A 1994 TV movie starring my favorite mulleted secret agent is both a solid adventure yarn and a refreshing dose of 90s optimism.
We’d all like to imagine that if we were trapped in a tough situation, say a cave-in or at the bottom of the ocean on a nuclear submarine, we could escape using solely our wits, a pile of household items, and a Swiss Army knife. Such is the appeal of MacGyver (1985-1992), which I will forever remember as a Dad show.
Over seven seasons and 139 episodes, Richard Dean Anderson portrays mulleted secret agent MacGyver, a family-friendly version of James Bond who refuses to handle firearms and instead gets out of tough jams using jerry-rigged contraptions and his knowledge of chemistry, engineering, and hard science. My Dad, along with 80s and 90s Dads everywhere, was a loyal fan of the show. When Mac pulled off one of his trademark engineering feats, Dad called it a “trick,” and gauged the quality of the episode by how many great “tricks” it had. The earlier seasons were better, he said, because they had 5-6 tricks per episode, but then the writers got tired in the later seasons and trick frequency dropped to 2-3 per episode.
To me as a kid, my Dad just was MacGyver. He even had a Swiss Army knife that could do all the Dad stuff anyone could need: opening packages, removing splinters with tweezers. He taught me the most whiz-bang 90s technical skills: how to navigate MS-DOS, how to handle a CD so you don’t scratch the shiny part, how to program a VCR. He was the Dad who, when I got a cool new video game that required Windows 95, stayed up all night to insert and eject the 25 installation CDs to upgrade our computer from MS-DOS to Windows 95 to get the game running. He could do anything.
On May 14, 1994, he taped the first of MacGyver’s two TV movies, Lost Treasure of Atlantis, on VHS on its first-run presentation. My sister Laura and I watched the tape ad nauseam. It became my first adventure story, and Mac was one of the first movie heroes I looked up to.
In the movie, MacGyver and his old college professor Atticus search for the lost treasure of Atlantis. It’s clearly derived from Indiana Jones, with several explicit nods to Raiders of the Lost Ark:
- One MacGuffin is an ancient treasure box called the Ark of Solon, much like the Ark of the Covenant.
- In the opening scene when MacGyver and Atticus attempt to retrieve an Atlantean coin, Mac replaces the coin with a lens cap, just like Indy replaces the golden idol with a sandbag. It goes about as well for both characters.
- The Indy references are no surprise, since the episode “Eye of Osiris,” done by the same writer-director team, directly rips off Raiders’ Nepal bar scene.
But the movie puts enough of a fresh spin on the adventure plot, especially the engaging Atlantis mythology, to make it a MacGyver adventure. Mac and Atticus move on to a war-torn region of the Balkan peninsula, which was then wracked by a series of post-Soviet conflicts. It’s tricky to set your adventure story in the middle of a real war that’s still in progress. But the sequence pulls it off by making the war a feature of, rather than backdrop to, the action, and also making a strong moral statement.
This dialogue exchange between MacGyver and the genocidal Col. Petrovic made a particular impression on me, then and now:
Petrovic: “Then you will know that this region belongs to my people and we will take it.”
MacGyver: “Even if it means killing innocent people who happen to live here.”
Petrovic: “We must cleanse the area.”
MacGyver: “You’re talking ethnic cleansing. That’s racial genocide. Look, pal, the whole world has been watching what’s been going on around here. Now you can call it whatever you want, but it’s murder, pure and simple.”
At the age of four, this taught me an important lesson: war is murder, no matter what terms you use to cloak that reality. Watching it today, it came off as ballsy. At the time, making a statement against genocide without mentioning any specific ethnic groups was almost anodyne. But today, the moral clarity is refreshing.
And Mac gets to strike back in a series of highly satisfying action scenes, simultaneously escaping via rocket-propelled car and blowing up an ammo cache to deal a setback to Petrovic. The whole sequence is terrific action-adventure, featuring some classic MacGyver “tricks.” The fluid, precise directing comes courtesy of Mike Vejar: a talented, versatile journeyman with a 25-year career in TV directing. Vejar also directed 14 episodes of Babylon 5 and 32 episodes of the various Star Trek series. For both franchises, his visual flair and panache made him a top choice for many of the important “story arc” episodes, like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s concluding arc. He makes you want to cheer at Mac and Atticus’ explosive jailbreak.
