The Last Starfighter (1984). Directed by Nick Castle. Written by Jonathan R. Betuel. Starring Lance Guest, Dan O’Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, and Robert Preston.
It’s impossible to talk about cinema, and especially sci fi cinema, without acknowledging the tremendous impact Star Wars (1977) had on the movie industry. But for all of its vast and indelible cultural influence, there aren’t actually that many movies that are consciously trying to tell a Star Wars-style story—at least not many that have retained any sort of staying power beyond the initial grab for cash and attention.
The reasons for that are pretty simply: when something has that big of an immediate, universal cultural impact, most of what references it and draws on its legacy is going to feel like either a knock-off or a parody. There are several films that tried to benefit from the Star Wars craze when it was hot, including Starcrash (1978), Star Odyssey (1979), and Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), which features a screenplay by John Sayles and special effects by a new-to-the-business James Cameron. But most of those are pretty much remembered only as being Star Wars copycats. (And of course we’ve already watched Spaceballs, one of the very few high-profile Star Wars-inspired films with enduring success, but sanctioned parody is really its own thing.)
So The Last Starfighter is a bit of an oddball. It’s very obviously a movie made to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars, but it is also doing its own thing in ways that make it quite charming, and it has grown to have a fond, nostalgic cult status separate from the Star Wars influence.
In a 2024 podcast interview, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel explains where he got the idea for The Last Starfighter. He was working at an ad agency in Manhattan, and during his lunch break he would go to an arcade around the corner to play the games. This was during the golden age of video game arcades, and when Betuel saw how heated people got about the games, he started thinking about how to turn that into a story. At some point he decided to combine it with ideas he took from reading T.H. White’s Once and Future King, particularly the bit about the future King Arthur proving his worth by pulling the sword from the stone. (This kernel of inspiration is preserved in the film in a brief exchange between the characters Centauri and Grig about Centauri’s recruiting ideas.)
That’s where Betuel came up with the idea of a video game as a sort of Sword in the Stone, a test for identifying a much-needed hero. He shopped his script around, and it was picked up by Lorimar Productions, a studio that mostly made television shows (including Dallas) but did produce a few movies as well.
Even before the studio found a director, they brought on Digital Productions, a visual effects company founded by computer animators Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr. after they left Information International, Inc. (Triple-I) during that company’s work on Tron (1982). Putting computer generated images (CGI) into movies was a new thing at the time, but its use was baked into the production of The Last Starfighter from the very beginning. The reasons were largely practical: Digital Productions argued that they could create the effects sequences faster and cheaper than practical effects. As for whether it worked out that way… Well, not quite. But that was the goal going in.
The director the studio brought on for the project was Nick Castle, whom we have encountered before during our John Carpenter month last year. Castle is a long-time friend and collaborator of Carpenter’s: He helped produce Dark Star (1974), he played Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), and he co-wrote Escape From New York (1981). Castle had only one director credit to his name before The Last Starfighter—his feature debut TAG: The Assassination Game (1982), which according to Wikipedia is about (you guessed it) a game of tag that turns deadly.
Along with Castle came Ron Cobb, the production designer and visual effects artist who had also gotten his start as a Disney animator before working on Dark Star, then going on to do concept art and design for Star Wars, Alien (1979), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), among many, many other things. He’s one of those artists and designers whose work is all over sci fi cinema.
It’s obvious from interviews that everybody knew they were making a movie that would be compared to the sci fi juggernauts of the Star Wars trilogy and E.T. (1982), so Castle wanted some way to differentiate their film. One thing he suggested was moving the story out of the middle-class suburbs—which were strongly associated with Steven Spielberg’s sci fi—and into a rural trailer park. Another change came after they cast Robert Preston to play Centauri. Betuel approached Castle with the idea of rewriting the character to play on the legacy of Preston’s most famous role: con artist Harold Hill in The Music Man (1962).
The Last Starfighter introduces us to teenager Alex (Lance Guest), who wants nothing more than to go to college so he and his girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart), can move away from the SoCal trailer park they call home. (The movie never specifies that they’re in California, but the Earthbound scenes were filmed in Soledad Canyon east of Santa Clarita.) When he’s not working as a handyman around the trailer park, Alex spends his free time playing an arcade game called Starfighter, which he is very good at even when his little brother (played by Chris Hebert) is backseat-driving the pixelated space battles.
