Greetings, Tor.commers! You have been recruited by, uh, me, to come along for the ride in my Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia… ship!
Okay, I didn’t think that one through. BUT, you should click on anyway, for today’s entry in the MRGN is 1984’s The Last Starfighter! Grab the wifeoid and your six thousand Griglets and settle in!
Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.
And now, the post!
It’s amazing what context will do to change your perception of a thing. Especially when that thing is a thing you first experienced/noticed/consumed in a period of your life (i.e. childhood) that by its very nature is devoid of any but the vaguest amounts of context. Not because the context isn’t there, of course, but because you just don’t have the maturity or the breadth of knowledge to perceive it.
I would venture to theorize that it is this—this ability to contextualize entertainment—that makes the most difference between how you feel about something as a child versus how you feel about that thing as an adult. Certainly in the course of the MRGN so far, that has seemed to be the case. Mainly because when it comes to entertainment aimed at a younger audience, there seems to be two schools of thought. One takes the much more difficult (but ultimately, in my estimation, the far more rewarding) route of creating a sort of “upper layer” to the story, which entertains adults while not disturbing the simpler perceptions of the children also watching it.
And then there’s the other one. Which, er, doesn’t bother with that layer.
To find the former kind of children’s entertainment, see movies like Willow or Ghostbusters, for examples within the MRGN so far. Or, basically any Pixar movie ever made, for examples of movies I am super sad mostly fall outside the purview of the MRGN altogether, since the majority of them came out when I was no longer a child by any reasonable definition. Sigh.
For examples of the latter, on the other hand… well. Let’s just say, The Last Starfighter most definitely falls into the category of “no layers”. What you see is pretty much exactly what you get. And what you see (and what you get) is a movie made in the heart of the early ’80s craze for (a) anything concerning aliens and outer space, and (b) video arcade games.
I think it might be somewhat difficult for someone who didn’t grow up during the late ’70s-early ’80s to appreciate what a tremendous thing the video arcade phenomenon actually was. By now (and for at least the last twenty years, if not longer) video games have just been… things that exist. They are awesome, of course, and constantly improving, and frequently ground-breaking, but they are also just there. They are nearly as ubiquitous and commonplace to the modern-day kid as TVs or microwaves were to my generation. However wonderful video games are to my young nephews, for instance, they are also just… expected. To them, gaming has always been around, and as far as they are concerned there was never a world without it.
But when I was growing up, young whippersnapper, video games of either the home or arcade variety were not just awesome and fun, but they were something new. Amazingly so. They were something never conceived of before. The idea of being able to interact with an electronic storytelling device, however crude, rather than just passively watching it or listening to it… well, it was just astounding. From the first time I ever played Pong on my neighbor’s super-swank Atari home system, my awe of the concept was set. Even though I’ve never been the most avid gamer over the years (mostly for lack of time and/or funds), I still love video games, and still love the idea of them. That conceptual awe took decades to wear off for me; in fact I’m not sure that it has, or ever will.
But my point is, at the time that fascination was a palpable force in the zeitgeist of early ’80s youth culture, that could neither be denied nor ignored. Though I guarantee you this never happened when you won a video game, even in 1984:
LOL.
But even so, it was entirely inevitable that someone was going to try to capitalize on the video arcade phenomenon in movie form. I mean, duh.
1982’s Tron was the first, and deservedly the most famous, but The Last Starfighter tapped even more blatantly (one might say, shamelessly) into the nascent gaming culture of the time. Basically this movie is the fantasy made manifest of every kid in 1984 who dreamed that his skill in shooting imaginary aliens via the likes of games like Space Invaders, Galaga, Defender, or any of their myriad imitators/competitors would lead to greatness in real life. You—no, YOU—have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada!
Which is great and fun and (evidently) all you need when you’re a pew-pew-pew Galaga-obsessed kid. But when you aren’t that anymore, and have gotten a bit more invested in dreary adult things like plot consistency and character development, well, then things get a bit more… slapdash.