The supporting characters generally fit into stock adventure-genre types: the sidekick (Atticus), the romantic interest, the villain, the henchman. But they’re played entertainingly. I appreciate the subtlety of MacGyver’s romance with academic archaeologist Kelly. Not every adventure tale needs a clichéd romance; it’s enough for this one to play out quietly in the background, with allusions to her crush on him five years prior, and a quick kiss at the end.
Brian Blessed as Atticus gives 110% in every scene: on the verge of being annoying, even maniacal, but personally, I find his over-the-top performance endearing. Incidentally, there are three actors in the film that also appear in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace: Blessed, Hugh Quarshie, and Oliver Ford Davies. Was George Lucas a secret MacGyver-head? (Mac-Daddy?) Did he geek out over this film and think to himself, “That professor guy was great! He’s just perfect for my bloated CGI fish creature!”
On the production side, the movie is top-notch for its era. Ken Harrison, one of the TV show’s regular composers, delivers a wonderful score full of thematic motifs, including a soaring theme for Atlantis and a driving “MacGyver action theme” whenever our guy starts improvising a “trick.” What takes the cake, though, is the climax in Atlantis’ Temple of Ages. Watching it today, I found it a refreshing throwback to a different era of filmmaking. No digital effects, just a really cool set that adds a sense of solidity to the action. And a tone of pure, earnest wonder with no meta jokes, no ironic quips. It’s still thrilling to watch the gang discover the pumice-entombed body of Solon, the ancient Atlantean computer, and of course, the treasure.
Our villain, Asshole Rich Guy Cleve, opens a treasure chest to find… just a bunch of crumbling scrolls. MacGyver figures it out: “The treasure of Atlantis is knowledge.”
Laura and I agree that this was our big takeaway from the movie, at the ages of two and four respectively. However cheesy and earnest it may sound, it’s such an important message for young minds. Knowledge is wealth. Not gold or jewels. Laura and I have both been avid readers all our lives. And though we would’ve been readers without MacGyver’s encouragement, it certainly helped to know that every time we picked up a book, we were holding the real treasure of civilization.
The film’s ending is 90s optimism personified. Atticus quizzes a group of schoolchildren on what lessons we can learn from Atlantis, and the kids shout out:
“They created democracy! They abolished slavery! There were no executions! Men and women were treated as equals! They believed in peace, not war!”
Art reflects the values of the times. The 90s, and really, the whole era between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, were a high water-mark for democracy and international cooperation. I found it almost moving to hear the movie so earnestly announce its values. It’s a bit cloying, yes, but it’s a message in a bottle from a different time: a sincere faith that we can make the world better.
I, of course, was shaped by my times, and I’ll be a 90s kid forever. To me, that means an innate optimism, and a faith in democracy and humanist values like tolerance and multiculturalism. I remember when America worked, and believe it can work again. In an age of rising authoritarianism, climate disasters, and techno-fascism, the memory of that pre-9/11 world is what I hold onto.
MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis isn’t perfect, of course. Some of the plotting is unconvincing, especially Atticus’ abrupt betrayal of MacGyver and Kelly, then his switch back to their side mere minutes later. But it’s a solid adventure yarn, one dash Indiana Jones, one dash National Treasure, all MacGyver-style problem-solving. I saw many episodes of the TV show later in life, but this is the tale that cemented MacGyver in my mind, because I saw it first.
MacGyver is embedded so deeply in my approach to problem-solving that he can inspire me at the most unlikely moments. It was 6th grade Outdoor Ed, in a spacious wooden cabin in the Rocky Mountains with bunk beds lined up, barracks-style. I was being a mouthy smartass as usual, this time to a beefy kid who was stalking around pretending like he was boss of the cabin. The kid death-gripped my arm, dragged me to a locker, tossed me inside, and locked it. It was the one and only time that a bully actually shoved me in a locker.
But I wasn’t intimidated, just miffed. My first thought: “What would MacGyver do?” I scoured the wooden cabinet for solutions. The lock was primitive: a short metal rod that you spun from the outside, vertical to open the door, horizontal to lock it, with a latch on the outside that kept me from just shoving the door open. But I had a Mac-style brainwave. I found a coat hanger, swept it through the gap between the door and doorframe to turn the rod, and sprang out. (Mac uses the same trick in the opening minutes of “The Gauntlet.”)
The beefy kid was astonished: “How the fuck did you do that?” I demonstrated my coat hanger technique, and before I knew it, the bully was asking me to push him into the locker so he could try it out. And then every other boy in the cabin wanted to try it too. It became the trendy activity of the day. I had never felt so clever and cool in my life.
Thanks, Mac, I thought.
