This is one of those nostalgia movies for me. It're pretty dumb, but I still enjoy it because I was really really young the first time I saw it.

THE STORY: Alex Rogan is a teenager living in a trailer park and his life is going nowhere. (Luke Skywalker? Nah...) Anyway, his one claim to fame is beating the record of "Starfighter", an arcade game. It's then revealed that the video game is a test for potential starfighters in a real life war between the planet Rylos and the evil Xur. So, he's plucked from Earth by the fast-talking Centauri (Robert Preston), and the adventure begins...

First of all, this was the first movie to use computer generated effects so extensively, so it should be remembered for that.

Robert Preston IS this movie. His Centauri is the highlight of the entire film. The disappointing this is, the movie leaves too much room for a sequel that never happened.

And Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat from DS9) is in it...for about two seconds. And he doesn't say a word...

Wil Wheaton has a credit in it, too, as "Louis's Friend" but has no lines. And Granny is played by none other that Meg Wylie (Wyllie?), who played the Keeper in ST's The Cage/Menagerie.

I really thought the "frontier" was hokey. Imagine how long it took to build those frontier "fence posts" and put them in place. Really, they could've saved a few guineas by building them more powerful and spacing them a couple light years apart. If these things, which apparently enclose a diameter of... 100 light years? ... are only about 10 km apart, that is, 1 in every 10 square km, then you'd need 28 quadrillion, 274 trillion of these "fence posts" to enclose a spherical area of the galaxy only 100 light years in diameter.

It'd probably take less time to churn out the number "googolplex" on paper than to manufacture all those "fence posts". Must have kept every industry on Rylos busy for millenia.

Thought it odd that the lizard guy (can't remember his name), who lives in a cave, has never heard of people living in houses on the surface. This guy doesn't get out very much, does he? (Oh, yes, he gets out into space, and into Star League's command facility, but...)

But it's a nice, rollicking fun adventure.

The command ship blowing up into the moon looked a bit more fake than the rest of special effects.

I think the star fighter battle scenes were fine based on the level of CGI, but the command ship and the moon just did't have that realism look. The command ship looked to big in comparison.

oh, and where is Alex's girlfriend sitting on the return trip to Rylos?

Centari says that the machine in the trailer park was supposed to go to Vegas but wound up in the park by mistake. So... Why didn't anyone from Vega come looking for it? I say this becasue I can't imagine any casinos out there stock their arcades with machines that mysteriously show up at their door, someone has to have ordered it (probobly from a dummy orginization that Centari set up). If they ordered it, wouldn't they want to know why they never got it? And how did the trailer park get to keep it? That looks like an expencive piece of machinery (especially for the era the film was made). Surely they didn't get it for free just because it was dumped on top of them.

Well, I doubt the casino owners would actively go looking for the machine themselves. They would call the company that they ordered the machine from (which as you suggested, is probably a dummy corporation Centauri cooked up). The company (Centauri) would then send them another machine. Centauri probably figured it souldn't hurt to leave the machine at the trailer park. And the machine may be expensive from our standards, but probably not from Centauri's. Or maybe the machines were part of a promotion and were distributed for free.

OK, I’ve had this DVD sitting on my shelf for a while and finally got around to looking at it. I haven’t seen The Last Starfighter since a year or two after it came out, so there were a few things I didn’t recall.

First, some context. I saw a lot of movies the year this came out, and just about every one had a trailer (preview) of either this one or The Karate Kid, and I kept getting them mixed up on the first scene of the trailer. This one had to be one of the most revealing of all trailers I’ve ever seen, showing practically every major development right there. Well, I sure knew what to expect going into it.

I really liked this movie. Not that it doesn’t have its flaws, but it was a good summer movie, and I appreciated the (then) awesome computer graphics. It’s funny to look at the credits and see that they needed a CRAY supercomputer to do those, when they could be done better now on any home PC. (Kind of the reason I don’t care much for the revamp of Star Wars – special effects will always be getting better – why shouldn’t Lucas update them every year?)

Now for my nits/gripes/comments:

Lance Guest is a rather vapid star. I thought he showed more as the Beta unit than as the human character.

