Happy Monday everyone, welcome back to another issue of Barrón’s Guide to Everything. This week I’ll be talking about The Goonies and Finding Ohana- Netflix’s attempt to recreate a cult classic, and why you should watch the latter if you’re feeling nostalgic. Now, it’s a little unfair comparing these two films, given just how far cinema has come since 1985. But it’s art, so everything is fair game.
Finding Ohana was just released on the 29th of January via Netflix, and it’s slowly getting some traction via positive word of mouth. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s every bit deserving of the praise it’s receiving, even if it’s obviously a love letter to its predecessor. My hot take? Without the rose-tinted lenses of childhood nostalgia, Finding Ohana completely blows One-eyed Willie’s ship out of the water. I’m not just going from memory here either, I went out of my way to watch both films this week to solidify my feelings on the matter and if you take nothing else away from this newsletter, just remember Finding Ohana is more fun.
That’s not to say it’s perfect, just better than a film from thirty-six years ago. As far as full disclosure goes, neither of the two could hold my complete attention as an adult viewer. I found myself stopping to eat or check social media during both, but The Goonies felt so much longer, despite having the shorter run time. The quality of the editing in The Goonies did not do it any favors either. You can see what I call “the echoes of the artifice” all over the place in that film. Let me explain.
Sometimes, while enjoying a piece of fiction, you stumble upon a residual fragment of unpolished work. This isn’t like noticing an actor trying not to laugh or that Julia Roberts goes from holding a pancake to a croissant during the breakfast scene in Pretty Woman. Those are just editing mistakes. What I’m talking about, are moments where the final cut of a scene tells its own story, one about what was going on behind the camera. You see, in post, there’s a technique called additional dialogue replacement or ADR for short. It’s where they bring an actor into a recording studio and have them mimic their own delivery of a line or record a new one instead. Anytime you hear an actor say something but can’t see their lips, it’s probably ADR, which can be really effective in the editing process for adding information that benefits the audience. When you see a lot of it or hear a lot of it in this case, it can mean they changed a lot of the story after filming- and it is rampant in the first half of The Goonies. This tells me the vision for The Goonies was flimsy at best and explains a lot of the nonsense dialogue and scenes that go nowhere.
In sharp contrast, while Finding Ohana has its share of wtf moments, they feel a lot more intentional. It’s campy but self-aware enough to not let things linger before snapping back to a more grounded reality. It manages to keep a lot of the same beats as its predecessor, without getting lost in its own padded run time and gives us a good reason to care about whether or not the protagonists succeed. It also has the wherewithal to explain its own logical inconsistencies and a lot of attention to detail is given regarding island culture and ethnic experiences. Things like having a father figure slice a piece of fruit for you as a sign of affection, or the not-so-subtle disconnect that comes from not speaking the language of your ancestors. It’s real authentic stuff. The portrayal of the Night Marchers is a fairly accurate one from my understanding as well, though there are different interpretations of the legend- some say you only survive an encounter with the Night Marchers by soiling yourself out of respect for their martial prowess, or that their feet don’t actually touch the ground, whether or not they march too or from the ocean is also debated, but the inclusion of modern-day warriors was a nice touch. Also, speaking as someone who picked up a little Hawaiian because of his appearance, I laughed entirely too hard at Pili learning Spanish because she got tired of explaining she’s not Puerto Rican.
Still, while I will go as far as saying that Finding Ohana is a more polished version of The Goonies, I won’t say it’s a completely painless experience. Ioane, the older brother, is an absolute tool for the entirety of the movie, and the fact that he and Hana end up together despite this pisses me right the fuck off. (note: my non-existent editors are telling me I only get one F-Bomb a month and I’m comfortable using it here) I know that the Suspension Bridge Effect is a real thing, and it could be argued that’s the explanation here, especially since there’s an actual suspension bridge, but she’s too good for him and I will die on this hill. He’s the single worst part about the whole thing in much the same way Chunk is the worst part of The Goonies, but Chunk is at least polarizing. You either love Chunk for his over-the-top idiocy and “fat-kid” status or you hate him for it. Ioane, however, is the distillation of every negative male teenager trope, and the one scene they include to try and explain his crap attitude doesn’t make him all that sympathetic. If his life had a face, I’d probably punch it in the balls.
To say nothing of the child acting, which is particularly bad at some points, and while it was cute that Pili used boxes of Spam to reach the pedals of the family car, I really can’t suspend enough disbelief to get past her not wrecking the thing. The stealing a car sequence is also especially annoying when you realize Casper could have called in a favor from Hana or Ryan to get them to that part of the island safely. The movie also does a running bit where they show us what might have happened in the past in the same style as Drunk History, which is to say we see the reenactment with the voices dubbed over by the kids and it gets real old, real quick.
To be fair, these aspects of the movie, while annoying, aren’t as bad as the crap The Goonies tries to get away with, and you can at least say that the comedic beats actually land in Finding Ohana. I got a good chuckle out of a couple of the lines even days later but struggled to smile even nostalgically during my Goonies rewatch. To boot, Finding Ohana has a lot more heart to it. We spend significantly more time learning about the reason to go on a dangerous treasure hunt and far less time on wacky comic relief and do-nothing plot points. Although both of the aforementioned are still present, they’re never the focus. It’s instead made clear to us that family, while sometimes painful and complicated, is worth risking your life over. This raw emotionality is carried almost entirely by Kelly Hu’s performance as Leilani. The “make it right” scene between Leilani and her father was excellently done, and yes, left me a little misty-eyed. It was good enough for me to wish we spent more time in the hospital and less on the hunt for a legendary treasure.
Look, it’s easy to write Finding Ohana off as a Goonies rip-off or even as a modern retelling. But there’s more to it than that. When you hold the two up next to each other, yes you can see that one only exists because of the other, but the theme of Finding Ohana is reflected even in its nature as an homage. At its core is a very relatable story about heritage and reclaiming your roots to handle the unknown of the future. Likewise, it uses the same visual language and sometimes the actual language of its ancestor to do something at once familiar and new. “The roots are stronger than you think, and so are you.”
-C