You’ve already seen The Rocketeer even if you haven’t. Director Joe Johnston takes the hero’s coveted jetpack and only flies it into familiar territory. If Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens found his inspiration in old pulp tales and Bettie Page (uncommon on the comics racks of the early 80s), Johnston finds his inspiration in Steven Spielberg. Soaring string music and moments so earnest you could plotz follow. It’s reconstituted pulp, an imitation of an imitation with the Disney seal of approval. Billy Campbell plays the hard luck amateur aviator in 1938 who finds an advanced Howard Hughes-invented rocket that mobsters on the run hid in his garage, but in a way he also plays the kid from E.T. grown up and with a knockout girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly). There’s a hint of Marty McFly in there, too and some Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter. Meanwhile, the Nazis, who are also after the rocket along with organized crime and the FBI, are stock black hats. If The Rocketeer doesn’t succeed in stopping them, you get the feeling that in this world Indiana Jones eventually will. It’s a film set in the 1930s based on formulas set in the 1980s and released at the dawn on the 1990s, which might be part of why it bombed in its original release. The best thing about it is its dreamy classic movie vision of 1938. There’s a charming little Hollywood diner and an opulent nightclub where the movie stars hobnob to a live orchestra that plays Cole Porter. The producers went all out with that stuff and it almost distracts from the weak script. And then the strings come in.