Batteries Not Included in a Nutshell

Batteries Not Included is about a group of tenants in an apartment block are being forced to move out so that it can be demolished. The tenants are reluctant to move, so the developers hire a local gang to ‘persuade’ them to leave. Fortunately, visiting alien mechanical life-forms come to town. When they befriend the tenants, the aliens use their extraterrestrial abilities to defeat the developers.
 

The Batteries Not Included Movie Trailer

The Batteries Not Included Movie Breakdown

Tagline: Five ordinary people needed a miracle. Then one night, Faye Riley left the window open.
Who is in it? Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Frank McRae, and Dennis Boutsikaris.
Genre: Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Comedy.
Was it funny? It was more cute than funny really. Parts were pretty funny.
Would this movie be for every family-movie fan? Yes.
Should you see it? Heck yeah you should see it!
Run Time: 106 minutes
Rating: PG

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The Verdict

This is one of those movies I loved as a child that I totally forgot about, until now. It’s a funny film to me because it’s not really that memorable… until someone brings it up, and then I remember all kinds of things about it. We start off in a construction site with machines working all over the place. Everything has been torn down in this particular neighborhood, all except one building. In the lower part of the building is a tired old restaurant, and above that is a bunch of crappy apartments. The building is set to be demolished and there is a group of goons going door to door in the building giving people buyout money to move. The restaurant owners, an old couple doesn’t want to move and pray for help. The next morning as the tenants are moving out the retaraurant owner’s senile wife Faye Riley (played by Jessica Tandy from Fried Green Tomatoes) is up on the roof spreading screws around like birdseed.

All of the three tenants that stayed besides the Rileys have noticed their building working a little more efficiently yet some of their belongings are missing. As they make their way to the roof with Mr. Riley they find Faye and accuse her of the theft. She says that the little guys have done it, making her look a little crazy. At that point she takes her husband’s watch and walks over to the shed on the roof and smashes it, saying that ‘they’ were shy. After she steps away for a second, two floating discs fly up and hover over the broken pocket watch and fixes it before their very eyes. The alien robots help out the group by working in the restaurant with the Rileys and fixing up the place slowly. The construction workers are even eating at the restaurant instead of working, which makes the goons paid to clear out the place look very bad. As the lead goon comes in to MAKE them move, he finds the tenants on the roof around the shed. Upon entering the shed the aliens zap him with electricity making him run away scared.

We soon find out that one of the discs is pregnant and gives birth to three babies, but one appears to be dead on arrival. One of the tenants, a large ex-boxer, takes the dead robot baby and runs to his apartment with plans of fixing it. After exhausting of his technical resources he accidentally drops the baby machine into the sink along with a plugged piece of electronics, which brings the baby to life. Meanwhile at the construction company’s headquarters the lead goon Carlos is getting chewed out for not clearing out the building. The president of the company has a plan to build some fancy buildings on that site and they need that building torn down and graded properly in order to do it. Carlos returns to the building and damages the pipes in the basement and starts tearing up the place. When the alien robots (the parents) come to check out the disturbance he hits one of them with an axe, “killing” it. The boxer beats up Carlos and after this point he has learned the error of his ways. The construction president hires more goons to burn down the building. Carlos is aware that Faye is inside and goes in to help her, and if if wasn’t for him she would’ve died. The dead robot is brought back to life but they are pissed and they leave.

After the fire the construction crews still can’t go ahead with the destruction because the boxer, the gentle giant, is sitting on the front stoop forcing the crews to wait until he moves. Later that night the boxer is still sitting there alone, even after the construction guys go home and he hears a noise. Upon investigating the noise he finds the little robot he brought back to life. It’s on the floor trying to arrange the floor tiles so they fit again. After he turns around he sees the two original robots and their children… and then hundreds more robots behind them! As the morning arrives the tenants leave the hospital and return to the site of the fire to see a fully restored awesome looking building. Every detail of the place is perfect, and the place is spotless. The news crews are there, the president of the construction company is there, and the tenants are there astonished on the miracle. The tenants return to their place of residence and say goodbye to the robots and live happily ever after. The final scene is an establishing shot of the restored building in the middle of the huge buildings the president wanted to build, showing they built around them making both sides happy. The End.

Official Nutshell-Movies Explanation

Batteries Not Included (1987): Space robots save a building from being torn down by restoring it back to it’s former glory.