Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

This movie isn't on this list because it's one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the century, as most of the others are. This movie is pretty bad when you look at it objectively. In fact it's so very stupid that the fact that it exists at all is funny. It's a B-movie premise with an A-movie budget and would be Blockbuster actors. I think it's a great film despite its very obvious shortcomings, and a very unique greatness it certainly is.

Bill & Ted are heroes of the X-Generation on one hand anti-heroes of its predecessor on the other. The profundity with which they converse is beyond the measured limits of language & humanity, it is as distantly impossible as Ursa Major or the evasive salt molecule at teh bottom of the ocean.

Bill represents the hero-by-default: the Shakesperean buffoon who knows not his greatness and whose greatness is thus compunded. He is the wily tortured one who truly understands nothing of his own prowess and genius.

Ted on the other hand is more acutely aware of his own limitaions, and he therefore is not able to reach so high as Bill. Ted is the Oscar Wilde Aristocrat combined with the Noel Coward autocrat & Sam Shepard has been, only he is still to be the has been. The circumstances of Ted's attainment of profound glory forgive him this fate and allow his nature of trustworthy idiocy in the face of demonic puzzles & agonizing labyrinths to shine through and help save civilization.

Their mutually excellent adventure is not so much a prophecy of the second coming, but rather it is more of a prayer for civilization to regain its feet before we are succumbed to universal judgment. Human history is a fragile beast whose bark has always been worse than it bite, twice as deadly in fact, and only plagues & natural disasters make us feel obliged to go on as if we were aware of how our own demise is the outcome of our own wishes then we would surely stop it all, but if there is evidence of fate or chance or happenstance or God, then we go on. Thankfully, God is everywhere, and obviously so, and rarely is it caught more movingly on film than in this movie.

Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Kahn, Joan of Arc, Ludwig Van, Socrates, Bill Bohney, and Sigmund Freud would not agree on anything should they ever actually meet except perhaps for one preemptive truth: That this film is a righteous exploration unto the human spirit and should be heralded as on of mankind's greatest feats of strength & mindpower in the shadow of the gloomy underbelly of placid Hollywood archetypes, Bill & Ted shine through as unique and inexplicable heroes who not only change our world, but who remind of us how precious life is, especially that of you family. God Bless you, Bill & Ted, may your journey always be bodacious.