The Last Starfighter (DVD)

It has been a while since I saw this film, but it was on this afternoon. I sat down with my son, wife and a big bowl of popcorn, eager and excited. I remember it being a feel good film, and released in the same year as Ghostbusters and Gremlins, it didn't quite get the big attention that those other two films did. Even so, it's just as enjoyable. The plot revolves around a trailer park set in the Rockies. Alex is bored of the daily routine his life has become, and following failure to get into a big college, he takes his frustration out on a computer game, playing it to the max until he sets a new record, much to the amazement of the park's inhabitants. ...  Read the complete review

The Last Starfighter is a cultish 1984 science fiction adventure film directed by Nick Castle. The story revolves around young Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a teenager living in the remote Starlite Starbrite trailer park, a close-knit community where everybody knows each other. Alex, in the tradition of all adventure heroes from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, feels restless in the park and constricted by his mundane life of chores and obligations. He yearns to escape away to college with girlfriend and fellow Starbrite resident Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) but is shattered when his college loan application is refused. Alex consoles himself as usual by playing ...  Read the complete review

There may not be any big names in this film. A few of the cast go onto bigger things. A boy good at computer games is chosen to defend a galaxy he's only ever heard of from an arcade game and thats pretty much the entire plot. All the budget for this film went on a totally new idea, something that would eventually go on to become a standard term in science fiction films. CGI - Computer Generated Imagery. All the spaceships, planets, stars and meteors are all computer generated. No-one had ever done anything like this before. All the images were generated by the Cray 2 super computer, the only other people using this computer at the time were NASA. The main ...  Read the complete review

I remember this film very well. I bought it the same day my brother bought Transformers the movie. I think it must have been 1986 or 1987. So this movie is one I consider a classic. It may look dated now, I have to admit that right at the start. I watched the film on DVD and you can tell that these are early computer graphics. They're not as rounded or as realistic as todays effects. On the other hand though, you can't rate the film on the effects. The story concerns Alex who lives in a trailer park. Being a kid in the UK I never real got the significance of that reference. It shows that even someone from the middle of nowhere can have a great ...  Read the complete review

Ah, I remember this.. the first sci fi movie I remember seeing, thanks to this I like sci-fi. It was one of the first movies to use computer graphics to this extent, rendering the Star Car and many of the outer-space scenes. The sets used are well constructed and the alien langauges are good and the action scenes are brilliant. Now for the plot: In a trailer park, where his mother is manager a young man beats a game called Starfighter, which everyone at the trailer park applauds him for. Later he is turned down for a collage application and is depressed when an alien comes down to take him to a Star Base, it turns out that the video game was a test of a ...  Read the complete review