From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie The Last Starfighter released in 1984.
Starring:
Lance Guest, Robert Preston, Catherine Mary Stewart
Directed by:
Nick Castle
Genre:
Action, Adventure, Science Fiction
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Rating:
PG
Budget:
$15,000,000 (estimated)
Current IMDb Rating When Reviewed:
6.8
The Synopsis is:
Alex Rogan, a kid from a trailer court, beats a video game record which qualifies him to be recruited by real life aliens to a battle in space to save the universe.
Story:
The story began as an idea by screenwriter Jonathan R. Betuel when he visited a video arcade on his lunch break while working as a cab driver in the 1980’s. There he took notice of a young boy playing one of the games. At the time, he still had his most recent book on his mind, "The Once and Future King" by T.H. White based upon the 1485 book Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book is split up into four parts detailing imagined chronicles of King Arthur from his childhood and throughout his rule.
The idea sprung from connecting the boy at the video game to young Arthur where Jonathan then conceptualized the initial draft of; what if the high score in the game was basically a sword in a stone for an intergalactic adventure.
What a genius idea for the early 1980’s because video games were new and magical at the time. Both kids and adults fawned over the chance to spend hours at arcades or for those who could afford it, have their own personal game console at home. It was considered a fun but useless entertaining pastime. However for many dreamy-eyed children and teens, the possibility of getting a high score was the ultimate prize because the games were so hard, that to have your name listed on the machine meant that you were one of best of the best.
Sadly, for some people, this was the only indication in life that proved that they were indeed special, so this Sword in the Stone idea struck a chord.
Other movies that came prior to The Last Starfighter that involved video games were, Tron in 1982, War Games in 1983, Joysticks in 1983, and Superman 3 in 1983.
Jonathan managed to get the script into the hands of Lorimar Pictures and they were pleased enough to give the film the green light to move forward with the working title of Centari’s Recruit.
Nick Castle was brought in to direct. Prior to this he had directed Tag The Assasination Game in 1982, making him perfect to direct yet another flick about game play.
The story in my opinion is the real reason I love this movie as much as I do. There are many similarities with Star Wars, which had just tied up it’s trilogy the year prior, but Star Wars also used the classic storytelling tool of the hero's journey.
The premise is a page right out of my dream journals from childhood. It’s silly but it sets the tone that this is not a realistic drama but a fantasy. You could take this movie as a fantastical event that actually happened or you could imagine this story as a fantasy that Alex Rogan is having as he is playing the game and the story works even better.
Pacing:
At 1 hour and 41 minutes, it’s short and sweet. I always love that. It didn’t feel the need to draw things out, but I don’t think I would have minded a little more time spent to flesh out some of the characters. This is rare for me to say, but in some aspects it felt a little too short and it actually has the feeling that the end things were rushed and that may have been due to the budget.
Challenge:
I really like the challenge in this film. Let me set up the story to explain why.
In space the Star League, led by Ambassador Enduran protects billions of creatures in peaceful systems against attacks from hostile worlds. Their main base and origins stem from the planet Rylos. According to Enduran, eons ago Ryland ancestors created the great Frontier, a defense grid barrier of energy or a wall in space, encircling the peaceful systems of the universe forever locking out the scourge that lurks beyond. One such scourge is the Kodans, who have been aching to make a dent in the Frontier so they can dispatch their armada (also known as the Black Terror) to conquer the worlds within.
Enduran’s son, Xur has different views about the Star League. He thinks that the peaceful worlds are weak worlds and tried to usurp his father for power. He was caught, disowned by his family and banished. However, Xur still has many very loyal followers undercover on Rylos and working within the Star League.
Another leg up for Xur is that he has made a deal with the Kodan Emperor to lead the destruction of the Frontier because only he has the exact coordinates to the Star Leagues’ base and Rylands on the inside to disable their defense systems. Once the base is down, the Frontier will fall. In exchange, the Kodan emperor has promised to allow Xur to rule Rylos after it has been conquered.
If you have watched this film and are shocked at anything I just said about Xur and the Star League, it’s ok. Blink once and you will miss it, but it is all in the film. It just gets explained so fast, it’s hard to catch it all in one viewing.
