous people from history and bringing them to the present so that they can parade them in front of the school and get an A+. What could be simpler?
Looking at it 25 years on, what follows is a cultural tour of an era and a way of life that alongside Wayne's World defined slackerism in the 1990s. The most obvious part the way that Bill and Ted speak, with all those "Whoah dude"s and references to contemporary rock. My personal favourite is how they seem to dumb down half of what they say, while a moment later they'll use weird flowery language to describe something simple - eg "we will flunk out most heinously" or "we will have a most triumphant time". It's almost medieval.
As far as downsides go, the film feels very padded out towards the end. There's only so many places they can time travel to and not reel out the same jokes, so when they run out of material they end up running around the present day trying to keep all the historical figures out of trouble at the mall. The script unnecessarily ties itself in knots, but then gets itself out of them by implying that Bill and Ted will simply travel back in time after the film's finished and fix it all - which is either brilliant or a cop out depending on how harsh you're feeling. Feels a bit like they were contractually obligated to get 90 minutes of running time out of the film, and so added a bunch of slapstick sequences to make it just long enough before calling on time travel to resolve everything. Lazy yes; but funny enough that it can be forgiven.
And that's the point isn't it? That it's funny? No matter that the camera loses focus a couple of times, regardless of how ropey the drawn-on special effects look, however terrible Keanu Reeves' hair is or how dated some of the clothes appear or how out of place the weird slapstick sequence is in which Napoleon Bonaparte bloody loves water flumes (seriously) - ultimately Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is definitely funny. Plus it has George Carlin in it. Win.
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