SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 42 Discussion - The Last Starfighter

[Guestx]

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@TheRuthlessOne offered to take his aboard his time machine and we accepted. And so in all its 80s glory, we'll be discussing. . .

Our Director

The Last Starfighter is directed by NICK CASTLE, a.k.a. the guy who played Michael Myers in the original Halloween.

He's an American screenwriter, director and actor who, in addition to being the director of The Last Starfighter, was also a co-writer with John Carpenter on Escape from New York. He born into a showbiz family in Los Angeles and got exposed to the business at a very early age. He went on to study film at USC, where he served as cinematographer for the Academy Award-winning live action short film The Resurrection of Broncho Billy.

According to Wikipedia:

Castle's film credits include "Dark Star" where he played the beach ball alien, Major Payne, Dennis the Menace, The Last Starfighter, and Connors' War as a director. He wrote the screenplays Escape from New York and Hook. He was the writer and director of the film "Tap".

He played Michael Myers in the 1978 horror classic Halloween, directed by former USC classmate John Carpenter, being paid $25 a day. Castle's subsequent collaborations with Carpenter included his name being used as one of the main characters' names in The Fog, co-writing the script of Escape From New York, and performing the title song of Big Trouble in Little China as part of the band Coup de Villes, alongside Carpenter and another friend, Tommy Lee Wallace.

Castle's most recent project is the screenplay for August Rush, a musical-drama directed by Kirsten Sheridan and starring Freddie Highmore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Robin Williams, and Keri Russell, released in 2007. He also stars as himself in the 2010 documentary Halloween: The Inside Story by Filipino filmmaker Nick Noble.[3]

Castle won a Saturn Award for Best Writing for The Boy Who Could Fly, a Silver Raven (for Delivering Milo), a Grand Prize (for The Last Starfighter), a Bronze Gryphon, and a Gold Medal of the Regional Council.

Our Stars​

Lance Guest: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0346411/?ref_=tt_cl_t3

Catherine Mary Stuart: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0829252/?ref_=tt_cl_t5

Robert Preston: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0696481/?ref_=tt_cl_t8

Dan O'Herlihy: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0641397/?ref_=tt_cl_t4

Film Overview and YouTube Videos​

Premise: A video game expert Alex Rogan finds himself transported to another planet after conquering The Last Starfighter video game only to find out it was just a test. He was recruited to join the team of best starfighters to defend their world from the attack.

Budget: $15 Million
Box Office: $28 Million

​

Trivia
(courtesy of IMDB)​

* The first movie to do all special effects (except makeup and explosions) on a computer. All shots of spacecraft, space, etc were generated on a Cray X-MP computer.

* A lot of the scenes with the Beta Unit were shot after main filming was complete because the test audience liked the comic relief of the Beta Unit scenes and the director decided they added more originality to the "boy gets to go to outer space" story. This is why in many of the Beta Unit scenes Lance Guest is obviously wearing a wig - he had cut his hair by the time those scenes were shot.

* According to screenwriter Jonathan Beutel, the idea for "The Last Starfighter" came about, because he wandered into a video arcade and saw a young boy playing a video game and also at that time, he read the book "The Once and Future King" by T.H White and it occurred to him, that what if a video game had been a sword in a stone and a boy had scored an incredible number in the video game, which sent out a ripple effect across the universe.

* The alien script seen on the computer screens in the movie is actually Hebrew with some variations.

* Jonathan R. Betuel was working as a cab driver when he wrote the first draft of the script.

* In addition to the major "Star Trek universe" roles later played by "Starfighter" cast members Wil Wheaton and Marc Alaimo, several others in the movie's cast guest starred in various "Star Trek" franchises. They include Dan Mason, Barbara Bosson, Norman Snow and Geoffrey Blake. But notable among them is Meg Wyllie ("Granny Gordon") who played one of the Talosian "keepers" in the Star Trek (1966) pilot, Star Trek: The Cage (1986).

