The Last Starfighter (1984)

A video-gaming boy, seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all his life, finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force.

Director:

Nick Castle

Writer:

Jonathan R. Betuel

Stars:

Lance Guest, Dan O'Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart

4 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Lance Guest	...	Alex Rogan / Beta Alex
Dan O'Herlihy	...	Grig
Catherine Mary Stewart	...	Maggie Gordon
Barbara Bosson	...	Jane Rogan
Norman Snow	...	Xur
Robert Preston	...	Centauri
Kay E. Kuter	...	Enduran
Dan Mason	...	Lord Kril
Chris Hebert	...	Louis Rogan
John O'Leary	...	Rylan Bursar
George McDaniel	...	Kodan Officer
Charlene Nelson	...	Rylan Technician
John Maio	...	Friendly Alien
Robert Starr	...	Underling
Al Berry	...	Rylan Spy

Storyline

Alex Rogan lives in a trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. He beats the Starfighter video game to the applause of everyone in the court and later that day finds he has been turned down for a student loan for college. Depressed, he meets Centauri, who introduces himself as a person from the company that made the game, before Alex really knows what is going on he is on the ride of his life in a "car" flying through space. Chosen to take the skills he showed on the video game into real combat to protect the galaxy from an invasion. Alex gets as far as the Starfighter base before he really realized that he was conscripted and requests to be taken back home. When he gets back home, he finds a Zando-Zan (alien bounty hunter) is stalking him. Unable to go home and live, Alex returns to the Starfighter base to find all the pilots have been killed and he is the galaxy's only chance to be saved from invasion. To defeat the invaders, who are ...

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Plot Keywords:

alien | trailer park | planet | spacecraft | handyman | 

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Taglines:

Alex Rogan is a small town teenager with big time dreams. Dreams of college... of success... of marrying his girlfriend, Maggie. He's just like everybody else, except Alex has a very special talent... that no one on Earth can appreciate. But, tonight, a mysterious stranger has called on Alex. He's come from a galaxy that's under attack from an alien force. And Alex's unique ability is their last hope.

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Genres:

Action | Adventure | Family | Sci-Fi

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Certificate:

PG

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

13 July 1984 (USA)

Also Known As:

Az utolsó csillagharcos

Filming Locations:

Santa Clarita, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$15,000,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Lorimar Film Entertainment, Universal Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

101 min

Sound Mix:

70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints) Dolby (35 mm prints)

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

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Goofs

When Alex first meets the Beta Unit, he already appears to have Alex's facial features and hair - albeit in silhouette. However, he is later taking form with skin and facial features growing over a robotic skeleton.

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Quotes

Beta: [to a startled Louis, while working on his detached head and sitting at a work bench] Louis, you're having a terrible nightmare. Go back to sleep.

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Connections

Referenced in The Nostalgia Critic: Free Willy (2010)

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Soundtracks

"Red Eyes"
(Craig Safan & Mark Mueller)
Performed by Clif Magness

User Reviews

The Father of all CGI movies

If you run through the end credits you will see names like Jeffery Okun (Independence Day) and Jim Rygiel (Lord of the Rings and Starship Troopers) as well as several other people for whom this might have been their first film- It is certainly the first feature length film with a lot of CGI... Considering that the Macintosh had not even been invented yet, and the only PC was the IBM PC/XT, it is an incredible feat of CGI for the time, this was a time when "computer" did not mean a PC with XP or Vista installed, it meant a Box with Plugs, and you had to buy peripherals and hook them up, and some computers did not even have a monitor, the Printers just echoed what you typed on the keyboard- Hence the term in a DOS "Autoexec.Bat" file- "Echo On" which was the command to tell the PC to "print" what you typed onto the printer, which was likely a huge Dot-matrix monstrosity.

When you think of the State of the Art in 1983 and the SOA Now... It is amazing that the special effects department ever was able to get this done. At that time, there were not even any Hard Disk Drives for storage medium. So it is not surprising at all that they had to borrow a Cray for this.

This is a very fine film... I rented it from Von's back in 1984 on a beta tape and watched it with my mom, and she liked it as well. She really liked the characters of Grig and Centauri.

Just to make a comment here about the look of the "aliens" - Which look like Minbari from Babylon-5. But if you look close, you can virtually detect pieces of set that ended up in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and in Star Trek: The Next Generatiion. I refer to the Table on the Command ship around which the commanders are clustered, and also, in the Starfighter base, there is a little gizmo that lies on it's side, with two long glass tubes through which Ruby laser is being fed- This was part of Beverly Crusher's Apparatus on the Enterprise D. So in a way, if this film had not been made, a lot of the look of some of the places in ST:TNG would have been different, including Engineering in ST:TNG, which ended up with that Table from the Command Ship. I would know those set pieces anywhere... And if anyone has seen "Bladerunner: Dangerous Days" They would see that indeed, lots of pieces made for other films end up in unlikely places, and in Bladerunner, whenever the Spinners fly over a city scene, if you look carefully you can see, The Millennium Falcon, pointed upright.

The non-cgi parts of this story are filmed just as well as any of the scifi fare of the day... The only weakness in my opinion is the blending of the CGI shots to the filmed stock. It is amazing the the CGI work was done on a Cray Supercomputer- And it is far from the hero work on LOTR, King Kong, Iron Man... But for its time, it was great. I remember when I first saw it, I actually liked the look... If you think about it, the stark CGI look of the starfighters, and the Frontier, and the base, and the command ship: It is all very much like a video game, and so this fits in very well with the plot of an alien man parking a "Starfighter Test" disguised as a video game in a trailer park in order to find Starfighters for this little episode.

It is as if Alex's whole POV is as if the video game has been expanded to a much larger scale. I immensely enjoyed the "Death Blossom" gag, it had humor and class. The HUD probably was influential for games like Descent Freespace and Mech Warrior 2.

The idea of having a personal robot to take ones place in uncomfortable circumstances is explored in this film, much to Alex's chagrin with his girlfriend.

I find the character actors in this well chosen, including Meg Wylie (One of the Talosians from the Pilot Star Trek Episode "The Cage") as Maggie's Grandmother, who at the end of the film gives a kind of "Salute" from Trek to Starfighter- Of you look close for it.

It would please me, and a large amount of fans no end to have a new "Special Effects" version of this film where the CGI could be run through a few things to give it a bit more realism, but that may spoil the FPS (First Person Shooter) effect of the film.