Retro Movie Review – The Last Starfighter

The Last Starfighter is one of a number of early 80s sci fi movies that sprung up in the wake of the success of the original Star Wars trilogy.  Throughout the first half of the decade if you had a screenplay that involved spaceships, a boy/young adult hero who had to recognize his potential in order to bring down an evil empire, lasers, and aliens you stood a punchers chance of getting it made into a movie.  This one had all of those elements plus video games, which had become all the rage by then.

The story is about Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a high school senior who lives and works at a trailer park with his Mom and younger brother. Alex, like one Luke Skywalker, is yearning for something more than his meager existence and wants to venture out into a bigger world but is constantly pulled at by the needs of his neighbors and his family. Alex is the de facto handyman of the park and is constantly being asked to help his neighbors fix anything and everything electrical in their homes, all while pinning his hopes for a better life on getting a loan so he can go to college at the state university and not the city college where his high school friends are all headed.

He spends what spare time he has with his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and playing an arcade game called Starfighter. One night he finally beats the game, not knowing that the game is actually a recruiting tool for a real mission. He gets picked up by an alien named Centauri (Robert Preston) and is whisked to the planet Rylos where he is asked to join the fight against the Kodan armada, who are the villains of the video game. After initially balking and asking to be taken home, Alex finds himself the lone recruit after an attack takes out all the others (hence the name of the film) and has to decide whether or not to fight the good fight or go back home to the life he knows best.

So…..this has the makings of a fun story, and I must have watched this movie 200 times on cable when I was a kid. Why on Earth am I watching this now? Well, for some reason it happens to show up a topic on my twitter timeline every now and then, so my interest was piqued to give it another look. Was it actually good? Does it hold up now? Let’s see.

The Good

The story was straight and to the point. Alex wanted to get out of the trailer park and do something bigger with his life, Centauri was looking for another recruit to join the army to save his planet, the two met up, hijinks ensued, they hit some adversity, then Alex saved the day. No weird subplots or time spent trying to make things more serious than they needed to be. The bits that were meant to add levity were kept in their place and didn’t encroach on the larger story being told. This was a movie meant to combine video games and spaceship battles, it didn’t need a bunch of musings on genocide or empire building or anything like that. Any ‘what does this all mean?’ conversation was kept to Alex’s navigator Grigg explaining how his family was enslaved by the Kodan and telling him that going back home will only be fine until the Kodan reach Earth, and that was only about a minute of dialogue.

The dialogue between all the characters never falls into overly hokey science fiction speak, or I should it never goes so far down that rabbit hole that you’re wondering what they’re even talking about. This is the kind of movie where that happens all the time, and there’s a fine line between being cheesy but endearing and downright painful to sit through. There wasn’t anything in this film that made me wretch upon hearing it being said. It was also good to see again a movie where the bad guys are not the coolest characters onscreen, and did not have any legitimate points. Way too often we are given movie villains are so much cooler than the heroes, or whose genocidal obsessions are tempered by their own traumas or underlying well meaning, that it takes a lot of the steam out of their eventual undoing. These bad guys are bad and there’s no reason to smile at anything they do. The good guys are likeable people and you never feel like you’d wish any of them would get taken out instead.

This is gonna sound weird but I really appreciated the way Alex’s neighbors were characterized. What I mean by that is that they were normal people who just so happened to live in a trailer park. Over the last 20 years or so trailer park residents have been caricatured to the point of being treated as if they are as alien to us as the people of Rylos in the film. I never lived in one but when I was a kid I knew a few people who did and there wasn’t anything different other than where they lived. Sure there are some weird people who live there but there are just as many who live in the suburbs for crying out loud. I fear that if this movie were made now it we would have to endure a slew of tacked on jokes about trailer park residents in some attempt to add humor to the story, to the point where it would hard to get why Alex would be torn about leaving as he was here.

The Bad

80s sci fi/fantasy films tend to have a whole lot of bad acting in them. Here it was on the side of the villains. Xur, the leader of the Kodan played by Norman Snow, was B-movie level hokey with his lines and his delivery. It was like all the creative energy was spent on the good guys and they ordered the bad guys from a catalog. Turncoat as a leader? Check. Cheesy, hammy lines? Check. Subordinates who were waiting to put him in his place? Check. Vague, takeover the universe plan with no real point? Check. While this was 100 percent a heroes journey kind of film the bad guys added absolutely nothing to it. It would be like going to WrestleMania and the main event is Cody Rhodes vs some jobber for the World Championship, with zero explanation as to how the jobber got to the main event.

Other Stuff

The special effects look to be some of the earliest forms of CGI. The spaceship battles look to be entirely computer generated, which was a big step in the early 80s. And as was the case in many an 80s movie, the high school kids all looked way too old to be in high school. Guest was 24 when the movie came out and Stewart was 25 so yeah, my eyes were not deceiving me there. Lastly, blink and you’ll miss Will Wheaton of Star Trek: the Next Generation as a friend of Alex’s younger brother Louis.

Final Grade

Look, nobody is calling this high theater of any kind. It was simple, basic sci-fi/fantasy stuff. But they did succeed in getting you to root for the good guys, and getting invested in Alex’s choices along the way. In todays’ world where these kinds of films are always swinging for the fences to create 3 dimensional villains that we’re supposed to understand and making the heroes the victims of tragedy in order to generate sympathy, this would get crushed by critics and bloggers and all. As a standalone film from a previous era that was made to piggyback off of Star Wars and capture some of its fans for a few hours, it was a perfectly fine piece of work. I can think of a lot worse ways to spend two hours if you got nothing else to watch.

Overall Quality: 3/6 (OK), Enjoyability: 4/4, Total Grade: 7/10.