One huge complaint about this film is the villain’s story. And although I just gave you a rundown of Xur and his relation to the Kodan Armada, it’s all intriguing enough that as an audience member, I did crave more. Where is his mother in all of this? I digress.
However, in the presentation of Xur, I enjoyed him because he was an extremely animated character who was drunk with his own arrogance and confidence. He was a delight to watch on screen. He’s just seething with evil.
Xur has been given command on a Kodan star ship with military commander, Lord Kril and his assisting officer. The Kodans are pretty close and rely on each other as I determined from the relationship between Kril and his assistant. They were so close sometimes, I thought they were going to kiss.
What is really clear about the Kodans, which is probably the same with the emperor that we never see, is that they hate Xur with a passion. It may be that they distrust him for being willing to destroy his own people for his own selfish means and their sense of loyalty to each other is at a much higher standard. I also think they perceive him as an idiot. I am totally reading into this but there is a visible disdain for him. They may also feel insulted by having to take orders from him and they are only enduring him to destroy the Frontier. Once they have gotten what they want, he may be disposed of. There is no telling.
I really enjoyed that about the Kodans. They can’t be trusted when it comes to Xur. It’s also baked into the sinister almost devilish way they look with leathery skin, shiny red armour and horned chins. In many ways you could say that Xur has made a deal with the devil.
I would have loved to have more information about the Kodans and their culture. It’s a lot to try to shove into a 90 minute movie, but I did enjoy the hints we did get that these guys are serious warriors with an intense code.
At the end of the film when the assistant is listing all of the things that are going fatally wrong with their ship, he finally asks, “what do we do?” Kril’s response is “We die”, as if it was something he had always accepted. This matches this warrior mentality that we were getting from the Kodans. It’s kind of a funny moment, but it’s also one of the moments that you wished you had more time with the Kodans on screen.
Ah, I love those guys.
Empathy:
The empathy in this movie for me is very very strong. I think the main reason for that may be due to the many characters we get to bond with during the film. I am actually going to go through a lot of them so this section may be a bit long and detailed.
So let’s talk about the main character, Alex Rogan. He was named after Jonathan R. Betuel’s own son and in many ways he is just a boy you are meant to sympathize with. Originally he was supposed to be from the suburbs, but the filmmakers felt it would have resembled so many other films of the time that took place there. So then Alex became a kid from a cute little trailer court, Starlite Starbrite in Coombs County where his mom is the part-time caretaker of.
The novelization by Alan Dean Foster fills in a lot of missing information from the film like the fact that
Alex is a high school senior which makes sense since he is worried about what he plans to do with his future and dreams of having a life of adventure somewhere else.
I am just going to give you a little play by play of the events to set up more of Alex’s journey.
Not only is he bored with his life at the trailer court,
Alex wants to do more than just go to City College and settle for a life where he’s at. The only reprieve he has from his life is being able to spend a day with his girlfriend, Maggie at the local makeout getaway, Silver Lake. However, he can never get away because his mom depends on him to be the handyman of the trailer park. He’s always asked to sacrifice his time to help others.
Alex doesn’t have a father present in the picture and the film doesn’t really go into what happened there, but it does give him surrogate fathers in other forms. One of the neighbors, Otis, an elderly man who also looks after the place, notices how unhappy Alex is and gives him some really amazing life advice. He says. “you'll get your chance. The important thing is that you have to grab it with both hands and hold on tight.” And I am telling you this now because it is called back later on in the story.
To unwind and let out his aggression of being stuck, Alex enjoys playing a relatively new arcade game, Starfighter, in which he has been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada. Alex beats the record on the game as every single person at the trailer park looks on cheering. We all know that the probability of this is slim, but this is the fantasy element of the film I was talking about playing into the fantasy of many kids that gaming would make them special.
It turns out that this game is a space combat simulator that an alien, by the name of Centauri, accidentally delivered to Coombs County instead of Las Vegas looking to recruit his Starfihter. He takes Alex to Rylos to join the battle wherein Alex realises that the Star League and the war against the Kodan Armada is real.