One night Alex achieves the games highest score, which everybody thinks is really exciting even though he appears to be the only person to play the game seriously at this location. In any case, it turns out it is exciting, but not for the reasons Alex’s close-knit community of neighbors might think. That same night, after Alex gets news that he has been turned down for a college loan and he’s outside venting his frustration at the desert, a stranger drives up in a car that is not a DeLorean crossed with a Volaré station wagon but totally looks like a DeLorean crossed with a Volaré station wagon.
That stranger is an alien named Centauri, and he’s come to Earth to recruit the best Starfighter player into a real space war. Okay, to be fair, “recruit” is a generous term. Centauri doesn’t tell Alex what’s going on before whipping him away to the planet Rylos to become an actual starfighter. He helpfully leaves an android behind to assume Alex’s look and take his place.
Alex is, understandably, not remotely interested in getting involved in a space war he did not sign up for. But when all the other starfighter recruits are killed and alien assassins come to Earth, he agrees to help Grig (Dan O’Herlihy) take out the enemy armada.
It’s all very predictable, yes, with a very derivative Chosen One plot, but as I was watching I found that I didn’t much care. It’s a fun movie! The cast is very charming, the story clips along at a nice pace, and the inherent zaniness of “what if your favorite video game was actually real?” is handled with good humor. I also like this little glimpse into the early video game era, when gaming was still mostly in arcades, not on consoles, and before pop culture would adopt the “video games will rot your brain” approach that came along later in the ’80s.
(Naturally I have to think about how this plot would look like here and now, when there are esports and global gaming competitions and all of that. Not the Ready Player One approach, which is something different, but the exact The Last Starfighter plot. Will the aliens come down to Earth to recruit somebody like Faker or Ninja or… sorry, those two names represent the full extent of my knowledge about professional gamers, but you get the point. What if the savior of humanity is some kid who is really, really, really good at winning Super Smash Bros. as the Wii Fit Trainer? What will our future hold?!)
Fun facts about the visual effects: Centauri’s Starcar was built by Gene Winfield, the same car customizer who built the flying cop car and many other vehicles for Blade Runner (1982). The Starcar was, apparently, a sheet metal exterior wrapped around a VW engine, so it couldn’t go very fast. But it did what it needed to do. Winfield was also the guy who built the shuttle Galileo for the original Star Trek, Robocop’s (1987) 6000 SUX, and spy cars for both Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Winfield was pretty much the go-to guy for building custom cars for film and TV, which is a pretty cool thing to be. In the grand Hollywood tradition of reusing props, Centauri’s Starcar makes an appearance in Back to the Future Part II (1989), where it can be seen parked on a street.
The car is one of the few practical effects in The Last Starfighter, but it’s not entirely practical; it also exists as a digital effect, such as when it’s flying through space and arriving at Rylos. There are a handful of other practical effects in the film: the beta unit’s mid-transformation form and the various alien faces. The beta unit (also played by Guest, naturally) was another late change to the story; Castle expanded his role after test audiences liked seeing the android’s Earth hijinks.
Of course, it’s not the practical effects that The Last Starfighter is known for, but the digital effects. And, yes, it is absolutely true that watching the movie now it’s very obvious that it’s CGI was created in the early ’80s—but that’s what makes it so significant. There are 27 minutes of CGI in The Last Starfighter, comprising some 300 scenes that encompass nearly all of the space flight, the exteriors of the base on Rylos, the exteriors of the spaceships, the space frontier, the asteroid, the armada… It’s a lot of complex computer imagery, significantly more than was in Tron, which had forged new ground in computer effects just a couple years earlier.
Whitney and Demos, the computer animators who founded Digital productions, had left Triple-I in part because they knew they could do more with more computer power. They leased (at considerable expense) a Cray X-MP, which was at the time the world’s faster supercomputer, and was vastly more expensive than most people in Hollywood wanted to spend on computer imagery that didn’t even look better than what George Lucas’ people were doing the old-fashioned way.
