"Well you may have thought it was a game, but it was a test. Aha, a test. Sent out across the universe to find those with the gift to be Starfighters."
The dream of every kid who has ever visited an arcade was to one day use their video-game skills to save the world. In 1984, Alex Rogan got his chance. As a young man with big dreams, he seemed all but destined to stay at his trailer park unclogging the toilets for the residents. When one night he breaks the record of the local store video game “Starfighter” he is recruited by a man, who turns out to be an alien and takes him to another planet where he is expected to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
Back when
this came out, it was a totally the kind of movie I could relate to. By this time I had already played Centipede,
Q*bert, Tron, and Star Wars. So to see
this movie where a kid gets a chance to go into space to do what he was really
good at, playing a video game, suffice it to say, I watched that movie a lot and
I played my games with more of a passion.
Unlike other movies that took place in a galaxy far away, here was this
hero’s journey happening in a place that looked like the hill country not too
far from my house.
Watching it
now, it brings back those memories and a new appreciation for films like this
that they don’t really make anymore.
Most movies for young boys are mindless big dumb fun if their anything at
all, like “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”, or the “Transformers” movies. Here we get a conflicted young man who is
thrust into a situation where he has to accept himself hero or not. Which you may be saying, ‘the same thing
happens it the movies I just mentioned, with the Duke and Sam characters
respectively’. But what they lack is the
heart. Those moments you can put
yourself there even if you never been in those exact situations. My favorite exchange is between Alex and
Centauri where he tells Alex about regular men like Columbus and the Wright
brothers who did extraordinary things.
And Alex tells them he’s not like those guys, he’s just a kid from a
trailer park, which Centauri replies: “If that’s what you think, then that’s
all you’ll ever be.” Words to live by.
On a technical
level they did a lot with very little, not counting the groundbreaking early
CGI, the script doesn’t have a lot of fat on it, it still moves along pretty
well, and the humor still worked for me.
Lance Guest as Alex and the afore mentioned Centauri played by Robert
Preston are great to watch even Guest as his own Beta unit is still kinda funny
with the intentional bad wig and all.
The villain is two dimensional and the space stuff is too clean of a 90’s
video game look, but in ’84 it was unique.
And though it’s not Star Wars good, as I said you can go a long way with
a relatable character and circumstances.
While they
do a lot of sequels for their films, Universal doesn’t really do re-makes. But this one is ripe for a remake if done
right, not just with the gaming culture, but you throw a little “October Sky”
in there and you got a classic in the making.
“The Last
Starfighter” is worth a re-watch, if nothing else for that nostalgia of when video-games
seemed like magic and our world seemed bigger and our galaxy, smaller.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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