Most
filmgoers know the name Nick Castle as the guy who was in the Michael Myers
costume on John Carpenter’s legendary horror film Halloween. Fewer however are aware of his own career in
the director’s chair, one which began quietly with the Linda Hamilton starring
videogame to film adaptation TAG: The Assassination Game but quickly
gained momentum with his second feature, the 1984 cult favorite The Last Starfighter. Known to fans as the last starring role of
Robert Preston and among the earliest adopters besides Disney’s Tron to
utilize computer generated imagery, The Last Starfighter joins the
aforementioned Disney film as another one of those movies where the human protagonist
finds himself sucked into the world of an arcade game.
Alex
Rogan (Lance Guest) leads a quiet life in the trailer park with his mom and
younger brother. Bored with his humdrum
life and having failed to enter a scholarship, he whiles away his time playing
an arcade game called Starfighter.
Little does he know, however, that the game’s extraterrestrial creator
Centauri (Robert Preston riffing on The Music Man) is using the game to
recruit new starfighters on an intergalactic battle between good and evil. Something of a Star Wars and Tron hybrid
with a dose of Steven Spielberg sentimentality, The Last Starfighter is a
science-fiction fantasy mismash which proves to be one of the better early
films to be based around a videogame.
For the
time, this sported startling computer visual effects which were created on the
then Cray X-MP supercomputer. But not
everything consisted of digitally rendered spaceships engaged in
dogfighting. The Last Starfighter also
employs a fair amount of practical effects including original designs by Star
Wars and Alien graphic artist Ron Cobb. Centauri’s Starcar, for instance, was
reportedly a rejected design for the flying cars in Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner. Though dated, seen now the
early CG effects work help cement the film as something of a time capsule.
Lance
Guest and the supporting cast members are good but Preston completely steals
the show in every scene he appears in.
Despite the years between The Music Man and The Last
Starfighter, the showmanship from Preston remains infectiously charming
with an energy which electrifies the screen.
For all of the visual effects wizardry and videogame concepts being
dealt with at a time when the computer game industry was in infancy, it is
Preston who makes this silicon spaceship soar.
At the
time the film did decent box office numbers though critics were quick to dub it
a Steven Spielberg “wannabe”. In the
years since, however, the film has gained a cult following with regular
syndicated television screenings.
Despite now being ostensibly a nostalgia machine, The Last Starfighter
oddly never saw an arcade rendition itself despite numerous efforts from
Atari and the PC computer to make it a reality.
While ideas of a sequel continue to come and go throughout the years,
for now The Last Starfighter is a charming pastiche of then-recently
produced science fiction film fits and one of the more endearing videogame
oriented films to come out of the 1980s.
--Andrew Kotwicki
