Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61833 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-12-21
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.com
The deep love that young boys feel for planes, cars, and gadgets is the driving energy of Thunderbirds, a live-action movie based on the British puppet TV show of the 1960s. Bill Paxton (Near Dark, One False Move) plays Jeff Tracy, billionaire ex-astronaut, who's turned his family of heroic sons into a crack rescue squad, zooming to danger and saving people using super-sophisticated vehicles. The youngest boy (Brady Corbet) hasn't yet joined the team and resents every moment he's not in uniform--but he gets his chance when a malevolent villain called the Hood (Ben Kingsley, slumming a bit from Gandhi and Sexy Beast) traps the rest of the family on a crippled space station and turns the Thunderbird vehicles to his evil purposes. Expect bright colors, clumsy dialogue, and a less-than-thrilling plot, but many kids will enjoy the fantasy of a secret island, rocket ships, and flying cars. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

A good family movie
This movie is good for a family that has some teenagers in the house and is something great to have in the library and it is directed by Johnathan Fraekis "Commander Riker from Star Trek"

Love the movie
This is a pretty decent movie. I'm surprised it didn't do that well in the theatres.

A movie for the kids to enjoy
Thunderbirds got badly panned by critics as a campy children's movie and a bad 'spy kids' rip off, but to be fair the original serries was a children's show and this is an upgraded version of that.
The idea is in the near future Jeff Tracy and his sons are "International Rescue" a secret emergency response team who's technolowgy is far ahead of anything the rest of the world has so they keep their identity a secret.

In the movie, well directed by Jonathan Frakes who really can direct a good action movie, 3rd son Alan in the original serries is now the youngest and desperately wants to be free of school and join his brothers on the team. The film also makes younger Alan's love interest, Tintin, played by a pre-HSTM Vanessa Hudgens, and added a son for resident geek 'Brains." When the rest of the family is lured off and trapped by the evil Ben Kingsley, it falls to these three younger members to save the day.

For all that as a kids' show, it works. Modern kids' stories do not involve kids watching the adults act as they did when this came out in 1964. They want to be in the action now. The opening scenes tells you that is just what Alan wants as he doodles spaceships on his school note books. People who panned Thunderbirds are, I suspect, people like me who loved the original as a child and hoped it had grown up as we had. these panners forgot it was a children's TV show and Frakes brings that same era to life in a way they will apeal to kids in the 21st century.