The 1984 Video Game Fantasy The Last Starfighter is a Uniquely Satisfying Star Wars Knockoff
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
If you want your Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 to be covered in a semi-timely fashion it never hurts to select a movie you think I might have seen as a child, loved and always wanted to revisit OR that you think I always wanted to see as a boy but never got around to.
For example, I welcomed the opportunity to relive a highlight of my childhood by re-watching The Last Dragon for this column and was delighted to discover that the Hip Hop martial arts cult classic is every bit as wonderful the second time around.
I am similarly pleased to report that I enjoyed watching 1984’s The Last Strarfighter as a forty-six year old father or two, including an oldest son who is really getting into Star Wars, just as much as I did when I first saw it on home video as a nine-year-old pretending to be sick.
In 1984 the idea that being better at playing a video game than seemingly anybody else in the world would be a ticket to fame and glory was a science-fiction conceit on par with a trailer park teen fighting aerial battles in outer space. These days there are billions upon billions of dollars to be made from competitive video game competitions and even more to be made from people watching other people play video games on Youtube while cracking wise.
I don’t understand it! I REALLY do not understand it. It mystifies me the same way that Hip Hop did my father’s generation.
I am an old man, which is why I’m nostalgic not just for the specific experience of watching The Last Starfighter but for the whole era that spawned it when the whole science fiction world was hopelessly in thrall to Star Wars and its endlessly lucrative spectacle.
But I also feel a deep yearning for the arcade games of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which are primitive by today’s standards but rich enough to inflame my fertile pre-pubescent imagination. Indeed, I loved these video games precisely because they were so simple and basic.
Once video games advanced beyond a certain level they lost me. They were simply too complex for my simple mind to comprehend. But the video game world of The Last Starfighter is soothing in its familiarity and infinite knowability.
The same is true of its special effects. The Last Starfighter was revolutionary in its widespread use of computer animation. I’ve come to hate to hate CGI with a white-hot burning passion but I love the early computer animation here.
This is the rare context where looking and feeling like a video game is both inherently positive and intentional. Like Tron, The Last Starfighter uses early computer animation to get us inside games, to usher wide-eyed audiences into a dazzlingly new digital realm of ones and zeros and beautiful shiny things zooming majestically across the screen.
I dig the retro-futuristic vibe of the star fights and extraterrestrial vibe in part because it coexists so happily with practical effects, creative character design and all sorts of groovy looking aliens.
The Last Starfighter director Nick Castle has a fascinatingly random background that began with him working extensively with John Carpenter at the very beginning of their careers, including the Oscar-winning short film The Resurrection of Bronco Billy.
Then he was part of the ridiculously over-qualified gaggle of science fiction geniuses who created John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Castle did double duty as a camera assistant and as the Beachball Alien.
The best was still to come. In 1978 Castle played Michael fucking Myers/AKA The Shape in Halloween. Yes, that Halloween. The famous one. Three years later Castle cowrote Escape From New York with Carpenter.
In 1984 Castle and Carpenter both made family friendly science fiction movies about space aliens created in the warm glow of the groundbreaking success of E.T and Star Wars in The Last Starfighter and Starman.
The Last Starfighter was not Castle’s debut but it feel like one. It feels like a natural progression from his work with Carpenter but his subsequent directorial output was nowhere near as distinguished or auspicious. He’d go on to give the world Dennis the Menace, Major Payne and Mr. Wrong before reprising his role as Michael Myers in David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy.
But at the beginning, at least, Castle radiated incredible promise as a cinematic storyteller with a gift for balancing special effects and emotions. In The Last Strarfighter Lance Guest plays Alex Rogan, a bored and alienated teenager who can’t wait to get out of the trailer home where he lives with his mom and Playboy-crazed little brother and see the world.
He finds escape and distraction in the arcade game Starfighter, out of which booms the stentorian tones of Robert Preston, who gets his best showcase since The Music Man in the simpatico supporting role of Centauri.
Centauri is essentially a space alien version of the charismatic film flam man Preston played onstage and in the film version of The Music Man. He’s a fast-talking grifter from beyond with a flashy line of patter and an angle for every occasion.
Preston commits to the character with complete conviction. He lays on the old razzle dazzle, giving everything 110 percent. It’s the definition of a star turn. He’s Yoda, Obi-Wan, Harold Hill and a used car dealer from Pluto in one spectacular package.
Centauri created Starfighter as a way of finding pilots to fight in real-life skirmishes between planets and civilizations. In that respect it’s the video game equivalent of Thor’s hammer or Excalibur and Alex proves that he’s worthy by conquering the game, a triumph that brings great joy to his entire trailer park.
Before it blasts off into the cosmos The Last Starfighter does a good job grounding its familiar but crowd-pleasing story in the banal reality of small town high school trailer park life.
Castle foreshadows the science fiction adventure to come by shooting a lot of early night scenes from a distance, so that the stars are a presence visually well before they become our hero’s home and proving ground.
Then Centauri shows up in his nifty space car and a robot double named Beta Alex (Guest in a dual role) who will take his place on earth while his exact duplicate fights in space and provide a steady stream of fish-out-of-water chuckles.
That space car turns into a space ship and an understandably gob-smacked and overwhelmed Alex is brought to a base for orientation alongside a plethora of similarly gifted fighters from alien races and faraway planets.
The Last Starfighter learned all the right lessons from Star Wars in terms of technology as well as storytelling and world-building. It gives us characters worth caring about in addition to cool looking aliens and nifty space battles to delight children and the deeply stoned alike.
Our hero rejects his destiny and returns to Earth to resume his boring, unsatisfying old life but he’s targeted by evil aliens on earth and eventually goes back to space to fight under the tutelage of mentor, friend and sidekick Grig (Dan O’Herlihy).
The Last Starfighter was the first produced script of Jonathan Beutel, who was working as a cabdriver when he wrote it. Beutel would go on to work on Freddy’s Nightmares, a gloriously cheesy horror anthology I’m currently binging, before writing and directing a movie near and dear to my heart: Theodore Rex.
That’s right. The Last Strarfighter and Theodore Rex were products of the same mind although one turned out a little better than the other.
Considering the explosive growth of the gaming industry I’m surprised this hasn’t been rebooted or remade or spawned any sequels although there have unsurprisingly been many aggressive attempts through the decades.
There’s something refreshing about that. Like previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry The Last Dragon, this is the rare beloved cult classic from the 1980s that hasn’t been sullied by a mercenary follow-up of some sort. At least for the time being.
The Last Starfighter’s premise is irresistibly simple and its execution stellar. In the mad, if innately doomed race to create the next Star Wars it occupies a place of distinction as one of the very best and most satisfying of many contenders.
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