This was Alex’s chance to grab on tight to his chance to be great and he totally freaks out, as would most people. It’s kinda played with comedy, but the trailer park, as boring as it is, is safe. It’s a heck of a lot different than being thrown right into the middle of a battle, yet alone, one in out space. What?!
I like the fact that Alex took that seriously and all of the comedy set aside, his reaction is realistic and not formulaic. I loved that.
Ultimately, this is a story with a hero's journey and part of the formula is the protagonist refusing his role and then eventually accepting it. Alex does have this character arc and it’s done in a way that feels like it’s something he has to do in order to keep his world safe.
In the beginning of the film a report from state police is blaring on the radio about suspicious lights in the sky that have been reported in Coombs County and I think that very well may have been Centauri landing his star car, while keeping tabs on Alex. He was right there to scoop Alex up to get him recruited.
Centari is such a wonderful character because once he appears on screen, he really inserts a heck of a lot of levity to the film, where it was more straightforward before. He’s a fast talker who eccentrically speaks in the third person and can be described as a space con man which it’s pretty accurate because he has unconventional ways of doing things that may also be considered unscrupulous.
He recruits Alex to join the Starfighters, but Earth is not among the planets within the Star League. In fact, the guy who ends up being Alex’s starship navigator, Grig, mentions that Earth is not mature enough to join them and Centauri broke the rules by recruiting Alex.
According to the novelization, since the Star League were such pacifists that they didn't know how to fight and the Starfighters were often mainly selected from planets with species that had a propensity for war and violence. This is what Enduran calls the “gift” in his speech to the Starfighters. It’s an interesting dynamic that has a lot of room for creative world building and it makes the universe of this story feel much bigger than what we get in the film.
It just doesn't end there because Grig also talks about Centauri using the Excalibur test implying that maybe it was a common technique he invented to find Starfighters. Was King Arthur a Starfighter? Did Centauri call himself Merlin to guide Arthur? We don’t know but, it’s very exciting to imagine the possibilities.
Centauri also acts as a secondary father figure as Otis does, giving him some amazing life advice. Alex complains that he can’t be a Starfighter because he’s just a kid from a trailer park. Centauri says “if that's what you think then that's all you'll ever be”. It’s a little on the nose, but I loved that moment because this leaves the audience with something to walk away from the film with. I thought it was truly inspiring.
I thought at that point, I was hoping more than ever that this message would insert a little motivation into Alex’s character to accept his opportunity for greatness and it does. I enjoyed Alex’s arc from a whiny kid to a hero. He has purpose by the end and he’s willing to make the sacrifices to do it.
There's a theory out there that since Centauri is an alien in a human suit, he’s secretly Alex's dad, making Alex part alien and him a liar for saying that it was a mistake to send the game to the trailer court. This could explain why Alex feels so desperate to leave home.
Centauri is the con-man with a heart that sacrifices himself to see Alex become a Starfighter. I cried when Centauri “died” and Alex and Grig tried to comfort him in his “last” moments telling him that there was a lot of money for him. Yes he was driven by money but at the core of it he wanted to do something good too.
Alex's first class star navigator, Greg is yet another father figure for him. Greg has a very whimsical upbeat charm and infectious laugh, but on a more serious note he delivers a lot of exposition to Alex and the audience. It’s not too heavy or boring. To me, I found all of the things he said to be fascinating and world building. I was curious to know more from him.
Grig explains that he is from an underground world with his wifeiod and 6,000 children. I want to know more about his culture!
He also casually mentioned that Xur has turned his children into slaves. What? I want to know more about that too. There is so much more under the surface of this story.
Grig also has a very positive view of death. He says that it is just simply doing battle in another dimension. And who’s to say he’s wrong.
The next important character in the story in my opinion is Alex’s beta unit, also called Beta. Beta is a synthetic being that replaced Alex on Earth while he could go off and be a Starfighter without causing alarm to his family. Beta was initially written into the story to deliver more originality to the film and he does, giving the audience a booster shot of humor from his awkward adjustment pretending to be a human boy. He steals every scene he’s in.
