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The other day I watched The Last Starfighter, which is a film that somehow, I’m not quite sure why, I’ve never managed to see before.
The Last Starfighter is best known for being one of the first films to extensively use computer graphics to provide the special effects, and it was always this film and Tron that were the standard bearers for many years. Whilst a modern games console could easily recreate graphics of the same quality today in realtime, back then this was a new technique and the end results were the state of the art.
A quick plot recap then. Alex Rogan is a teenager who lives and works on a trailer park in back-of-nowhere America. He’s bored with his life and desperately wants to leave to go to University and take his girlfriend Maggie with him. The only thing he has to occupy his time is an arcade game called Starfighter.
Alex becomes quite adept at the game, which it turns out is actually a training simulator for a real space fleet called the Rylan Star League, who are at war with the evil (of course) Ko-Dan Armada. Alex is whisked away in a space craft (which looks stunningly like a DeLorean with a big chunky extension on the back) by a chap name Centauri and is told he has been chosen to become a real Starfighter.
Alex is shocked by all this, and asks to be returned home. Whilst Centauri takes him back, the Ko-Dan Armada launch an attack which kills all the other Starfighters.
Back on Earth Alex is surprised to find the Centauri had replaced him with a robotic double so that he wouldn’t be missed, and is even more surprised when an alien hitman tries to kill him. He therefore returns to become the Last Starfighter and help defeat the Ko-Dan Armada.
Whilst the computerised special effects are what the film is most famous for, the more traditional make up effects are generally very good too. Whilst some of the aliens look a bit naff (I’m thinking particularly of the bug eyed alien hitman, who’s mouth is above it’s eyes) most look quite realistic looking. In particular Grig, who becomes Alex’s navigator, has a great reptilian look but still manages to convey a lot of emotion, whilst the prune like aliens of the Ko-Dan Armada are also quite interesting to look at.
All in all I’m glad I watched it. It took me back to a time when I used to look forward to the video rental shop finally getting some big Hollywood blockbuster in that I was desperate to see but which had been on at the cinema a year or two previously.
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Did you see what else was on at the weekend? Battle Beyond The Stars!
Really! D’oh! I’d have loved to have seen that again. Must have hired that from the video shop several times when I was a kid.
John Boy Walton in space, what else do you need…
Actually, truthfully despite having watched it several times in my youth I don’t remember much about it now other than John Boy being in it, and I think there was some kind of space cowboy character.
…. who was George Peppard !
Robert Vaughan’s in it too.
Would this be a good point to mention I have it on (region 1) DVD?
Ooh, ooh, ooh! May I borrow? 😉
Yes. Pick it up when you come over. Which reminds me I must reply to that email….
Oh, what a fantastic movie! I watch it probably six times a year! It’s one of those things that never age, bit like a certain Guns N Roses album… but I digress. Incidentally, the guy who played Grig in TLS also played the Old Man in Robocop, and appeared in four episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E (with of course, Robert Vaughn, who was in BBTS). Oh, let’s keep this going; he appeared in one episode of Bonanza, which had Lorne Greene of Battlestar Galactica fame in a lead role (O’Herlihy played Dr. Ravishol in the Battlestar episode “The Gun On Ice Planet Zero”). Oh yeah, and the guy who played Maga, one of the Borellian Nomen in “Baltar’s Escape” among other BsG episodes (Lance LeGault) was Decker in the A-Team – back to George Peppard and BBTS… sorry, I can’t do six degrees of separation for TLS, it’s too early in the morning…