However, these films, The Goonies included, also have the luxury of having some of the greatest film scores of all time and we all know that a movie isn't a movie unless the music is right. This is because the music makes the movie what it is, If The Goonies didn't have Dave Grusin's wonderful pirate like score, it might not be as fun, if E.T (1982) didn't have John Williams' fairytale music, it probably wouldn't be as exciting. Music makes the film what it is and gives it the nostalgia we all crave when someone tries to emulate those kinds of movies from the 1980s. Take Stranger Things for instance, it's a show that was made in invoke that feeling of nostalgia, to throw back to those 80s adventure movies and sci-fi movies and while it succeeds in great writing and performances, it gets the music wrong. According to Stranger Things, Synth scores are the what the 80s were about, this isn't the case, a synth score can elicit a nostalgia for the 1980s, but the films that it's meant to be giving homage to, never used Synth scores, What they have done is mixed in 80s family adventure and sci-fi with John Carpenter's electronic synth scores for horror and sci-fi aimed at an older, adult generation. Now i'm not having a pop at Stranger Things for going this route, for that show it works completely and sets it apart from other shows in the genre, what i'm merely pointing out is how the show homages the whole "Goonies" aesthetic and 80s adventure movies but doesn't use the kind of music, those movies are known for, big bombastic and wonderous, orchestral scores. No film since the 80s has captured that sense of wonder, not even Super 8 (2011) and that came pretty close but took it's self way too seriously but still managed to get the music spot on with Michael Giacchino's wonderful music. This brings me to RIM OF THE WORLD (2019) written by Zack Stentz, a writer who'd previously co-written both X-Men: First Class (2011) and Marvel's first god of thunder movie Thor (2011) and directed by....sigh....McG, a director known for being, well essentially a hack with a lot trash behind him from Charlies Angels (2000) and Netflix's recent YA sci-fi flick Uglies (2025) to some slightly better movies, but only slightly better, Terminator Salvation (2009) and American football drama, We Are Marshall (2006).
Rim Of The World wants so desperately to be the Goonies of Gen-Z but misses the point of those 80s family adventure movies. Those films were about fun, adventure and friendship with characters we could relate too, but here, the characters are just stereotypes of modern phone obsessed, nerdy, naught kids. It gets some elements of the friendship that evolves over the course of 3 days but for the most part, the characters are unlikeable with only one coming off as a character that would fit in well with the cast of The Goonies, that character being Alex, a shy, nervous nerdy kid, forced to go to camp for the summer after his father passes away, hoping it would bring him out of shell. He's the best character in the movie and the fact that the entire film is carried by this 13 year old kid, says something about how Zack Stentz fleshed out Alex in the screenplay, it's just a shame he didn't do that with rest of this kids. The worst of all is Dariush, a stereotype of the rich black kid who thinks he's a gangsta or Baller because he has cool, expensive shit. His constant gloating and flexing is massively off putting and its a disservice to Benjamin Flores Jr, the actor behind Dariush, as he does put in a fairly good performance. He comes across like a more foul mouthed version of Keenan Thompson from both Heavyweights (1995) and D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994). Then we have ZhenZhen, played by Miya Cech who from the start gets a barrage of racism thrown at her. Thats also one of the biggest issues with the film, the blatant racism is really obvious and really uncalled for especially considering its cast of kids. She's also stereotyped, the naughty rebellious Chinese girl who disobeys her strict father yada yada yada, it Mulan mate. Finally we get to probably the biggest stereotype of the film in Gabriel, the clearly latino character who's from a broken home and has escaped from juvie...fuck me, what shit is going on with this movie? What makes this even worse is Andrew Bachelor, most well know as Vine legend, King Batch who's career started after he would post 30 second clips to the now defunct precursor to TikTok app, Vine. Now I have nothing against Bach, loved his skits on Vine and have enjoyed his roles in other movies but again, the script has him hurling racist shit at Alex about being white. WTF?...
So the plot is the most basic plot known to man. Aliens invade and the kids have to get a key to a lab to be able to launch an attack on the alien invaders from space. Along the way they develop friendships, romances and grow as people, well Zhenzhen and Alex do, Stentz doesn't really know what to do with Dariush and Gabriel. I mean it ain't Stand By Me.... it's incredibly by the numbers. The film was made on a budget of between $15 and $19 million dollars, exceptionally low for a film that includes an alien invasion as a major plot device, so some things can be forgiven, however, considering this is a Netflix movie from only six years ago, a time when Netflix was on top and considering they just dropped $320 million on The Electric State, a film that has absolutely tanked, they could have spared a bit of extra cash to make sure the VFX were at least decent. Ive seen better CGI made on Blender. The CGI in this is unforgivable. Netflix released another Alien Invasion movie the same year called Extinction (2018), made for a budget of $20 million, from director Ben Young who had only one other feature film to his resume, he knew how to handle his budget and instead of opting for low res, under-rendered CGI, he went with costumes to a much better effect. Now considering McG has a somewhat extensive background in feature film making, you'd think he'd handle the budget better because there is no way in hell that $19million on the screen. The are no A-List stars in the movie, its clearly shot on the Universal backlot street and there are no real creatures, no real stakes to the film. So where did the budget go?
Now I want to go back to what I was talking about at the start, about the music... Rim Of The World has a score by prolific composer Bear McCreery, fresh off his work on The Walking Dead and other high budget TV productions. The in-demand composer knocks it out of the park with a score that harkens back to the music of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and Alan Silvestri. His score is absolutely brilliant and does invoke the feelings of watching The Goonies or The Last Starfighter. It brings so much to a film that really doesn't deserve a score as wonderful as McCreery's. Its a crying shame that it feels like, at a lot of points during the film, that its a score in search of the right movie. When the right movie gets the right soundtrack it can literally elevate a movie, it can make that film feel like something special, but here, in the case of Rim Of The World, the music feels like its the only one in the team actually trying to make something special.
Rim Of The World almost succeeds in replicating the adventure of The Goonies, but is let down by a lazy script full of inappropriate, sexual innuendos from 13 years olds, dialogue that shoe horns in movie references and ambition that far exceeds its budget. Had this movie been made with the goal of entertaining a family instead of horny 12 year old social media users who live only through 30 second comedy clips and sexual innuendos, and focused more on the innocence of early teens and childhood instead of the kids needing to prove they're men or women, and just leaned in more to the adventure and fun, Rim Of The World could have been a winner, instead, its just another in a long line of failed attempts to replicate the wonder and adventure the movies gave us in the 1980s....
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