At least, that’s what Kate and I think; our one-word reviews of the movie were “silly” and “ridiculous”, respectively. Liz maintains that we are being entirely too hard on the film (“C’mon, it was fun!”), but reluctantly concedes that she couldn’t in conscience actually recommend the movie to anyone.
This is not to say we didn’t enjoy watching The Last Starfighter, because we did. But we mostly enjoyed it because we were laughing at it, and its hilariously brazen lack of depth. Or sense.
Granted, sometimes we were laughing with it, because it definitely had its genuinely funny comedic moments. Mostly owed to the antics of “Beta”, our hero Alex’s sarcastic android duplicate sent to replace him while Alex is busy saving the galaxy:
They could have made the whole movie about him as far as I was concerned and it would have been a lot better.
But Alex’s shady recruiter, Centauri, also got laughs from us:
Mostly because my mother is a huge fan of musicals, and so we knew without being told that Robert Preston’s performance here was a direct homage to his equally shady con-man-with-a-heart-of-gold starring role in 1962’s The Music Man (though I don’t remember whether we made that connection as kids). Turns out this was one of Preston’s last roles before passing away, so I’m glad at least that he seemed to have had great fun with it.
There was an awful lot of homaging going on in this movie in general, actually. The biggest thing we noticed, in fact, was how many elements of The Last Starfighter seemed to reference (or, if you want to be less charitable, rip off) something else. There were suspiciously Star Wars-esque aliens:
And suspiciously Superman-like fonts for the credits:
And even suspiciously WarGames-ish sets:
Though not all the sets referenced that one:
ME: Many Bothans died to bring us this screen shot.
And I know this is referencing or being referenced by something else, but I can’t place it:
Then there were the even more bizarre elements, that seemed to reference things which didn’t actually exist yet.
LIZ: I didn’t know DeLorean time machines came in “minivan”.
KATE: Ferengi hair!
Even the targets Grig has Alex practice on look exactly like the magnetic mines used in Galaxy Quest:
Speaking of Grig, um, Enemy Mine much?
I don’t really know whether these similarities are coincidences or not, but we kept being startled by them anyway. My absolute favorite, though, was embodied in the villain of the piece, Xur:
LIZ: OMG IT’S MUGATU.
He really was. Again, I have no idea if Will Ferrell got direct inspiration for his ridiculous overblown villain from this particular ridiculous overblown villain, or if there’s just this Platonically ridiculous ideal of overblown villainry out there that both of them sprung from independently, but wow.
(It’s probably Ian Fleming’s fault, ultimately.)
Anyway. The Last Starfighter is also notable for being one of the very first films to use CGI imagery, not just for screen graphics and such, but for physical objects and environments:
The CGI-ness of it is distractingly primitive and unrealistic now, but I remember thinking at the time that it was the very obviousness of the effects’ digital origins that made it so cool, because it was like you were in the video game, man!
So, yeah, The Last Starfighter is cheesy and absurd. But we did have a lot of fun with it.
ME: Prime Directive LOL.
KATE: Hi honey! I was in space! It was full of death! You should come!
LIZ: No thinking! Just get in! Whee!
(As an aside, it says something that my sisters and I are so used to having to pretend, both in 1984 and now, that adventure fantasies clearly aimed solely at boys are also for us that we didn’t even bother to remark on it. But it should be remarked upon, because it’s still true thirty-two years later, and that’s just sad.)
Centauri: “This is a Zando-Zan, an interstellar hitbeast.”
ALL THREE OF US: INTERSTELLAR HITBEAST.
KATE: That is the best pair of words ever.
ME: “Interstellar Hitbeast” is the name of my Scandinavian death metal band.
LIZ: You bet your asteroids it is.
Oh, and randomly, apparently Wil Wheaton is in this movie? We saw it in the credits and were like, WTF. I wasted a rather insane amount of time trying to find him, and finally realized that this was his appearance in the movie:
Welp. Never mind, I guess!
So, in conclusion! The Last Starfighter is not a good movie. But it was fun to make fun of, that’s for sure. And its nostalgia value is pretty high, especially if you were or are into gaming. If your contact embarrassment threshold isn’t too high, and you have a sufficient amount of alcohol and sarcastic sisters and/or friends to watch it with, it might even be worth your while.