I had a problem with a lot of Louis’ lines (the little brother). In a moments confusion he says “What the s***?”, a phrase I had never heard before or since. I suspect it was just to get that PG rating as the movie was pretty mild otherwise. He also overacts the “Oh, my God!” line a couple times. Seems like a kid that age would say something more like “Holy cow!” or just “Wow!” (which he does at the very end – “Wa-how!”) And is an 8-year-old really interested in the type of magazine collection he has? (Alex said they were Louis’)

I have the widescreen version but did not see Wil Wheaton anywhere on screen, even though he is credited.

It wasn’t until this viewing that I realized the Frontier was supposed to be a sphere, and came to the same questions as GCapp above. It appears that the asteroid they hide in is the only one within light years, and it’s directly in front of where the command ship breaks through the Frontier (as it and the squadrons fly right over them).

The POV shot of the cheering crowd on Rylos is really pathetic. It looks like all of about six extras dressed in their “Mask of Gideon” best.

I also only realized this time that “The Last Starfighter” referred to Alex, and not the ship (referred to once as a “Gunstar”.)

They can’t seem to agree on a pronunciation of Xur. Everybody switches between saying “Zer” and “Zoor”.

Xur is one of the least effective villains I’ve ever seen in the movies. What a weenie. His underlings were pretty cool, though.

The shot of the command ship hitting the moon was all wrong (as mentioned above), mostly because of the scale. The moon was much too small and the ship much too big in relation to each other. It reminded me of the old comics where Superman would push a planet out of the way, and it looked like he was just carrying a large ball.

It didn't appear that the ships were firing on them at all while they waited for them to get into "Death Blossom" range. I would also have liked to see Alex ready to hurl after firing the DB, instead of just shaking his head a bit.

Nevertheless, I did like this one a lot. It had some unexpected twists (Alex refuses and comes back home), great characters (Centauri, Grig), and things that came out of the blue (what was that stuff the Xanduxan was shedding, anyway?).

I’m curious to check out the extras I haven’t looked at yet.

I have a couple ideas about why Louis would have a collection of Playboys. I think he has them because it's rebellious to have them. I doubt he reacts to the centerfolds sexually, being too young for that, but he knows having them is against the rules and feels cool because of it. Another idea, which answers where he got them from, is that they may have originally belonged to his father. When he left the family, or died, Louis may have found them and taken them into custody, and looking at them reminds him of his father somehow. I know I'm putting way more thought into this minor detail than the writers did, but I guess that's part of nitpicking.

About Xur being a weenie as a villain, I agree. I think the Kodan were using him for the information he had on the Frontier, and had no intention of making him Emperor of Rylos. They did seem to barely tolerate him bossing them around, and were probably planning to send him for a spacewalk without a suit as soon as his usefulness ended.

So what happened to Xur?

His pod crash-landed in the Outback, he kicked around Australia for a while, then hooked up with the band Man or Astroman? doing pyrotechnics, and now manages a Hot Fish Shop in Osseo.

Influx: And is an 8-year-old really interested in the type of magazine collection he has?
Luigi Novi: Children are fascinated by nudity even before puberty.

Influx: Xur is one of the least effective villains I’ve ever seen in the movies. What a weenie. His underlings were pretty cool, though.
Luigi Novi: That was apparently the point. The movie made the point that the lizard guys were only interested in Xur because he had some type of "codes" (it's been a while since I saw the movie), and that even though he appeared to be "in charge," it seemed clear from the exchanges between his two highest ranking "underlings" that he was just a spoiled, posturing child being humored as a pawn, while they were the true power behind the operation. This is especially clear not only when his father calls him a "child" during the holographic communication, but also when the lower-ranking lizard guy asks the other how long they'll have to put up with Xur.

I remember this as a fun movie. Robert Fletcher designed the costumes, and they resemble his designs for the Star Trek movies.
A 25th anniversary DVD will be released August 4, 2009. More here.

Here's an article praising this fun movie on its 39th anniversary. Robert Preston, donning his likable con man persona, looked like he was having a very good time making this pic. It's available to stream, but only on pay platforms for now.

And next year will be it's 40th.