The Last Starfighter (1984)
The Last Starfighter is an American science fiction /space opera directed by Nick Castle. Starring Lance Guest, Catherine Mary Stewart, Robert Preston, Dan O’Herlihy, Norman Snow, and Kay E. Kuter. It may have been a cash-in on the success of Starwars and Wargames with a focus on arcade videogames.
Plot
Alex is a teenager living in a trailer park with his mother and younger brother. The only entertainment in the trailer park comes from an arcade game Starfighter. After Alex becomes the game’s highest-scoring player, he is approached by the game’s inventor, Centauri, who invites him to take a ride in his fancy car as a prize for winning the game.
Centauri is actually an alien and his car a spacecraft.
Alex learns that the Starfighter arcade game represents a real-life conflict between the Rylan Star League and the Ko-Dan Empire; The game was designed as a test to find skilled space pilots. Alex is then asked to become to be the gunner for a Starfighter spacecraft.
Notable Scenes
The scenes in the trailer park where Alex is playing Starfighter have a real eighties vibe.
the space scenes are one of the first uses of CGI technology.
Making of the Last Starfighter
The voice of the video game that Alex Rogan played at the trailer park was done by Robert Preston (Centauri). The star car that Centauri drives is based on a DeLorean that was also used in Back to the Future..
All visual effects were made on a Cray X-MP computer. Next to Tron one of the first uses of CGI.
This was Robert Preston’s final movie appearance before his death on March 21, 1987.
Atari produced games for its 5200 Super System and 400 and 800 series home computers as a tie-in with this movie, but they never went past the prototype phase. The game was nothing like the arcade machine Alex Rogan played in the movie. The technology did not exist at the time to produce real-time 3-D polygonal graphics on a home machine. Rumor also has it that Atari produced one prototype Last Starfighter arcade machine, but it since has been lost. An early Atari 2600 program was revamped into the game released as “Solaris”.
The small box-shaped robot, shown after Alex Rogan gets his uniform on Rylos, is a Heathkit H.E.R.O. 1 robot.
Lance Guest was chosen as the lead after director Nick Castle saw him in post-production for Halloween II (1981).
Nick Castle, Lance Guest and Dan O’Herlihy had all previously been in the Halloween movie franchise. Castle played Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), Guest played Jimmy in Halloween II (1981), and O’Herlihy played Conal Cochran in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).
Our view on the Last Starfighter
the Last Starfighter is a real eighties classic. A lost gem that had something from Star Wars, Wargames and E.T. 
It has humour, warmth and adventure with first time CGI effects are good for the time. Exploitflix thumbs up.
Trailer
Where to buy
Amazon
DVD/VHS/Betamax/VCC
Ebay
Where to stream Public Domain
Details
Genre: Space Opera
Released in: 1984
Era: Eighties
Actors: Lance Guest, Catherine Mary Stewart
Director: Nick Castle
Poster artist: Unknown