Even with that much computing power, the amount of human power that went into the CGI was tremendous. These days we think of CGI as a shortcut, a way to make things easier and faster, but that was definitely not the case when they were making this film. They were building everything from the (digital) ground up, which meant they had to spends months coding in all of the geometric shapes for all of the CGI elements. The Gunstar, the ship Alex and Grig fly against the Ko-dan armada, is made up of 750,000 polygons. They could duplicate and manipulate the digital ship where needed, but they ran into problems due to the fact that geometric shapes in a computer don’t have any solidity or directionality unless they are programmed to have it. According to Cobb, “We had a few funny instances like that when we had ships passing through things or flying backwards.”
It took so long and raised so many problems that Jeffery Okun, the visual effects coordinator, wanted to build practical models instead and was ready to call a model-building company at any moment, but the film’s producers were committed to the digital approach.
I don’t know if doing everything digitally saved them any time or money in the end. The movie was expensive to make and didn’t earn much at the box office. Most of the contemporary reactions were that it was pleasant and fun but derivative, which is fair, because that’s what it is. It ends with Alex and Grig saving the day, then Alex and Maggie leaving their trailer park to go off to live in space. It’s all very earnest and light-hearted, the kind of story where we never really doubt that the good guys will be victorious and live happily ever after.
But The Last Starfighter did demonstrate, unquestionably, that a film could be made with entire scenes and set-pieces being computer-generated.
I know that’s commonplace to us now. I know sci fi fans and movie fans love to argue about whether or not it’s a good thing. I don’t happen to think that’s a very interesting or productive argument, because every movie comes from a series of choices and limitations. I know I will often talk more about practical effects in movies, but that’s simply because I love making things with my hands and learning about how other people do as well. We all know that CGI, like all tools used in making movies, can be used well, and it can be used poorly.
Here’s the thing about The Last Starfighter: It might not look great to us. It looks awkward and dated. Some of the CGI is—by the admission of the people who made it—quite flawed. (Cobb described the asteroid as “melted ice cream.” They knew when it didn’t look good!) But that’s not because they were using a filmmaking tool poorly. They were doing amazing work. They were building on the innovations used in Tron and doing things that nobody had done before. They were experimenting to figure out what was possible. It’s a hell of an achievement, and one that deserves a place of admiration in movie history.
And you know what? It’s also a fun movie. I enjoyed watching it. It seems irrelevant to care if it holds up or not, because it’s so very much of a particular era in pop culture. It’s a good time, cheesy as it is, and that’s really all a movie needs to be.
What do you think about The Last Starfighter? What game are you into that will have aliens coming down to Earth to steal you away for space heroics?
A Century of Visiting the Red Planet
Due to the upcoming holidays, we’ll be combining November and December into a single theme. That theme has been one of sci fi cinema’s favorite topics since the very beginning: Mars.
Sci fi filmmakers have quite literally been making movies about Mars for over a hundred years, and there are dozens of Mars movies to chose from. We’re going to watch just six of them from across the decades.
November 5 — Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), directed by Byron Haskin
No points for guessing the premise of this movie. It’s right there in the title.
Watch: Apple, Cultpix, Kanopy, Amazon, and more.
November 12 — Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven
I understand that the question of whether it actually takes place on Mars or entirely in the main character’s head is central to the movie’s theme, but I’m including it anyway because I want to watch it.
November 19 — Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), directed by Yakov Protazanov
We’re going way, way back to one of the very first sci movies ever made.
Watch: Kanopy, Indieflix, Amazon, Klassiki, as well as several versions on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other free video sites. The movie is in the public domain, although the music might not be, so some versions don’t have a score. Other versions have converted the intertitles to subtitles, which reduces the total running time by about 30 minutes. There is also a colorized version floating around. Choose your own adventure.
December 3 — Rocketship X-M (1950), directed by Kurt Neumann
We’ve watched a lot of post-WWII sci fi cautionary tales, but this was the first to take the atomic era into space.
December 10 — Mars Express (2023), directed by Jérémie Périn
If you aren’t interested in animated French cyberpunk noir, I just don’t know what to tell you.
Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango, Plex. I can’t easily tell which versions are subbed and which are dubbed.
December 17 — Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), directed by Nicholas Webster
I don’t usually include movies that have earned a spot on several “Worst Films Ever” lists, but it’s the end of the year, we’re all stressed, let’s watch something completely ridiculous.
Watch: Everywhere. It’s in the public domain and available many places online.
I’m with you The Last Starfighter may not be great cinema but it is a fun movie! I really think that our blockbuster era has lost sight of making fun sci-fi movies.
