TRON started the revolution in computer graphics, but a smaller yet well-liked film from the 1980s is regarded as another milestone. THE LAST STARFIGHTER, which bowed in US cinemas in December 1984, contains some of the very earliest computer space craft, which have become such a regular part of blockbuster film-making
Director Nick Castle was an actor-turned-director whose most famous role was the original ‘Shape’ aka Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) and also co-wrote ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)
In THE LAST STARFIGHTER Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is a daydreaming kid who lives on a trailer park and doesn’t seem to fit in with his fellow peers, although one girl there, Maggie Gordon (Catherine Mary Stewart) has a soft spot for him there. His only escape is a video game in which he battles the seemingly-fictional Ko-Dan Armada in a first-person spacecraft looking out and blasting everything to the nearest light year.
When he breaks the record on the machine, it turns out that the game is in fact a recruitment initiative for potential pilots who can help the troubled civilization battling the Ko-Dan. It comes in the form of an alien shapeshifter, Centauri (veteran Broadway legend Robert Preston, the original MACK & MABEL stage show (incidentally, the Overture was used for one of Torvill and Dean’s Winter Olympics routines) and VICTOR VICTORIA (1982) with Julie Andrews and James Garner) who takes him out of the Solar System and leaving an alien clone at the trailer park.
Trained up, he is about to enter a different kind of game….
THE LAST STARFIGHTER represents the kind of blockbuster that Hollywood attempted to bring out. It was OK overall, though it was released around the same time as David Lynch’s DUNE, 2010 (a sequel to 2001) and the ever-growing popularity of a new low-budget hit by the name of THE TERMINATOR….