There are so many little details in his appearance in the film that add more color to the film, like his transformation, learning how the movement of eyebrows means something to teenage girls and removing his head to fix his ear because Alex’s girlfriend Maggie sticks her tongue in it.
Just when you think his antics are going to take a step too far, becomes a hero sacrificing himself to help Alex. I love characters like this, who can change the tone of their personalities when it counts. These are the characters that keep me invested in a story.
The film could have stopped there and been a flick about a dude going to space, but they also made it a beautiful love story.
Out goes the trope of the girl that Alex flirts with but finally wins over and takes into space. The story starts off with Alex and Maggie in a very serious relationship dealing with the possibility of splitting up as their lives will eventually change. Alex dreams of nothing but leaving and Maggie could very well stay put. Even though Alex promises to take her with him, she’s visibly terrified of change.
Alex's relationship with Maggie is a very cute relationship going through the ups and downs and I love that this is very realistic, arguing one minute, and making up the next. Although the film has a lot that it has to do, it gives the moments with Alex and Maggie some breathing room for you to observe their connection to each other and it’s actually so sweet.
One thing that I adored about the story is that it keeps Maggie in the loop. She doesn't disappear for too long and she feels like a real partner to Alex. It’s no surprise that he returns at the end of the adventure to take Maggie with him to Rylos. Maggie experiences an arc for her character by facing her fear of change and going with Alex on his next adventure and leaving the trailer court.
Technical:
The film was shot in about 40 days on location in Canyon County California as well as some indoor set shots. There was also an extra week of reshoots and additional content.
Most of the shots on Earth were very simple, with the exception of the Starfighter arcade video game. It was not an actual game. I think that if they had created the game before the film, it would have given the film some legs to grow in the zeitgeist as a double release.
The displayed gameplay concept was a mixture of Gallagher and Space Invaders, which are two of my favorite games of that era, but no games were at the level of the digital effects that appeared in this movie. They were mostly all built by arranging giant colored pixels to look like the shapes of things. This looked amazing in comparison and a true companion game to the film was in the works but it would be thousands of dollars if sold retail.
The film borrowed some attributes from the Tactical Air Command’s logo for the Starfighter game logo. They were an inactive United States Air Force organization. I thought it was a nice addition to help make the game feel official.
Another impressive aspect of the game was the use of Centauri’s voice in the game introduction, who was played by legendary actor and musical performer Robert Preston.
“Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada.” It’s iconic and a cornerstone in the film that is endearing to many cult followers of the film. It tickles me to this day every time I hear it.
Now we’ve come upon the part of the film that receives the most complaints, which is the digital effects, which were possibly acceptable for game display in the 1990’s or the early 2000’s so in that aspect it can be obviously observed for being ahead of its time.
However, the actual space battle scenes were criticized for looking too primitive today. Practical miniatures would have sold the space battle much better, but the decision was made to attempt to create a photo realistic space battle.
This is where we have to get on our imaginary Delorean and time travel back to 1984 to understand that these effects were actually aggressively ground breaking. We really wouldn’t be ready to have realistic spaceships on film until the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s, more than a decade later.
We have to remember the computers in 1984 were pretty bulky and slow. Ever tried to use one of these today?
Well for the eighties the 27 minutes of computer graphics for 300 scenes in the film were rendered on a Cray X-MP supercomputer which was the most ever done for the time. This was very ambitious and broke ground in it’s own right.
I remember seeing these effects as a teenager understanding that this was the wave of what special effects would be like in the future. So I typically cut a little slack for the CGI elements attempted in the 1980’s and 1990’s for the evolution it needed to get to the level we are at today.
I think they could have gotten even closer to more realistic visuals if they had more time to complete the effects. Just to give you an idea of how long it took, each frame took several hours to render.
A big argument that I often hear is that the movie Tron 1982 used CGI and did it better. Tron used CGI sparsely used and many of the effects that looked like computer animation were actually practical effects. As well, in Tron it worked because the construct of the world was within a video game.
The main focus of the CGI in The Last Starfighter was the Gunstar which was the awesome design of artist Ron Cobb, who also worked on Alien and Star Wars.
