By Reclusive Writer Matt K, who has Spawn chained up in a bathroom with a dull hacksaw.
(Someone please help me, I can't get out....Anyone?? HELLO!!!!)
The Last Starfighter(1984)
Cast
Lance Guest
Robert Preston
Catherine Mary Stewart
Norman Snow
Dan O'Herlihy
Director
Nick Castle
So how to describe this story...the briefest would be to say Star Wars minus the Jedi stuff set in the here and now. Okay, so a bit more elaboration: Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a trailer park handyman, yearns to escape the mundanity of his life. However, instead of studying for college loans and scholarships, he prefers to spend his free time playing Starfighter, an arcade game too good for where its at. However, despite the universal credo of parents everywhere, Alex's video game playing does do him good, as the breaking of the high score automatically drafts Alex into the Rylan Starfighter Corps, where he is tasked with fighting the Rylans battle for them against the Ko-Dan Armada, led by Xur (Snow), a Rylan traitor. At first, Alex refuses, obviously needing to get back to the oppressive lifestyle he'd been bitching about all through the movie. Luckily, after the other Starfighters are destroyed in a sneak attack, Alex pulls his head out of his ass and goes back to defeat the Ko-Dan through button-mashing and the severe ineptitude of the enemy. Alex is given a heroes welcome to from both the Rylans and the trailer park, where he goes to pick up his girlfriend (Stewart) since he needs to rebuild the Starfighter Corps and no one there probably matches him anatomically for some heroic fucking. And thus the saga of the Last Starfighter begins!...and ends.
This film plays out like lame Mary Sue Star Wars fan fiction altered to avoid copyright infringement (and would go unrivaled until the release of Eragon). What no one bothered to tell the writers is that the Star Wars Trilogy had ended the year before, the bad rip-offs had already come and gone, and no one really wanted to see more of the same repackaged with 80's CGI. And while the Star Wars Trilogy contained many incredibly memorable characters, most of the characters here are pretty much forgettable. Perhaps the best character is Centauri (Preston, his final role), the creator of the arcade game Alex plays. The aliens, aside from a few of the Starfighters, come off as Battlestar Galactica rejects. The Rylans are the worst example, being nothing more than balding white people who chew scenery like it were made of Laffy Taffy (and Xur is the worst of them), and considering they are not only responsible for the shit hitting the fan but also for creating the Starfighters, one has to wonder why they are opting to stay off the front lines. Grig(O'Herlihy), Alex's co-pilot, is a poor man's Chewbacca, and you'll be begging to hear the fuzzball's grunts and growls instead of this guy's old man wheeze-laughs. As for the trailer park residents, they're just there to show how much Alex wishes to leave the shit hole, and the prime example I'll describe at the end of this section. Once Alex goes into space, you'll forget these guys until the story deems it necessary how much Alex's Beta Unit (Guest, unsurprisingly) is fucking up what little social life he had.
Speaking of 80's CGI, all the space ships and space sequences are fully created with the future animation staple (with the minor but incredibly noticeable exception of every explosion). While impressive for its time, it's really no more than a quaint experiment and a means of saving money. Return of the Jedi utilized no CGI for its space battles, and quite honestly they still look good today, and that was a year before this film. Still, for CGI before Terminator 2, it is great, perhaps second behind Tron.
As a final note, I would like to say how personally horrifying Alex's shithead little brother (Christ Herbert) is. We first see this kid as he pretty much ignores his mother;s protests that he not shoot at their neighbors with a pellet gun, making Bamm Margera look downright polite and considerate in comparison. Later, we see that he has an extensive collection of Playboy magazines, as if he has a subscription, and considering the little shit hasn't even dropped his pair, let alone know what to do with it, this just comes off as stupid rather than humorous. At the end, he's at the arcade machine to practice for his chance to become part of his older brother's Starfighter Corps. I'd have signed the kid up immediately, hoping the little fucker crashes into the first meteor he passes.
Gamer Culture Exposed
One would suspect that the video game industry secretly funded this film, banking that all the kids coming out of the theater would begin pumping quarters into Space Invaders in hopes that all the time and money they've previously committed to what was, so far, just a quaint hobby. Sure, we've all joked about it, but none of us came out of two-hour sessions of Street Fighter II knowing kung-fu.
And let's be honest, college loans are not refused because you come from a shit hole trailer park. They are competitive and accomplishment-based, and poor Alex just doesn't want to admit that he probably put just a little too much time wishing and pumping quarters instead of...you know...STUDYING. Sure, Alex got lucky this time, but are we all to put hope that we'll be recruited into some video game related force or league that will serve as our career? How many girls do you know immediately dropped what they were doing to become hookers after seeing Pretty Woman?
Once again, we get ANOTHER scene where everyone watches the main character play a game. What elevates this to a more ludicrous degree is Alex's boss calling all trailer park residents from whatever mundane task they were doing to watch. What's worse, the fact that no one has nothing better to do or that Alex considers this the highlight of his life?
It's odd that the moviemakers didn't seek to create a game tie-in for this movie, although they do allude to one in the credits. Perhaps they were afraid our warped, fragile minds would feel they were being recruited into the Rylan Star League? Paranoid? Not so fast! Seems that someone, perhaps in the army, recently saw this and developed America's Army with the sole purpose of opening a gamer's eyes to the opportunities of utilizing their 1337 shooting skills in a real world setting. With this in mind, the film seems to become a 90 minute recruitment message for the military. "Hey guy, not good enough to get into college? Come join the Starfighter League!" Hey, scoff all you want, but just make sure you read the fine print during the demo mode of the next game you play, or you may find yourself digging a foxhole in some morally-ambiguous war...excuse me, freedom force.
Availability
This isn't too hard to find on DVD. Plenty of copies are available at perfectly affordable prices. It even made the jump to high definition last year when it was released on HD-DVD. Yep, 20 years later and the producers are STILL making dated, bone-headed decisions.
Pretty much nostalgia is what drives this film, so if you enjoyed it back in the 80s, you'll probably like it now (I obviously missed it). If you were born afterwards and saw Star Wars, you'll really only see this as a laugh. Still, nostalgia has brought about an off-broadway musical...for what that's worth.
Formula
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