And thus ends the MRGN for now, kids, with our usual Nostalgia Love to Reality Love 1-10 Scale of Awesomeness!
Nostalgia: 8
Reality: …ehhh, we’ll give it a 6 for the laughs
And that’s what I got for now! Come back in two weeks, when the MRGN comes back down to earth—sort of—for what promises to be a very entertaining viewing of that Schwarznegger and Nielsen not-classic, Red Sonja! Except then I realized two weeks from now is almost Halloween, and we just can’t pass up a chance to do something appropriate to the season, so instead we decided we wanted more Fairuza Balk – and Tim Curry! – in our lives, and thus you should come back Thursday next to check out my review of 1986’s The Worst Witch! Whoo! See you then!
I liked the humanness of this movie. The rundown trailer park that was like a family. The little brother was fun, too dealing with the fake Alex.
I hadn’t thought about all the borrowing of other movie plots:
Alex, like Luke Skywalker,is going nowhere living in a backwater existence. No money for school, no prospects. He has a skill, though.
“Back to the Future” he has a loyal, disposable girlfriend who sits out all the action. Also he is bullied by the cooler kids
“Ender’s Game” Make believe training turns into the real thing.
Anyhow, I always liked this movie, even if it was cheesy. I am old enough to remember the first video games and the skills involved.
Started well, that sentence… not quite a “timey wimey” metaphor, bu tpretty good.
Isn’t this where that classic exchange comes from:
Alien 1: But what do we do now?
Alien 2: We die.
And don’t forget those killer automatic bifocals!
The big battle at the end doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you assume that the Ko-Dan emperor only gave Xur one aircraft carrier because he didn’t trust Xur.
Wow, I loved this movie as a kid. I’m sad to find out that it wouldn’t stand up to a rewatch now.
Regarding the effects, I remember reading magazine articles about how entire movies could someday be animated solely using computer, and young me pooh-poohing the idea because it would take a whole room of computers and couldn’t possibly be cheaper than hand animation. Ah, how we underestimate exponentials.
Was there ever an actual tie-in arcade game?
And am I the only one who gets kind of surprisingly upset when I’m watching an SF movie and they’re using a line of closely-spaced satellites to demark the “border” between two regions?
#4 @StrongDreams – If the big battle at the end HAD made sense it would have stood out as completely in contrast with everything that had already happened in the movie.
This review sums up the movie quite well. I remember going to the theater to see this as a kid with such high expectations, and coming away thinking “Meh.” I didn’t dislike it, but even at age 13 I could tell that this was not high quality storytelling. I suppose when it comes to video games and Hollywood that’s not unusual. Wreck-It Ralph is probably the deepest movie in the genre.
“THE FRONTIER” shot is very similar to one in The Fifth Element, but it could be a coincidence, as they are both trying to represent the same silly idea.
I loved this movie as a kid. Haven’t seen it in 30 or so years, so I can’t judge its worthiness for rewatch. But for a kid in the 80s, this move was AWESOME!
“We die.”
Best death scene ever!!!
Skwid @8:
The Fifth Element! That’s what I was thinking of, thank you.
And yeah, as a concept it was dumb in both movies.
Sigh. I loved this movie as a kid.
@8, 11:
Well, its no worse than the asteroid fields in every SF movie ever. You can’t actually SEE two asteroids at the same time in a real asteroid field.
I saw this, like so many other cheesy 80s movie, at our Drive-in… so that always makes the experience better. I really miss drive-ins.
When are you doing Gremlins?
Those who liked this movie should really check out Ernest Cline’s Armada. It follows roughly the same setup, but with an MMO instead of an arcade cabinet, and actually makes reference to The Last Starfighter, for a bit of meta-context.