* Atari actually programmed games for its 5200 SuperSystem and 400/800 series home computers as a tie-in with this movie. The games never went past the prototype phase (though copies do survive). Also, the game was nothing like the arcade machine Alex played in the film - the technology did not exist at the time to produce real-time 3-D polygonal graphics on a home machine. Rumor also has it that Atari produced one prototype Last Starfighter arcade machine, but it since has been lost. An early Atari 2600 program was revamped into the game released as "Solaris".

* This was Robert Preston's last movie appearance.

* In 2007, a musical based on the movie was performed as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival.

* Robert Preston and Dan O'Herlihy had never met before this movie. When they finally met on the set, O'Herlihy was already in Grig makeup with a full-head mask. O'Herlihy introduced himself and Preston jokingly replied that of course he recognized O'Herlihy because he had "one of those faces."

* Shot in forty days.

* Robin Williams was offered the role of Xur, but passed.

* Director Nick Castle and actor Lance Guest had both previously been in the Halloween series. Castle played Micheal Myers in the original Halloween, and Guest played Jimmy in Halloween 2.

* Released a few years after the alleged release of the mysterious arcade game 'Polybius' which allegedly caused epileptic seizures and nightmares among the children who played it. The existence of this game is never been proven but there are strong similarities between the plot of the movie and the Polybius conspiracy that is still alive on various online forums.

Members: @shadow_priest_x @europe1 @EL CORINTHIAN @HUNTERMANIA @iThrillhouse @DaDamn @chickenluver @jeicex @MusterX @BeardotheWeirdo @In The Name Of @Coolthulu @AndersonsFoot @DannyNL @TheRuthlessOne @coopdro @Scott Parker 27 @Alex Murphy

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Loved this movie as a kid. Talked the wife into watching it about six months ago and we both fell asleep with no desire to go back and finish it.

 

[MusterX]

1984, what a great year and decade. The 1980's will forever stick out as something different, at least to me and to the others who remember it.

In the opening scene Maggie and a truck load of teenagers are going to the lake they stop and try to get Alex to come along. Its amazing how much like the 80's this film feels to me. That is how things used to be. We loaded up, went to the lake, got drunk, and that was a good time. This film is full of all the wonderful cheese that the 80's are known for like when the entire trailer park they live in runs down to the only arcade machine, which is outside no less, to excitedly watch Alex try to break the record score.

This is god level cheese and not too far off from reality as I can vividly remember people gathered around arcade games watching someone having a great game. This was a common sight in the 1980's. The whole thing that makes it awesome is that the 80's actually were cheesy in real life, not just in its movies. Look at this pic of two people that could actually be Alex and Maggie from the 1980's, complete with arcade games.

Depending on your age in the 1980's it may mean something different to you guys but even the relationship between Maggie and Alex is that sort of cheesy first love, we're going to get out of here someday and leave it all behind love.

The way fate is woven into the story is also 80's cheese that makes it taste so good. Alex is the best StarFighter player in the world but that arcade machine was not supposed to be delivered to his trailer park, it was supposed to be delivered to Las Vegas. Alex was never supposed to be playing that game to begin with. Then we flash over to Alex's little brother going through his Playboy collection, more cheesy gold because before internet porn that is what guys did, they had stacks of Playboy mags hidden under the mattress.

At the same time Alex is in Rylos and they place a small translator device on his collar and he says you guys speak English and they say no you hear English because of the translator. This later become reality at places like the United Nations.

Grig is unhappy about Alex being selected as a StarFighter pilot because Earth is too primitive, they aren't even part of the interstellar community so he tells Centauri, "You are up to your old Excalibur tricks again huh" This was a great line and it passed by quickly so you might not have noticed it. Excalibur being a reference to King Arthur's sword and a story from Earth but its great because only the chosen one could pull Excalibur from the stone and be king and Centauri placed the arcade game there to see who could pull the sword out and it was Alex.

