Last Starfighter, The (1984)

May 1, 2002

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by Nick Castle
Written by Jonathan R. Butueli
Starring
- Lance Guest
- Dan O’Herlihy
- Catherine Mary Stewart
- Robert Preston

The Last Starfighter is something of a perennial favorite; since its initial release, it’s never been out of sight. The video’s never been out of print, and it’s always showing somewhere on TV. It’s like the movie version of Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town.” It’s just never gone away, even if it doesn’t make anybody’s Top Ten list. Not too bad, considering that the original reviews were pretty dismissive, pegging it as yet another forgettable Star Wars Trilogy hanger-on.

So how does this movie manage to hang on, remaining a pleasant if innocuous mainstay of video viewing? [Ahem, hem.] Join me, won’t you, and let’s find out together.

Proof positive that the rest of the movie is actually one gigantic illusion. (If you don’t get it, check the Notable Totables.)

Our protagonist is one Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), prince of the Star Lite Star Brite trailer park in the middle of unspecified nowhere. He’s the all-around good teen, helping out the handyman, respecting his mother, even treating his annoying little brother Louis (Chris Hebert) with less abuse than he deserves. He’s also got a girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart). In fact, life seems to be pretty much good, if unambitious.

But Alex has ambitions. Vague ones, it’s true, but he’s still got that itching to get out of the trailer park, to go to a better school than the nearby City College, to amount to more than the pickup-driving beer-swillers that are his only friends. Those hopes are pretty much dashed, though, when his financial aid application comes back with a big fat “UH-UH” stamped across it. (Let’s see — he’s in a trailer park, his mother’s apparently a single parent supporting the family as a waitress… What kind of higher-than-high hurdles did they have for financial aid back in the early ’80s?)

Alex and Maggie, two American kids growin’ up in the Heartland.

The only other plus in Alex’s life (which tells you how slack his life really is) is the Starfighter videogame up by the park office, with which he shows uncommon proficiency. In fact, he’s gotten so good at piloting his Gunstar ship to protect the Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada that he manages to beat the machine (a fact that is greeted with such incredible enthusiasm throughout the entire park that you really expect all these people to go home, stare at their pitiful lives, and burst into tears).

All of which doesn’t seem to have much real-world application –but it does! Oh boy, it does! Because flast-talking flim-flam man Centauri (Robert Preston, playing exactly the same character he made famous in The Music Man), the inventor of the Starfighter game, shows up in his snazzed-up sportscar to offer Alex the thrill of his lifetime — a trip into space!

See, to make a long story short, the Starfighter game is Centauri’s recruitment tool for the real-life Starfighter program, wherein spacejockeys from the dozen planets of the real-life Star League learn to pilot real-life Gunstars on the planet Rylos, against the real-life Xur (traitor son of the Rylan leader) and the real-life Kodan Armada — a cadre of ugly aliens who only need Xur’s knowledge of the weaknesses of the Frontier (a grid of forcefield generators protecting the Star League) to invade and make life pretty damned cruddy for everyone.

Heady stuff for a kid from the trailer park, ain’t it?

If you know anything about Tantric magic, then this guy’s head is really funny.

Yes, the story’s pretty lite, and more than a little derivative (“computer games that are real” has been a well-mined SF subgenre ever since Atari opened its doors). However, it does hold some recognizable bits of magic that have allowed it to keep its head bobbing into the public awareness.¹

Those initial reviewers were correct when they said that The Last Starfighter owes more than a little to Star Wars. However, since stealing from hit movies is old hat in Hollywood, the trick is to steal the right parts. There were plenty of movies that tried to capitalize on the post-Lucas spaceships ‘n’ laserguns phenom — most of them ranging between mediocre (Battle Beyond the Stars, The Black Hole) to laughable (Starcrash and worse).

The Last Starfighter, on the other hand, shows that there are other facets to Star Wars‘ success than John Dykstra’s special effects. And thus, what they co-opt is Joseph Campbell’s idea of the mythic hero’s journey.