#14 There’s still drive-in theaters out there, Anthony, but you’ve got to hunt for them. Assuming you live in the US, here’s a site to help find the nearest to you. Cheers.
http://drive-ins.com/
I’d have to go with the people who said this movie was awesome on first watch, which was in theaters. I also agree that drive-ins made movies like this just that much more awesome and growing up, our movie theater was a drive-in cinema. The best way to recreate this in many large cities in the US is to visit one of the parks that have the open air cinemas many summers. I’ve experienced this in five cities so far and know it exists in others that I’ve not caught a movie in. The only real drawback to those is that booze is frowned upon, so no drinking games or anything like that (at least not visibly) for something like this.
And yes, for “We die” this deserves better than essentially a D- for ‘Reality.’
Grig rerouting power after the Death Blossom with the 9V battery connector dangling on the circuit board is the best moment in the entire film. Oohweeohhh, Oohweeohhh “Weapons on. We have them now. Fire! Fire!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLN36pgwS5o
He also had some of the better lines.
“Yes, one Gunstar against the Armada. I’ve always wanted to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds.”
I loved this film as a kid. It still makes me smile.
THIS IS THE ONE.
Every single space movie that’s been mentioned in the MGRN so far (I don’t know how many that’s been) I’m like, wait, is this the one with the guy who’s good at video games and gets space-recruited?
My dad LOVES this movie and would make me and my brother watch it fairly often because it was his FAVORITE.
So I posted your rewatch on his FB wall Leigh – I’ll let you know what he says.
ShaggyBella @@@@@ 1: I actually thought about the Ender’s Game connection but forgot to mention it. Kudos for pointing it out.
StrongDreams @@@@@4: I forgot how the “plot” for the conflict went almost as soon as I saw it, because clearly the actual plot of the movie was of the least concern to anyone involved, so I’ll take your word for it.
hoopmanjh @@@@@6: On further research, apparently there were plans for a game but it never actually happened? http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8394
And no, you are not the only one.
Anthony Pero @@@@@14 & 15: I’ve never seen a movie at a drive-in. It’s something I really would like to fix someday.
Gremlins is on the list, but we likely won’t get to it terribly soon.
SunDriedRainbow @@@@@ 20: I look forward to hearing his thoughts!
I love this movie! (I was 19 when it came out, and smoking lots of dope.) Yeah, the plot, whatever. But the lines! The reference to King Arthur! (he’s done this before…) I wonder if JMS got his idea for the design of the Centauri in B5 from this? The CGI! IIRC, it was done on a Cray Supercomputer. Today you could render it, in realtime, on a $400 tablet.
If I’m channel surfing and come across it I still stop and watch.
Definitely like the premise, wasn’t entirely sold on the execution but still enjoyed it then – and now, too. My kid saw it about four or five years ago and still praises it, so it’ll still work for that age. Nostalgia for this movie feeds into my anticipation for Speilberg’s take on “Ready Player One”.
Re: the whole crowd cheering when the guy beats the game never happening:
Well, no. Not like that. Not old men and women and a crowd of 20.
However, back in the day when Mortal Kombat had first come out, our college got one of them in the Student Union. They had the volume absolutely cranked – you could hear it out in the bowling alley even though the arcade was enclosed. You put a quarter in and it made that SHEEOWN!!! sound and people would perk up and come to watch this amazingly realistic and violent looking game.
I had access to this thing called USENET and used that to find all of the special moves and fatalities for every character. For about a 2 day span, I was the king of Mortal Kombat. I’d have crowds of 10-12 people all watching as I tore out spines, punched off heads, and ripped out hearts. And each time I did something they hadn’t seen yet, there would be a collective ‘OH!’ from the crowd.
What a time to be alive. It’s all been downhill from there.
@21:
Make sure you go with 15-20 of your closest friends. All piled up in one car. Its part of the charm ;)
For context, our Drive-in, and many drive ins, used to have an individual price, or you could pay by the car load, which was about the same as 4 people. We once had 4 people in the front seat, 7 in the back, and 3 in the trunk. Not exactly street legal, lol.
I used to spend 5-6 nights a month in the summer at the drive in as a teen. It was great. Bring three or four cars full of people. Well, it was great for us, I’m not so sure it was great for everyone else there, lol.
