Some of the nerd sites are citing a sizzle reel, a working title – The Last Starfighters – and the intention to be a torch-passing sequel, not a reboot.
This was the announcement? A sizzle reel?
Boy, what an original concept! Can’t wait for the Beastmaster torch-passer.
They must have had a tough time deciding between “The Last Starfighters” and “Last Starfighter” as the title. Maybe “The Last Starfighter 2” was in the running as well.
I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of The Last Starfighter, it always seemed just a step above a B movie though it is good cheesy fun. But I think it would be super cool if he could get Lance Guest and Catherine Mary Stuart back for the sequel.
It was great if you were, like, 12.
But, yeah, it’s pretty cheesy.
Robert Preston is the only thing in it that maybe pushes it slightly above a B movie.
It was also kind of stupid that at the end it had nothing to do with the teen pilot and everything to do with an “I win” button, unless after 30+ years I’m forgetting something.
I enjoyed TLS and Catherine Mary Stewart even more. But the title of the film is The Last Starfighter. And our hero was just the gunner. It felt a little like switching Luke and Dak’s positions in the snowspeeder. Glory goes to the pilot, not the gunner. Grig was the Starfighter!
Your spoiler was something that bothered me even as a kid. I remember walking out of the theater feeling a little deflated, I’m not sure I was familiar with the word ‘anticlimactic’ just yet but that’s how I felt.
You are absolutely correct.
Sequel so bigger, bigger, bigger.
Work with @tbaldree to make a Starfighter videogame. Rank players via MMR. After 30 days, top 1% worldwide gets a free ticket to the movie and a permanent cosmetic Gunstar denoting them as one of the elite few, a token next to their name on the forums, unlimited DLC for life, etc.
But in the movie, the top 1% are earth’s recruits against the Kodan armada. The movie focuses on 4 out of the thousands of qualifiers. They’re all diverse with sympathetic backgrounds, a bullied 12 year old asian boy, a badass muslim girl, etc, etc.
These elites were all replaced with beta androids already, just like the first movie, and were in training underneath Antarctica. Assassins show up, you think it’ll be just like the prequel, but no. As most of the assassins are fought off, lights burst in the skies.
Disaster strikes, a small Kodan destroyer evaded the blockage and appears over earth. It’s pitifully weak against modern space weapons but the earth has no defense and millions are killed by orbital bombardment from kinetic weapons, essentially flying crowbars targeting population centers, including all but 4 of the elites. The 4 remaining elites from that 1% take to the skies in Gunstars and easily destroy it.
As earth mourns, they head out to the blockage. First battle goes poorly, they lose badly, the blockage is broken. Non-human gunstar pilots are all dead. More disaster porn, alien worlds being bombarded to such an extent their crust cracks and the seas boil away, etc, etc. Cheap with today’s CGI. They regroup at the last base.
Then like the first movie they fight the entire armada, using some other macguffin to do it, maybe they rig asteroids to blow into shrapnel in its path, causing them to use their energy with laser point defense and depleting their shields, need some side quest here to consume 15 minutes.
Before the main battle ahead, they regroup for one last time. The father Centurion-like figure tells them a secret. There’s some sort of secret weapon combining all 4 Gunstars together in perfect synchronicity that requires a mind-meld. It’s never been successfully done before.
This goes into the roots of each pilot’s trauma, the black nerd who wasn’t good at sports and whose rough n’ tumble father never understood him, the beautiful italian girl who has a crush on her best friend, etc, etc, evolve the characters in there. All their stories sync up in a realization that they fit into each others’ stories like puzzle pieces and together they’re invincible.
Anyway they destroy the armada flagship and with the secret weapon, leave the rest of the armada drifting with dead engines, then sue for peace because they’re the good guys and we can’t kill thousands of even evil aliens anymore. Two of the four return to earth and conclude their stories, one makes daddy proud and the other marries her girlfriend, and the remaining two go off to lead the Gunstar academy-- working on the next version of Starfighter videogame to recruit new elites.
That’s my treatment. We’ll see if Whitta beats it.
Compare it to the end of the original Star Wars movie. Luke has to do some dogfighting, has to shake Vader, and then has to dodge AA as he makes a high precision bombing run, and he only gets one try at it.
Final scene:
“Do you any more games you need designed? We just finished tightening up the graphics on level 2”.
*Smash cut to credits*
I found a preview of the start of the movie.
Pst, don’t tell anyone that nothing Harrison Ford does in the first Indiana Jones movie has any impact on the Nazi’s plans! In fact, he makes it easier for them by finding the Ark when they were off course.
Not true! He finds the Arc for the Nazis!
Actually, I never thought of that before, but you’re right. He was basically just a horsefly, a minor irritant to them.
Yeah, it’s kind of a mind-blower when you first think about it. He maybe slowed them down a tiny bit, but their goal was to take the Ark to that island and open it up, and that’s what they ended up doing. Ford was just a bystander.
I’ve kinda always appreciated that Indy is totally unnecessary to the events of the first movie. He seems like he’s in way over his head even though he cuts quite a swashbuckling figure. Sorta like Jack Burton. Also don’t tell anybody but - the Ghostbusters? They’re the bad guys!!
To be clear, my treatment is lazy and terrible and if Whitta’s is anything like it, it’s time to rework.
Other than the real videogame part, I think that would be really neat.
But they were only off-course because he got the McGuffin that had the instructions for using the solar map. The Nazis only had half the instructions because they had to rely on the branded image on that dude’s hand. But they would have had the whole piece anyway if not for Indy.