That is a fun movie. Saw it a couple of times in the theater, bought the VHS then DVD and now blu-ray.
Somewhere I have a file comparing the specs and cost of a Cray X-MP to a (now 5 year old) Android tablet.
I think I only saw the film once on TV long ago, so I don’t know much about it. The CGI in those clips actually looked better than I expected, except for things like the asteroid and the strobing/lack of motion blur in fast-moving shots.
Normally you’d expect that if an older movie were restored for Blu-Ray, they’d redo and upgrade the CGI. But the vintage 1980s CGI is such an integral selling point for this film that I guess they didn’t dare tamper with it.
There is also a somewhat complicated situation with the rights to the film (every few years there is a news article about how nobody really knows who holds the rights, because people have been interested in making a sequel for ages and can’t sort it out), and that may have impacted any subsequent release’s chance of anything beyond the usual cleaning up of the original audio and video. I haven’t read anything about interested in updating the CGI, but that’s doesn’t mean nobody has considered it.
Motion blur is such a funny thing. Movies need it but people in video games hate it with a passion. Never understood that as it does make things much more realistic.
So when we watch Santa Clause Conquers the Martians are we watching the MST3k version? Also any thoughts on why this scared you as a kid? This next to the last navigator was one of the ones that surprised me the most that it was on your list. I loved this movie as a child not sure how it would hold up now.
As for what games I play that would have aliens warping me away – well XCOM and Civilization might have them come take me for fighting on land and leading a civilization – but fighting in space probably not my 3d thinking is not very good.
Can I say that I’m so disappointed you’re not doing Angry Red Planet as part of the Martian movies series…
Ko-Dan 1st Officer: She won’t answer the helm! We’re locked into the moon’s gravitation pull. What do we do?
Lord Kril: [his eyepiece swings over his left eye] We die.
Perhaps the greatest final line from a baddie! So honest.
Hey, Battle Beyond the Stars isn’t (just) a Star Wars knockoff! It’s also a Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven knockoff!
I saw this in the theater with a packed crowd opening night. I was kind of a special effects geek back then and very excited about CGI which seemed so magical at the time.
The script was just serviceable but, like so many eighties SF movies, the tone was light and infectious. If the visuals were disappointingly cruder than I had hoped for, I rationalized it then as being somehow excuseably appropriate for a video game themed movie.
It’s not a film I thought much of at the time or in the years since but given the richness of genre fare at the time it’s an understandably forgotten flick. Still, it was a nice showcase for Cobb’s talent and Preston imbued the whole affair with some sorely needed warmth and sparkle.
And the images may have been crude in some ways compared to ILM models, but they were amazing for an early 80s video game.
These days, I am less hopeful about video games recruiting for alien space hi-jinks than our military recruiting teens for terrestrial (mis)adventures.
Ron Cobb’s DVD commentary is delightful. You can tell he really enjoyed working on the film.
The “I love you Alex Rogan!” moment still gives me goosebumps.
As a former owner I can pretty much assure you that the StarCar is an adapted 84 Honda Civic Hatchback. 50 mpg *and starflight* Quite the ride in the mid-80s. Don’t fall for that stuff it about it being custom built blah blah blah. Just go to a junkyard, and hope…. :-)
Headcanon: The Music Man (1962) is actually the story of Centauri trying to recruit Ronny Howard to join the Star League and fight Xur and the Ko-Dab Armada.
My sister wanted to see Footloose; I wanted to see The Last Starfighter; we drove a couple of hours to find a second-run theater showing both in a double feature.
I adore this movie, I had it on a VHS tape back-to-back with Night of the Comet and the double header was staple party viewing all through high school and into college.
I love this movie: “A mobile cave that doesn’t go anywhere”. I enjoy telling people it has state of the art CGI, and then watching them realise it WAS state of the art — 40 years go. Loads of fun to watch.
I just recently added this movie to my BluRay collection. I hadn’t seen it in decades and delighted in watching it again. Robert Preston was already a favorite in my family thanks to Music Man and Victor/Victoria, and this movie just upped the ante. :-)
I think this movie is an underrated gem. Guest and Stewart don’t get enough credit for their charming performances and the way they depict that lower-class lifestyle. And Guest worked perfectly in expanded dual roles. The old pros did what I’d expect them to do, but the young folk in this exceeded my expectations.