My favorite drive-in memory:
One night in 1997, we decided to sneak in to the drive in to see the second show (drive ins often feature double or even triple features for the same price). We had four screens there, so we drove in through the exit and ended up watching Face/Off, with Nic Cage and John Travolta. Worst movie I’ve ever seen this side of Battlefield: Earth.
There were about 20 of us there, and the movie was horrible, so we weren’t really behaving well. Long story short, by the time the final chase scene (by land/by sea/by air/by sea/by air/by land) was wrapping up, my friend Joe got out of the car he was in and starting kicking rocks and screaming at the top of his lungs, “I have no idea what’s going on, or who’s who anymore! Somebody just die already so I can go home! Anybody! I don’t care who!”
We just about die laughing, and then nearly every car started honking their horns at him and flashing their lights, pretty soon the entire lot we were in had people out of their cars shouting “Somebody die already!” It was pretty funny.
We got kicked out.
@leigh and @24:
I definitely had a crowd of people at our local arcade the first time my friend and I beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and they cheered. It was more like 12 people, and it took like, 2 hours, and we spent about $65 in quarters, but nobody had beaten it yet since they got it in at the bowling alley.
We also drew a crowd playing the Star Wars Trilogy arcade game at the movie theater in 1997. You sit inside it, but the game had two screens, and one was visible from the outside of the game’s cockpit. We ended up running out of money before we beat it (we took turns during respawn after someone died, it wasn’t a two player game), and people kept giving us quarters. No cheering, but lots of “Awwww!” when we’d die. People stopped giving us money in the final death star run scene, when it became obvious that “one more run” wasn’t going to make any difference, lol.
I’d like to second LazerWulf (aka #16)’a recommendation of Ernest Cline’s Armada. It’s received mixed-to-negative reviews, primarily because, apparently, it’s not as good as Ready Player One. wasI wouldn’t know (I haven’t read RPO), but I do know that Armada was a lot of fun. It carries a distinct ’80s-movie vibe!
Speaking of ’80s movies, thanks for the review and for the series, Leigh! This rewatch is – by far – my favorite feature on Tor.com. Being born in the late ’80s, the movies were released before my time, but I still carry a lot of affection for ’em. Thanks for reviewing the films with such warmth and good humor!
Hey guys,
Just a quick note to let you know the post has been updated to reflect that instead of doing Red Sonja next time, we decided it would be more appropriate to the Halloween season to indulge in our need for more Fairuza Balk – and Tim Curry! – in our lives, and review 1986’s The Worst Witch instead! Huzzah!
This movie came out three years after I graduated from college. We enjoyed it a lot.
One of the key points of the CGI was actually in the scene with The Frontier, if I remember correctly. They generated a rainbow effect, which meant there was no green screen or blue screen or whatever. All the colors were available.
Also, my friends and I loved The Frontier. We could just image the Cray FORTRAN to generate that.
DO 100 I = 1, 10000000
CALL DRAW_FRONTIER_THING(I)
100 CONTINUE
The Frontier just screamed that it had been generated by a computer. Nobody would even want to do that by hand.
I don’t care what any of you say, The Last Starfighter is/was a GREAT MOVIE!! There should be and Needs to be a Sequel or a Redux for a sequel in the works…This was a little boys fantasy like was said and I dunno if it was because you’re a “girl” or what *wink wink* LOL but man this movie was AWESOME!!
Not since Galaxy Quest has a movie like this existed, where an ordinary person is called upon to save the world/universe because of their “Geekness” And yes this was Preston’s last movie role before his passing :(
I would still like to see an “Honest Trailer” of this movie…it would be fun. BUt a Drunk Movie Night of this flick would be fun too. Try “Catwoman” drunk…HILARIOUS!! buts till a HORRIBLE movie.
In 1975 hubby paid $75 for a gaming machine that played Pong. Just pong, nothing else. In today’s dollars that means he paid the equivalent of $342.00 for it, which meant it took me a month to earn the money to pay for it. Of course, we thought it was AWESOME!! and my kids loved playing it in 1977 when they were two and three years old.