Anyway, just really love this movie. 8.25/10

 

[MusterX]

Me too. Watching it again last night brought back fond memories of it.



I'm glad I have only vague memories of the '80s. Such an embarrassing decade.

That translator thing wasn't original to The Last Starfighter. They used that in Star Trek.

I noticed the opening titles of the movie were very similar to those of Superman. Wonder if anyone else noticed that.

I'll give it 7/10. Too good for a 6 but too cheesy for an 8.

LOL at calling the 80's embarrassing. The 80's are the GOAT decade.

 

[Guestx]

Just going to do my series-of-disparate-thoughts thing here.

* So the movie starts off in a trailer park. I've always wondered what it would be like to live in one of those. A long time ago I had a friend who had a friend who lived in one, and I went out there one day with her, and it actually didn't seem too bad. I think this must have been like the bourgeois version of a trailer park though because it was kind of nice and looked nothing like the redneck trailer park that another friend of mine lived in back in the day.

* It's always interesting going back and watch movies set in the 80s and early 90s. Because they're more or less modern people at that point . . . but they still live in an Internet-less era. It really is amazing to think of how the Internet has changed the world so much.

* I was taken off guard big time with the CGI, because I had no idea that CGI was even being used on this scale in the 80s. That blew me away. I can't remember CGI being used on a large scale in any movie before Jurassic Park, honestly. With that said, you know the old saying: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because, while the CGI is absolutely fascinating from an historical standpoint, since they went in that direction the FX looks nowhere near as good as they would have if they had used models.

* It's always fun to see what past generations thought futuristic shit would look like. Inevitably they think the future will mostly look like the current era, but with some weird tweaks. What's interesting though is that our current depictions of the future in movies really haven't changed much in the past 20ish years. Minority Report looks like it could be made today, for instance.

* I have to say, considering the movie is called The Last Starfighter, there's really a distinct lack of action in the film. You expect a lot of, well, you know, starfighting but that's not really what happens. Instead of him being the LAST starfighter, I think the storyline would've worked better if they had just made him the first starfighter from earth--that's what makes him special--but he works with a squadron of other starfighters to kick some ass. I also think a training montage would be pretty awesome here. And a great 80s metal soundtrack for while all this training and ass kicking is going on.

Reading back over some of my points, it sounds like I'm more negative on the movie than positive but I actually had a lot of fun with it. It was a light, breezy week in the SMC and I enjoyed it. I found the trip back to the 80s very nostalgic and I thought the humor with the Beta Unit really worked to make the film feel fresh and original.

It's a good pick.

7/10

 

[Guestx]

Watch Tron.

I actually did some reading and, if what I read was correct, Tron only has about 12 minutes of computer generated footage. And much of what appears to be computer generated is in fact traditional hand-drawn animation.

 

[Guestx]

Excuse me while I wipe this egg off my face.

LOL. Well I do think it's a good example.

Tron, at least to my knowledge, is truly THE first example of CGI on anything approaching a wide scale. But Starfighter took the shit to a whole new level.

 

[Coolthulu]

After my first viewing of this film as kid, I came away with three things: 1) I wanted to live in a trailer-park, 2) Catherine Mary Stewart was all I would really need to be happy in life and 3) I wanted to fly that damn ship.

The Last Starfighter, directed by Nick Castle (he was the first Michael Myers. pretty solid gig), is a slightly more than 80's fluff, slightly less than resonating sci-fi drama about a young man who qualifies for interstellar combat by being a arcade stud. Alex Rogan pretty much lives in the greatest trailer park on earth. Scenic, friendly, charming and quirky with an immensely entertaining arcade game and the most bodacious T-park girl ever (ol' C.M.S.). He conquers the 8-bit beast and sets the all-time high score in awe inspiring fashion.

Guest is fine in his role, as is most of the cast. Dan O'Herlihy and Robert Preston give standout performances and add some more gravitas to the film, as does a rousing score from Craig Safan. The computer effects were pretty cutting edge at the time, but haven't aged terribly well. They don't really take away from the enjoyment, and serve as an interesting touchstone in the development of the technology.