I loved all of this even though it didn't look photo realistic, I enjoyed the effort, creativity and how it worked with the story. I was so invested that I imagined the completed effects overriding my disbelief. Today these rudimentary effects are what people use for pre-production.
The battle sequence was very exciting for me, but I must admit that the Kodan Armada is pretty puny. I would have loved something a little more massive and intimidating. What helps the battle itself is the build-up to where Grig explains the ship’s capabilities, Alex has target practice and then shoots it's his first ship so he can get used to the weight of what he’s doing. I kind of love that stuff because it feels like we are getting the training as well.
The Kodan Armada uses a circle of Doom formation which forces Alex to have to use the death blossom, a weapon of last resort. This is where the Gunstar spins and shoots in all directions, wiping out the armada. The death blossom is unique and devastating which makes sense why the bad guys fear the Starfighters.
One strong standout in the film was the makeup effects for the many aliens featured in the film. They were all so very unique and even utterly gross at times, which made them have a realistic edge. I loved every minute of seeing them on screen.
There was a scene that gave me Flash Gordon 1980 vibes when the technicians aboard the Kodan ship with visors emit a digital sound before all dying at once as if they were connected to the same electronic device. If you’ve seen both movies, you’ll know what I am talking about.
I wont pick apart every detail to discuss but I have to talk about Centauri’s awesome car, the Star Car. The car was a real car that was made to look like a DeLorean. At the time, actual DeLoreans were hard to come by because John DeLorean’s company’s assets were seized by the British government while he was on trial.
It’s an incredible likeness, fitted with the gull-wing doors and all. It was the perfect choice for a space car. When the car takes off for space the first time, I remember the line from Back to the Future in 1985, “where we're going we don't need any roads”. As homage, the Centauri Star Car appears in Back to the Future 2 in Hill Valley.
Craig Safan composed the score wanting to go what he calls "bigger than Star Wars". It was a wise choice creating an outstanding, very triumphant score with lots of horns. It had a very similar theme to the music theme for Star Trek the Next Generation television show.
Similar scores can be found in Superman 1978, Krull 1983, and Clash of the Titans 1980.
Performances:
Nick Castle went to film school with John Carpenter and played Mike Myers in Halloween and Halloween 2. While editing the film Nick noticed Lance Guest who played alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and thought of him for this project.
One of the reasons why Lance Guest was cast as Alex Rogan was because of his James Stewart, Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda like qualities. That is exactly what Lance did with the part of Alex. That doesn’t get enough credit, because his performance helped the audience feel as if they were the Starfighter being recruited.
He was able to show off his acting chops playing a dual role in Beta. This was observed in test screenings of the film where audiences responded positively to the character and Nick Castle wisely added more scenes for him. Unfortunately Lance had cut his hair short and also got very ill during the reshoots. This is why he is pale in those scenes as makeup tried to cover up his illness and gave him a terrible wig to cover up his hair cut. To me, it always seemed to work because Beta is a simuloid.
One thing I loved about Lance’s Beta performance is how well he was at comedically impersonating a robot trying to impersonate a human being. We’d see this kind of thing later in characters like Data, from StarTrek the Next Generation television show.
There are a lot of connections between that show and this movie including the fact that 11 year old Wil Wheaton who later went on to play Wesley Crusher was one of the children seen in the opening segment of the film. He had a bigger part, but it didn't make it to the final cut.
Peter O'Toole and Mick Jagger we're up for the role for Centauri but Robert Preston was a shoe in because he’d played this kind of character before as the fast talking con man in The Music Man in 1962. He was a delightful treat in the movie providing us with some much needed comedy and sentiment.
Sadly, this was his last movie appearance. He died only four years later at the age of 68 from lung cancer.
Catherine Mary Stewart was cast to play Maggie based on the rapport that she had with Guest Lance and truthfully they make such a cute couple on screen. I think she brought a wholesome realism to the role to keep me invested in the relationship between Alex and Maggie. She is (low key) one of my favorite female actors in the 1980’s like Weekend at Bernie's 1989, Night of the Comet 1984, and The Apple 1980 (a wacky and wild movie that I love so much).
