When Bill & Ted Face the Music was released in 2020, as a completist, I realized that I would have to rewatch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey because too much time had passed for me to accurately maintain any mental continuity and integrity in recalling the storylines and truly appreciate the latest installment of the franchise. Unfortunately the pandemic’s effects has kept me so busy that it is hard to even watch one television show episode, forget three movies in a row, but I somehow set aside enough energy and time to do it in chronological order.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is about two teenage boys who must successfully complete a history report so Ted’s father does not separate them by sending Ted to military school. An emissary from the future delivers a time machine so they can experience history for themselves and stay together thus saving the future. The main reason that I wanted to see any of these movies is because they star Keanu Reeves.
Revisiting Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a very different experience from watching it soon after the time that it was released, 1989. I was really struck with how fundamentally polite, respectful and decent these two teenage boys were. Bill and Ted are fairly wholesome, decent and innocent. Maybe it was unrealistic then, but it underscores the general vibe of the movie: to be excellent to each other.
In retrospect, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure seems to decry toxic masculinity. When they are catapulted into the past, they are self-aware enough and completely unashamed that they are unable to fight. Ted, the son of a cop, understandably equates military school with the death of his identity. Yes, the movie is about two kids that appear to be intellectually dumb, but it also seems to be a severe critique of how history elevates predominantly bellicose figures, but when transported to our time, the consumer society reduces these historical greats into people like the titular characters: mischievous misfits out of tune with regular society.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure seems to ask the question: what do people who are great and change the course of history look like? It is simultaneously a condemnation and commendation of society. The film seems to suggest that our traditional view of greatness in the contemporary US is virtually impossible, but it also democratizes what greatness can look like in a society like ours by elevating friendship, decency and good naturedness. If you prefer to view the world through a jaundiced eye, it is also a sign of the downfall of humanity by reassuring ignorant goofball every men, i.e. the possible target audience for this film, that they are great, and with time, people will truly appreciate how special they are instead of calling them out for their shortcomings. Given that I lived through the era of the elevation of proudly, aggressive, willfully stupid, mean men, I obviously do not fall in that camp and appreciate making these clueless teens into heroes.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure does not entirely age well. Other than the titular characters, one of the few characters that appear in every installment of the franchise is Missy. Missy is only around three to four years older than the titular character when Bill’s dad marries Missy, and she becomes the stepmom. Grown women are largely absent in this story, and teenage girls play for laughs the role of the permissive stepmom. The laughs lie in the fact that males of all ages find her sexually attractive. She is barely legal and graduates to become a housewife. Yes, it is a clever play on the Oedipal complex, but it is less funny to explore the underbelly of this joke: ordinary grown men as pedophiles. Missy exists as a sexual object. There is something vaguely Warren Jeffs about this plot point—grown men in competition and exiling their sons to prey on their daughters. Missy seems fine and is generally underexplored. The myth that girls mature faster than boys is at full tilt in this film. We are not supposed to see Missy as a victim of child abuse.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure could not exist today given the issue of gun violence for American children specifically. When the titular characters travel back in time to the Wild West, Ted excitedly notices, “This is just like Frontier Land,” then Bill solemnly replies, “Yeah but you can get shot here.” Today’s teenagers do not have to travel back in time to get shot. They can stay home or go to school. The movie does respect the finality of death and uses the idea that Bill and Ted could slough off their mortal coil during these adventures as a way to build tension and create high stakes for the character throughout the movie, but in the denouement, one character shoots the lights in a crowded high school auditorium as a flashy way to grab the audience’s attention. That scene would not be used if this movie was recreated today. The movie never finds a consistent stride when it comes to violence. It alternates between using it as a punchline or as a serious possibility, but as a product of its time, it makes sense and serves as a cinematic time capsule of how gun violence was treated with more levity.
I was pleasantly surprised at the role that black people played in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There were only two black characters if I recall correctly: their history teacher, Mr. Ryan, whom Bernie Casey plays, and one of the Three Most Important People in the World, whom Clarence Clemons, also known as The Big Man, best known as Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band’s saxophonist, plays. These characters are figures of authority, are the few characters not subject to ridicule in a comedy that often depicts adults as problems and are serious but kind and respectful to the titular characters. On the other hand, there are no black women, and if you are hoping to abandon respectability politics, you may feel as if their characters are severely two-dimensional, not fully complex human beings.
There are technically two Asian characters if Ted has the same attributes as Reeves, but if not, then Genghis Khan is the only one. When we first see him, he is the most unpleasant of all the historical figures, depicted in his harem abusing his subjects. After Napoleon, his character does not adjust well to the modern world, but he is not as much of a jerk as Napoleon. Unlike most films about time travel, the characters mostly interact positively with each other in spite of language, cultural and broader socioeconomic barriers. There is zero concern of how “bagging” historical figures and bringing them to the present will change history. Modern life’s most commendable trait is the absence of genuine physical conflict.
While I enjoyed Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I actually do not think that it is the best in the trilogy. I have never seen Back to the Future, but it feels like a ripoff. I saw the obvious influence that these characters had on Wayne’s World.
