Film Review – Life After the Navigator

Two years ago, director Lisa Downs dipped her toe in the warm waters of nostalgia with the documentary “Life After Flash,” which detailed the career of “Flash Gordon” star Sam Jones and the making of the 1980 cult masterpiece. Downs offered a compelling overview of Jones’s life after his most successful acting assignment, working to juggle a story of personal evolution with the nuts and bolts of “Flash Gordon,” trying to give fans everything they’ve been searching for. It was an intimate offering, and now Downs is looking to turn such filmmaking into a business with “Life After the Navigator,” which details the monumental life challenges actor Joey Cramer encountered after appearing in 1986’s “Flight of the Navigator.” With Cramer, Downs has more of a challenge when it comes to achieving tonal balance, dealing the highs of a strange but fascinating Disney release and the lows of drug addiction and crime, with Cramer struggling to survive after experiencing early success as a child actor. “Life After the Navigator” is an easy fit for Downs’s series, but it’s also a tale that doesn’t always deal smoothly with the extreme ways of the subject. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com