Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) is a brilliant and eccentricCaltechnuclear physicist, living during the Cold War. His extreme fear of a nuclear holocaust leads him to build an enormous self-sustaining fallout shelter beneath his suburban home. One night, while he and his pregnant wife, Helen (Sissy Spacek), are entertaining guests, a family friend comes to inform him that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev are getting into a debate. The family turns on their television, and watch in horror. When the Cuban Missile Crisis
begins, they ask their guests to leave, and they head down into the
shelter. Meanwhile, a pilot is having problems with his plane; he is
ordered to eject, believing his jet will crash into the Pacific Ocean.
Just as the Webbers descend into the shelter, the plane veers off and
crashes into the Webber home, leaving their friends and family to
believe the family has died. The family, having seen the resulting
fireball just as they lock themselves in their shelter, believe that the
unthinkable has happened and that they are the sole survivors of a nuclear war.
The locks on the shelter are set for 35 years and cannot be overridden
by anyone inside or outside the shelter — for "their own protection"
according to Calvin Webber.
A few days after the locks have been engaged, Mrs. Webber goes into labor
and gives birth to a baby boy, whom they name Adam. During the roughly
35 years they are down in the shelter, the world above drastically
changes, while the Webbers' life remains frozen in 1962. Adam is taught
in several languages, all school subjects, dance, boxing, and many other things. The family passes time watching black and white movies and kinescopes of television programs via a projector rigged to a television. Adam is given his father's baseball card collection and shares in various companies.
In the present the timer on the locks releases, and Calvin decides to
check out the surroundings above the shelter (in full protective gear),
which has turned into a ghetto. He mistakes this for a post-apocalyptic world and wants his wife and grown son (Brendan Fraser)
to stay in hiding, but suffers from chest pain. Adam, who is naïve but
well-educated, is sent for supplies and help, thus beginning his
adventures.
Much of the humor in the film is derived from his being unaccustomed to the lifestyle of the present (such as using the term negro, and believing "shit" is a French compliment), believing "gay" means happy, and finding awe in simple things of modernity. Early on, he meets Eve Rustikoff (Alicia Silverstone)
at a card store, where she works, and where he went to sell his
father's classic baseball cards. She stops the store owner from ripping
Adam off and is immediately fired. Adam asks Eve to take him to the
Holiday Inn, in exchange for a baseball card, worth 4,000 dollars. The
next morning, at the Holiday Inn, Eve comes to give back the card to
Adam, and after a brief conversation, Eve informs Adam that she has to
look for a new job. In exchange for $1,000 a week, Adam asks Eve to work
for him, she agrees to help him buy the supplies and his search for a
"non-mutant" wife from Pasadena. Meanwhile, Adam meets Eve's homosexual housemate and best friend, Troy (Dave Foley), who offers advice and commentary as Adam and Eve fall in love.
Adam continually impresses both Eve and Troy with his array of
talents including an energetic swing dance that garners the attention of
Sophie, who starts flirting with the naive Adam, spurning Eve when he
goes home with her. Adam returns later, having admitted to rejecting
Sophie's advances and tells Eve about his past. The sheer notion of the
story scares Eve into thinking he is a sociopath or psychotic and delusional
and she contacts a medical institution to have him committed, which he
escapes. After Adam is gone, Troy and Eve find that he has "millions
upon millions, upon millions of dollars" worth of stocks, and the
lifestyle they find he has been living seems straight out of the 1960's.
Eventually, Eve finds Adam and the two make up, Adam finally
introducing Eve to his sheltered parents.
At the conclusion of the movie, Adam's father and mother move into a
home at the surface that their son has had constructed with the wealth
he has acquired from selling stocks, which acquired great value from
splits over the years. Only his father is informed that the catastrophe
they went into seclusion for was in fact a plane crash, for fear his
mother would be incredibly angry at her husband for her years of
mistaken confinement.
The film finishes with Adam's mother at peace with her newfound
freedom from the shelter, Adam and Eve engaged to be married, while
Calvin, certain that the "Commies" have faked the collapse of the Soviet Union, starts pacing out measurements for a new fallout shelter.
The film received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes the film had an overall score of 59% of the comments positive. on Metacritic had a score of 48% with a 9.0 / 10 "Mixed or average reviews". Roger Ebert
gave the film 3 out of 4 stars saying "the movie is funny and
entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it
tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an
original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly
undercurrents."[1]
Blast from the Past opened in North American theaters on
February 12, 1999 and took in $7,771,066 earning it 5th place at the box
office for the weekend.