“I was enjoying a little nap in R’lyeh until you woke me up!”

Since I’ve got a degree in English Lit, I’m legally empowered to drone on about Campbellian motifs and archetypes for hours on end, pro and con. I won’t do that, mainly because you’re not a captive audience, and I know that Stomp Tokyo’s only a couple of clicks away. So let’s just point out a few obvious correspondences:

- Obviously, Alex is a Luke Skywalker type, living in the middle of nowhere without the means to get away into the bigger world Out There. (Mercifully, Alex is nowhere near as whiny as Luke.)

- Alex’s call to action comes in the form of a Wise Old Man. (In a nifty twist, Centauri is not only a mentor figure, but also a roguish Han Solo type, combining two character archetypes in one. There are no wookiees to be seen, alas.)

- When Alex is taken up to Rylos and shown the heroic fate awaiting him, does he jump at the chance? Hell, no! He insists that he was brought there under false pretenses (true enough), and Centauri shuttles him home, grumbling all the way. However, spies among the Rylans have informed the Kodans that a qualified Starfighter is unprotected on Earth, and the trailer park is immediately swamped with Zandozan bounty hunters. Alex is forced into going back as a Starfighter. Not unlike how Luke was all set to let Ben Kenobi dodder off to save the Princess himself, until he came home to a bonfire, huh?

Centauri just found out that the Kodan Armada has conquered the last planet on which bowties were still cool.

Mind you, there’s more to the setup than Star Wars lite. One of the subplots that appeals most to teens is that in Alex’s absence, an identical and long-suffering Beta unit has been left behind the take his place. Unfortunately, Western courtship rites kinda have him at a loss, so encounters between the ersatz Alex and Maggie have all those cutesy misunderstandings you’d expect. If this were the whole movie, it would get tedious very quickly, but a little goes a long way.

Probably what everyone remembers best about this movie (aside from Alex’s turtle-headed copilot Grig (Dan O’Herlihy)), are the special effects — specifically, that the lion’s share of them were computer-animated, instead of the standard models ‘n’ mattes approach. While those effects obviously stand out in the current era of CGI wizardry, a couple of things keep them from being uselessly and hopelessly dated:

Most of the effects shots primarily feature spaceships — angular, metallic bodies that were pretty easy to render, even back in the day. (For contrast, there’s a scene in which Alex pilots a Gunstar through the tunnels of an asteroid, and the tunnel walls looks as hokey as you’d expect.)
The special effects are merely an alternate way to tell the story — unlike, say, Tron, which was conceived specifically to say, “Lookie-here at this newfangled technology!” that lost its cutting-edge status with egg-timer speed.

Granted, to a generation that even manages to sneer at the original Star Wars effects as “hokey,” this one will probably come across as hopelessly non-edgy. (A movie with teens, without a single fart joke?) But we can all fondly remember kinder, simpler days, right?

Some Notable Totables:

body count: 4 on-screen, plus oodles of ancillary damage
breasts: 0
explosions: 84
ominous thunderstorms: 0
actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 7
- Key E. Kuter (Enduran, the Rylan leader) played “Cytherian” on the TNG episode “The Nth Degree” and “the Sirah” in the DS9 episode “The Storyteller”
- Dan Mason (Lord Kril, the Kodan leader) played “Accolan” in the TNG episode “When the Bough Breaks”
- Barbara Bosson (Alex’s mom) played “Roana” in the DS9 episode “Rivals”
- Norman Snow (Xur) played “Torin” in the TNG episode “Rightful Heir”
- Marc Alaimo (the hitchhiker who turns out to be a Zandozan) played the recurring role of Gul Dukat on DS9, plus four guest spots on TNG
- Geoffrey Blake (Gary) played “Arjin” in the DS9 episode “Playing God”
- Meg Wyllie (Granny) played the lead Talosian in the Star Trek pilot “The Cage” (and now that joke waaaay up there makes sense, right?)
- [Wil Wheaton also had some scenes as Louis' friend, but none made it to the final cut]