SYNOPSICS
The Last Starfighter (1984) is a English movie. Nick Castle has directed this movie. Lance Guest,Robert Preston,Kay E. Kuter,Dan Mason are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1984. The Last Starfighter (1984) is considered one of the best Action,Adventure,Sci-Fi movie in India and around the world.
Alex Rogan lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a massive extended family. He defeats Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game to the applause of everyone in the court and later finds out 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 sports 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 ...
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The Last Starfighter (1984) Reviews
A "gem" from the 80's
This is a lost gem of a movie from the generation of "E.T.", Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc... When a friend showed it to me on VHS in 1984 I loved it for its originality, warmth & humor, as well as being impressed with the first-time computer-generated special effects for this kind of sci-fi film. When I saw the 'special edition' DVD in Widescreen I snatched it right up and found that I enjoyed it as much as I did 20 years ago! The movie's special effects still looked good to me, especially the "Star Car" (my personal favorite). But the special effects are not the centerpiece of this film. It has plenty of charm of its own to offer in plot, story, warmth, humor & good performances. Craig Safan's music score for this film is one of my all-time favorites. It almost outsizes this movie but it fits just the same. "Starfighter" is a real gem from the 80's I will treasure in my movie collection.
Cool really cool
Another film from my youth and fabulous. A kid from a trailer park is recruited to fight in an intergalactic battle against an evil madman and his unstoppable armada in a star fight to the death. And he doesn't want the job. I really got into this one it's totally enjoyable. There is a lot of humor and action mixed quite well. Robert Preston is like butter he's good no matter what. He delivers the quips and jokes with just the right amount of wit and energy. And he warms your heart. I miss that guy I was very sorry to find out he had passed on. I remember him from many films like Beau Geste and the Music Man. I simply cherish this film and many other people do too.
Its not the plot or effects, its the characters that work...
None of the other reviews of this film (at least those that I have seen) understand what makes this movie so wonderful. This is one of the few movies I can recall that treat teenagers with some respect, instead of as cartoon characters. Alex has the same kinds of dreams and problems we all had at the age of 18, but he really does try to do the right thing, even when it goes against his desires. The film does not show the generation gap as a battlefield, but as a fact of life that Alex has to live with, and not one that is entirely negative. This film is totally driven by the characters. The plot, and even the CGI, while groundbreaking for the day, are not the real magic here. It is the characters.
Fantastic Sci-Fi Movie that captures the spirit of 80's Cinema
The story is simple and has probably been retold in every heroic setting possible. It's also a bit of wish fulfillment for those of us that grew up pumping quarters into arcade video games. In my opinion the acting is above average for a movie like this. It is much helped by veteran actors Robert Preston and Dan O'Herlihy. Lance Guest does a great turn as Alex as well. The effects were not appreciated at the time, I think, but hold up fairly well. They were drawn on that Holy Grail of computers to us children of the 80's; a Kray Supercomputer. The score is well done, the humor timed well and the overall good feeling I get from watching it never fades. You can't go wrong with this gem.
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.