I rewatched it several years ago and it was GREAT.
First watched The Last Starfighter at summer camp, sitting cross-legged on the grass, projected onto a sheet. How’s that for nostalgia!
For a moment I thought you were talking about Enemies Closer, a movie which stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a vegan kickboxer and terrorist pretending to be a Mountie, with the most fabulous hair:
How dare you HOW DARE YOU.
I showed it to my wife a couple of years ago. She didn’t get it. At. All.
I still love it.
I never got why the gunner was called the Starfighter not the pilot. Maverick > Goose, it’s Movie Truth!
Oh, you. As if there’s two living actors that could top Marvin and Mifune. That movie is goddamn awesome.
This ones going to be tough because it’s not so much premised around cool alien wars going on in outer space and death blossoms - all that is the delicious icing - but around the arcade cabinet.
We forget that arcade games were a new thing in th 80s. I remember riding my bike a couple of miles to play arcade games for an hour (if i was lucky) at the mall. Or riding the monorail at Disney World to go to thr Contemporary(?) resort in the evening by myself just to play some arcade games. I remember birthday parties at pizza restaurants in second grade whose only feature other then greasy thin pizza was an arcade room.
What is the contemporary equivalent today? Of something kid-aspirational but in limited quantities / geography? The 3d printer? Hamilton the musical? LARPing or Cosplay?
I just don’t think Steam Game #20897 has the analogous cultural significance, and without that the “video game” is just a MacGuffin.
Ya, I watched it a few years ago and it totally still rocked.
I think that some folks just aren’t that into certain kinds of movies that The Last Starfighter is exemplar of… it’s not some great cinematic masterpiece. It’s not an iconic film that set the stage for everything that followed, like star wars or something.
It’s just a fun movie. That’s literally all it is. It was fun. The Goonies falls into this category.
And that’s all a movie needs to be.
I saw it in the theater, and about a year ago, I showed it to my kids. We had fun, despite, as expected the effects viewed now being groan worthy.
It was part of a magnificent day of watching 5 movies at the local multilex for the cost of one, back in 1984. My friend and I bought tix to the Last Starfighter. Then snuck in to Karate Kid, Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, and Top Secret. Glorious.
I don’t need a remake and Whitta has an unfortunate track record writing movies I don’t like. Still, Last Starfighter wasn’t that great despite my affection and I do appreciate Whitta’s enthusiasm. I hope it works out!
Good God, all those movies were out concurrently?
Whoa, Toshiro Mifune was in the original Enemy Mine movie? That makes me want to see it, even though I’m pretty sure it’s an old black-and-white grampa movie.
-Tom
From the comments on that IO9 link. Tell me you don’t want to watch this!
Not sure if you’re joking, but yeah, Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin instead of Quaid and Gossett Jr.
Neither of them had a baby in Hell in the Pacific, however. And it had a much… bleaker ending.
Wow, you were at Disney World and you got to go to an arcade there? You’re right, though. I did the same thing. It’s true that as home consoles caught up and surpassed arcade machines, the arcades got a lot less cool. Nowadays, I hear the children are into Minecraft. But there was also a branded Minecraft world in “Ready Player One: The Movie”, so The Last Starfighter is going to have to reach farther.
Not only was an Arcade Game one of the coolest things at the time, but so were the special effects. They were computer-generated-images. They were rendered by one of the coolest computers at the time: a Cray supercomputer. They were the Cadillac of supercomputers. Now, the Last Starfighter’s CGI has been outpaced by today’s mere animatics that provide guidance for the real CGI. Mundane miracles are built by underpaid FX studios and their server farms. You’d really have to wow the kids when the universe is nearly destroyed a few times every summer and the Earth is in peril every spring, fall and winter.
I think the original movie had a few additional things going for it that aren’t necessarily dated. I hope any remake or reboot could take these into account.
- There certainly have been a ton of kids’ movies in the last twenty-five years where the hero has some kind of innate prowess that only needs the belief in one’s self to activate it. If only it were as easy as pressing the “death blossom, holy cow do not touch” button to do so. But the main character’s struggle between sticking with friends, family, a lover, and everything he knows versus striking off into for the unknown for a better life is a good one. Alex wasn’t just learning to believe in himself and wasn’t just resisting the call to adventure™. He was weighing some pretty existential problems even before the Music Man showed up to take him into space. The “Modern Trailer” fan edit picked up on that. (also, I know you should never read the YouTube comments, but notice the top pinned comment.)
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A really nice girl next door, who is beautiful, supportive and interesting in her own rights. She’s also just slightly too content with her lot in life. This means for a boyfriend who really would like to get out of town, she’s a trap. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. Just ask George Bailey, the richest man in town. And Alex and Maggie’s trailer park is awfully scenic.
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Both the appearance of the alien mercenary wandering the sleepy town of Nowhere, Northern California, and Centauri’s real face, hit the maximum limit of how terrifying sci-fi makeup could be in a children’s movie. Jump scares, mise-en-scène darkness, and overprotective parents that didn’t let kids see scary movies stretch that a long way.
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Really expressive acting through layers and layers of makeup turn shameless overacting into an interesting sidekick who happens to be a cross between a Drac and a Narn.
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Being grounded on regular ol’ Earth means that the screenwriters don’t have to kick things off with an infodump and worldbuilding just to get the audience caught up. They can reveal as much or as little as they want to to keep the movie trundling along. (I hope they could build a little bit more of the world in a reboot, though. The “Star League” is odd and multicultural and The Good Guys because they fight the Bad Guys, but this league feels like they all live in a hangar on a small rock, and their wisest, coolest leader took his cues from General Dodonna in Star Wars. Who? Exactly.)
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Craig Safan’s score was the best late 20th Century score that John Williams, James Horner, and Jerry Goldsmith never collaborated on.
It was a kids’ movie from long ago, but there’s more than enough good in it to justify watching it every few years in my waning days.
I think that folks are being way hard on the CGI effects… I mean, this was 1984. The CGI in The Last Starfighter was crazy awesome for the time.
Not at all. I knew about the movie, but didn’t know it was Mifune. I guess I just assumed he was only in Japanese movies directed by Akira Kurosawa.
-Tom
Cool. You should watch it. Heck, you don’t even have to read subtitles (no, he doesn’t speak English, either).
Now that you mention Kurosawa, though, maybe they could do another remake of the story and bring it around full-circle, sort of like Yojimbo- originally a Hammett detective novel (Red Harvest) translated into a samurai movie, then into a western (A Fistful of Dollars), then back into a weird detective/mobster/western thing in Last Man Standing.
Holy fuck this was not a good book. I liked Ready Player One (the book) and thought it was enjoyable, but I also understand its critics. It was a charming book and a fun read. Armada is not … defensible. It is just plain bad.