MORE THAN THE JOURNEYMAN: AN APPRECIATION OF JOE JOHNSTON

by Taylor Zaccario 

Why doesn’t director Joe Johnston get the love and praise he deserves? The man has been involved with some of the biggest films of the past 45 years, but never gets the same adulation as his contemporaries like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Okay, so he didn’t direct Saving Private Ryan. Big deal!  

Johnston has, in his own way, contributed to major aspects of our pop culture, and the time has come to give the gentleman his due. 

His skills as a talented craftsman rarely come into question, but his films are often snobbishly shrugged off as popcorn fluff, overloaded with too much butter a.k.a. heavy special effects at the expense of characterization and story. 

This is horse pucky. 

True, special effects are a major component in most of Johnston’s films. That is a product of the types of stories Johnston tells on the big screen. Big tales that need big special effects. 

However, don’t be fooled into assuming that special effects equal hack. Not every director has the requisite abilities to employ effects competently in their movies. We’ve seen it many times: Films with overblown, poorly constructed, and sloppily integrated visual effects; directors using effects as a crutch, propping up films suffering from weak scripts and lame characters. 

Johnston, on the other hand, uses his sublime mastery of visual effects to deftly build worlds in which his stories unfold and his characters breath. Not everyone of his films is successful, but don’t forget, Spielberg directed 1941. 

Johnston’s reputation as a “special effects” director is born out of his career beginnings. He started as the visual effects supervisor on a little known film called Star Wars (1977). He worked in similar capacities on three equally obscure movies called The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). 

It was in The Empire Strikes Back that the bounty hunter Boba Fett first graced movie screens. The design of his iconic armor — which can be seen on the small screen in his own Disney+ series — is credited to Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie. 

Johnston’s association with Lucasfilm was vitally fruitful to his career and extended to some lesser remembered projects. He served as production designer on the two Ewok spin-off films, the mostly forgotten Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984) and its very forgotten sequel, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985). He wrote and illustrated the Ewok novel, The Adventures of Teebo: A Tale of Magic and Suspense. And lest not forget that episode of the 1985 animated series Star Wars: Droids that Johnston provided the script for. 

The biggest boon to Johnston was George Lucas’s encouragement to start directing. Johnston finally did when he made his directorial debut with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). An unexpected box office success, the film set the template for most of the films to populate Johnston’s filmography: family fun, a touch of fantasy/science-fiction and, yes, a dose of special effects. 

His follow-up films, The Rocketeer (1991) and The Pagemaster (1994), didn’t match the success of his first but each have gone on to become well-loved cult classics. It was Jumanji (1995) that gave Johnston another box office smash and another long-running franchise to his name. 

Johnston stepped away from blockbusters to the helm the (ironically) more grounded October Sky (1999), the story of a coal miner's son who takes up rocketry. That film received generally positive reviews and proved Johnston’s aptitude for visual storytelling did not rely solely on big budgets and big effects. 

Laura Dern was in that cast, and Johnston would direct her again when his old buddy Steven Spielberg passed him the reins to Jurassic Park III. Though the film does make one question whether Jurassic Park had the legs to be a franchise at all, the movie contains all of Johnston’s trademark fun and is a pleasant choice for whiling-away a Sunday afternoon. 

Like any director, Johnston has his turkeys, such as horse-turkey Hidalgo (2004). He’s also had the unfortunate luck of being called in to resuscitate troubled productions like The Wolfman (2010) and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018). Both were sinking ships before Johnston came on board. But what a testament to Johnston’s reputation as a competent filmmaker that studios seek him out for help and guidance when their productions smash into an iceberg.  

It’s a shame when this reputation as a reliable craftsman is used against him. His critics and detractors will often label Johnston as a journeyman director. This term refers to a filmmaker who, despite being talented, has no distinctive style of their own, making them apt to direct a variety of genres and types of films. They are considered hired guns, willing to bow down at the altars of studios. They are not considered artists. 

Joe Johnston is an artist. 

He is a literal artist, and he is a film artist. Anyone who saw Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) could easily identify it as the work of the same director behind 

The Rocketeer (assuming, of course, they actually saw The Rocketeer). I won’t claim Johnston possess the same identifiable style as directors like Tim Burton or the Coen brothers. You could pick out their films from still images alone. You can’t necessarily do that with Johnston’s oeuvre. 

However, that should not diminish Johnston’s standing as an artist. A journeyman can be an artist and vice-visa. Not every director needs to be an auteur. A good director needs only to make a good film. Johnston has made more than his share. 

An under-appreciated hero of many beloved franchises in cinema history, and a reliable, skilled director of his own equally treasured films, Joe Johnston’s legacy should be both acknowledged and secured.  

Okay, so he didn’t direct Jaws. Neither did you. 

- T.Z.