Enjoyment:
The film was very quietly released in theaters on July 13th 1984 for 3 weeks in California and a little longer on the east coast. It grossed over 28 million dollars with a good response from both audiences and critics. It was not bad, but it got a little buried under all of the movies that came out that summer.
- White Fire July 5, 1984
- The Public Woman July 7, 1984
- The Gods Must Be Crazy July 13, 1984
- The Muppets Take Manhattan July 13, 1984
- The Last Starfighter July 13, 1984
- Splatter University July 13, 1984
- The Neverending Story July 20, 1984
- Electric Dreams July 20, 1984
- Revenge of the Nerds July 20, 1984
- Best Defense July 20, 1984
- One Deadly Summer July 20, 1984
- Meatballs Part II July 27, 1984
- Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers
- July 27, 1984
- Purple Rain July 27, 1984
- The Mutilator August 1, 1984
- Grandview, U.S.A. August 3, 1984
- The Philadelphia Experiment August 3, 1984
- Joy of Sex August 3, 1984
- Red Dawn August 10, 1984
- Cloak & Dagger August 10, 1984
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension August 15, 1984
- The Woman in Red August 15, 1984
- Dreamscape August 15, 1984
- Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight August 17, 1984
- Wheels on Meals August 17, 1984
- Tightrope August 17, 1984
- Sheena August 17, 1984
- Cal August 24, 1984
- Oxford Blues August 24, 1984
- The Jigsaw Man August 24, 1984
- C.H.U.D. August 31, 1984
- Bolero August 31, 1984
Of all of these movies, my mom picked Neverending Story for us to see in the movie theater, which we loved. However later on, like maybe a year later or so I saw it with everybody else on HBO. They had a way of replaying the same movies over and over, so I saw it over and over and over again like many other kids during the 1980’s. There is where it gained a cult following.
Surprisingly there were no toys to accompany the film release, but at some point there was a Marvel comic and a novelization as I mentioned before.
Atari produced a 2600 version as Solaris and the 5200 version was released as Star Raiders 2.
In 2007 there was a musical based on the movie as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival.
You can see some influences or creative similarities in movies like Ender's Game 2013, Galaxy Quest 1999, Pixels 2015, Wreck-it Ralph 2012, and Ready Player one 2018.
Besides anticipating a game after the film was released, many fans had always wondered about a sequel. The way the film ends, Alex takes Maggie to Rylos to live there and help rebuild the Legion of Starfighters. Xur is still alive. On earth Alex’s brother Louis plays the game in hopes of being the next Starfighter.
In 2009 there was an announcement that a sequel (titled "Starfighter") was going into production and would take place twenty-five years after the original film. That project vanished and then was announced to happen again in April 2018 as a reboot this time. I wasn’t too keen on that idea because for the modern day this premise is not new, fresh or groundbreaking anymore.
Then in 2020, a sequel was announced since screenwriter Jonathan R. Betuel finally laid claim to ownership rights to do it. A short video was released on YouTube to preview this project.
I for one am curious about a sequel. As I thought about it, the special feeling that we get from this story at the end is one of a kind. Any other exploration of a continuation of the story would indeed change the tone of the film completely, but there is a unique opportunity to explore the many cultures of the aliens in the Star League and beyond. It could be a lot of fun. I also wouldn't mind a series either, so we can have some time to catch up to 30 years of storytelling.
There are a few people that don’t even think that there is a continuation, because of the exaggerated unrealistic moments that feel like the story is Alex’s fantasy. A trailer park kid saves the Galaxy!
This film really speaks to Generation X in a beautiful time capsule that picks you up and drops you right in the smack of the 1980s. It may seem like a fun dumb movie at the outset, but it's not. Watch this one a few times, and you’ll discover so many little details about the film, easily missed the first time.
Well Starfighters, dreamers and believers "May the luck of the Seven Pillars of Gulu be with you at all times!”
My Rating:
8.6
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. If you did, I’ve got over 100 of these videos, so go on and browse the channel to see more reviews from me like this. Subscribe if you haven’t done so already and hit the bell icon to be the first to be notified of my next video. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off!
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