So, when we all went to see “The Last Starfighter” we all loved it because we were a digital family! Love it then. Love it now. Didn’t think it was in the least bit cheesy. I bought it on Video Tape then on a DVD. I like it. So sue me.
@Anthony Pero #14 ~ there are still drive-ins in Ohio. There is one on Elm Road in Niles, Ohio that has three digital screens and a full-sized cafeteria-style eating option, so not only are there two movies but “real” food to eat! Awesome. Also near Youngstown is Skyway Drive-in. Off the turnpike near Cleveland outside of Akron is a double-drive-in. There are still many drive-ins in Ohio, much to the happiness of movie goers. There is one drive-in with a single-screen and “real food” dining options located about 1/2 hour drive from Newark, Ohio, that sometimes has three movies for the price of one, $8.00 per person. I much prefer a drive-in when going to a movie!
It seems like folks are suggesting that some of The Last Starfighter is lifted from sources like Back to the Future, Ender’s Game, and Enemy Mine. I think it’s worth noting that Starfighter was released in 1984 and Back to the Future, Ender’s Game, and Enemy Mine all dropped the following year, in 1985. I’m not suggesting anyone borrowed from anyone else, the production schedules were too tight for that sort of thing and the public knowledge aspect of entertainment that is so prevalent today was still a ways off back then. Things created around that time were working with the same aspects of society and pop culture and it’s not hard to imagine they crossed into similar territory. Starfighter, I think, gets a bad rap these days when people look back on it through the lens of the last 30+ years. It is, after all, responsible for giving us the severely underrated (and in my opinion the slickest space fighter ever to grace the silver screen), the Gunstar.
I saw it as an adult and lived it, still do. And by the way, it has all the elements of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Check it out.
My friends and I got a hold of a version of the Atari 5200 game in 8th grade and used to play it in our computer class when the teacher wasn’t looking.
This is one of my favorite movies. I have the DVD at home I may have to watch again soon. The plot is ridiculous but it’s fun. I always wanted to be recruited by the space armada but I suck at video games. It has some great one liners . I pretty much agree with your review especially for nostalgia factor. My brother loves it too but he was around 8 when it came out. Thanks for all the work on the re-watch. I’ve been having a great time.
The foreheads may be Ferengi, but the hair looks distinctly like a Minbari headbone — so much so that it makes me wonder if JMS was homaging this movie.
I LOVED going to Kmart with my mom because she dropped me off at the small arcade in the store while she shopped. I would play Galaga, Tron, and Ms. Pac-man, and a couple of others I can’t remember. After watching this movie, it was my fantasy that someday, my hours of playing Galaga (or whatever my favorite was at the time [short attention span..squirrel?]) would get me noticed by some intelligent life on another planet. Recognizing my mad skills, they would come to earth (secretly) and take me away from my miserable life, train me and mold me into a super fighting machine, and I would save their planet.
The fantasy goes much deeper, but I will spare the details. Even now as a middle aged man, when I play a video game, the fleeting thought of perhaps some agency or other entity secretly watching my prowess in this game still lingers.
All because of this movie.
Thank you, Leigh Butler, for rewatching and reviewing this movie and helping me relive one of the very few of my teenage memories that are happy. :)
“Speaking of Grig, um, Enemy Mine much?” Please, please, please PLEASE do Enemy MIne!!! And the very excellent movie tie-in book that expanded so much on the short story that was the basis of the film!!! #SQUEE
“Pixels” is as close to a remake/sequel of this classic that’s been offered so far. Decent movie, some higher originality to the characters, good plot. The Last Starfighter remains more enjoyable though, because it’s so for real, totally 80’s. For certain, I second the calls for a true Last Starfighter sequel or remake. And yep…BTTF DeLorean was later, same as Enemy Mine, Fifth Element, and such. The Last Starfighter might be more meaningful than you think, for what it inspired. And yep, the crowd of twenty or so kids that I was in when Mortal Kombat first hit the arcade went nuts, same as trailer park people in Last Starfighter. If anything, I’d say Last Starfighter in many respects is less a relic of, and more of something that was ahead of it’s own time.