#Batteries not included movie

Ultimately, the residents want to save this building because it is significant to them for intangible reasons.

The broader moral lesson to the story is that buildings have cultural and spiritual value to the people who live in them, and that alone makes them worth saving.

#Batteries not included movie

And the movie is a love letter to the kinds of places that bring communities together. The old tenement building is the real hero of this movie. It is about how communities define their love of home and protect that home in the face of external pressure. By introducing the element of the supernatural, Batteries is making a political statement on real preservation policy.ĭespite what some critics say, this film isn’t really about space aliens or sci-fi. But here’s the thing: this plot device is necessitated by the failures of real-world archetypes, including historic preservationists. We are left with the unfortunate conclusion that the community’s success is the sole result of supernatural power. The film doesn’t leave much potential for a more metaphorical interpretation of the aliens because the ending is such a literal application of the deus ex machina plot device. There is some fairness to this criticism. The implication is that the humans are too weak to save themselves. Kempley was particularly turned off by the way in which the aliens act as divine saviors who intercede in the human’s lives. At the time of its release, film critics Gene Siskel and Rita Kempley believed this was a tired trope that made for a boring movie. In the final climax of the film, a hired arsonist blows up the building but the aliens reconstruct it back to former glory, thus prompting its permanent preservation.īy returning to the theme of benevolent alien high jinks, it’s clear that executive producer Steven Spielberg was cashing in on the popularity of movies like E.T. The aliens (small UFO-type machines) are capable of magically fixing anything and start helping to repair the old building while bringing the tenants together as a community. Just when all hope seems lost, space aliens arrive to help. The neighbors are terrorized by a big-shot developer and his goons who are trying to tear down the tenement to make way for a new high-rise building. The plot revolves around a group of people who live in an old tenement building in New York City that’s slated for demolition. I loved this movie as a kid, but recently I re-watched it and discovered some valuable lessons for contemporary preservationists.ĭirected by Matthew Robbins and starring the legendary husband and wife acting duo, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Batteries is an unusual movie. *batteries not included(1987, “Batteries”) was not a blockbuster, but it did have the distinction of being one of the first films to feature historic preservation as a central plot point. Preservation at the Movies, Part 1: “*batteries not included”