In 2016, on a plane, I saw the 1989 Bill and Ted movie for the first time and really enjoyed it. Recently, Siqi and I watched it together, and watched the 1991 sequel, and watched the 2020 follow-up.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
The newness and simplicity of the premise makes the first movie the best.
Two best friends, in danger of failing high school history, with disastrous consequences for their two-man rock band, Wyld Stallions, are suddenly approached by George Carlin in a time-traveling phone booth and told they and their band are important in the future, and therefore cannot be allowed to fail high school history. Hilarity ensues. They gently kidnap a variety of historical figures (including Socrates, whom they call So-Crates, and two English princesses their own age), and apparently manage to learn something in the process. The best bit of mind-bending time-travel logic, though, is when they’re back where they came from and trying to avoid being caught by their parents. They get the idea to use the time travel machine later to help themselves now. As a result, as soon as they think up a plan for what they want to happen, it happens! Genius.
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
I wanted to like this movie, but it had too many icky things in it for me to be keen to watch it again anytime soon, if ever.
The premise is that a future wannabe-tyrant creates a pair of robots that look like Bill and Ted, and sends them to kill the real ones. The robots more or less immediately succeed in killing Bill and Ted, who assume that the robots are future versions of themselves who have come to help them. The robots are callously mean; they are not only evil, they are rude and destructive, and the special effect where we see their internal workings is pretty creepy. After dying and spending a bit of time as ghosts, Bill and Ted wind up in Hell (?!) and experience a couple of creepy nightmares. They escape by challenging Death. (This series of contests with Death, which he sheepishly loses, is probably my favorite part.) They visit heaven, where God directs them to seek help from “Station”, a pair of super smart small goblins who transform (via a big gloopy puddle of goo) into one big goblin and build a couple of very rough and creepy-looking Bill and Ted robots for Bill and Ted to use to fight the evil Bill and Ted robots at the Battle of the Bands showdown. But first, Bill and Ted have to time travel to learn to play well enough to win. Sigh.
Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020)
I wanted to watch this sequel for the sake of completeness; I am relieved that it was actually pretty good. Definitely it was more enjoyable than the first sequel.
Bill and Ted are married with kids, but they aren’t successful musicians, and they haven’t created a song to unite the world, as it was prophesied that they would. They are fetched into the future in a new egg-shaped time-travel booth and told that the universe will soon collapse if they don’t hurry up and create this song. They try to travel in to the future and learn it from themselves, but in the future they have more problems than they do in the present. When they go farther into the future, their future selves try to trick them. They escape using another genius bit of time-travel logic, which is too good to reveal. It had me laughing uproariously; it was the highlight of the movie. Unless the highlight was the finale, the song that united the world (in party by involving an international group of historically significant musicians), which was musically and emotionally satisfying.