The Last Starfighter remains a monstrously fabulous example of the charm that existed in a lot of 80's film. As an adult, I am sure of three things after I watch it: 1) I NEVER want to live in a trailer park (how gullible I was), 2) Catherine Mary Stewart is an essential part for a happy life (unfortunately for her: you snooze, you lose)

Oh & 3) I still want to fly that damn ship.

Cheers!

 

[europe1]

Yeah this was pretty fun. There was a lot of cheese to it but it also felt so... perfunctory.

Like, take the evil aliens for example, they don't have a lot of oomph to them. There is no defining moment that really makes you engage with them. Compare this, with say, The Empire in Star Wars. Those guys have oomph from the get-go due to their iconic look and strong introduction, seeing their massive, triangular spaceship hunt down Leia's ship -- and then having the Stormtroopers storm in an gun-down the security crew. That's the sort of thing that grabs your attention, that makes you think that these guys are an worthy, fiendish threat. In this one, the evil aliens are just either talking heads or tie-fighters in space, there's not a lot to get your danger senses tingling. We get to know nothing about their Emperor or what their culture is like.

On the same subject, I also think it's a bit odd how unemotional and unexcited everyone seems to be about the situation. Everyone seems really blasé. Alex is a bit disorientated when he's at the Star Leage, but he seems perfectly fine just leaving it all behind and forgetting he's even been there. It's not an earth-shattering event, it's just something annoying that he want's to get past. He's really unmoved for someone whose just discovered aliens and a Star Wars. With is especially strange considering his addition to the Starfighter games and dreams of leaving home and going on an adventure.

Grig likewise seems strangly blasé. The entire flotilla gets blown up. Every Starfighter is dead. The entire free universe lies ripe and ready to be plucked like a fresh peach. Unavoidable doom seems at hand. Does he seem affected by all this though? Nope! Still calm and collected as always, formal and ready to do his duty without any emotional vexations at all! The movie does use this attitude to have some fun though in the second act. But it doesn't really save how strange all this feels.

1984, what a great year and decade.

1984 is actually my highest ranking year on IMDB, with 6.87. I gave this film a (pretty weak) 6, so it brough the rating down to 6.80. Still highest though.

At the same time Alex is in Rylos and they place a small translator device on his collar and he says you guys speak English and they say no you hear English because of the translator

But how could Grig communicate with the earthlings in the end though? They didn't have translators. What an amazing coincidence that english developed on two entirely separate planets in space!

This film is full of all the wonderful cheese that the 80's are known for like when the entire trailer park they live in runs down to the only arcade machine, which is outside no less, to excitedly watch Alex try to break the record score.

Yeah that was just... bizzare. So this entire community is downright elated that this random teen manages to break the high-score? Everyone sprints down to the arcade to watch him do it? They're all smiling ear-to-ear and cheering him on?

That has to be really weird for the actors too. "He's doing computor stuff -- something you know nothing about -- act all excited and awed!" <45>

Those were some faked smiles in the audience. Watching Catherine Mary Stewart smile so fakely -- not having an idea about what she was excited about -- gave me sort of a flashback to Wargames, where Ally Sheedy likewise had to act super-enthusiastic about computers and it was clear that she had no idea what a computer actually was.

* So the movie starts off in a trailer park. I've always wondered what it would be like to live in one of those. A long time ago I had a friend who had a friend who lived in one, and I went out there one day with her, and it actually didn't seem too bad. I think this must have been like the bourgeois version of a trailer park though because it was kind of nice and looked nothing like the redneck trailer park that another friend of mine lived in back in the day.

Yeah I did notice that it was really neat and tidy. Not at all what you normally see trailer parks like.

My google-fu on this film informs me that they originally were going to shoot in a suburb. But changed it so to not draw connections to E.T. And they also thought that making it a trailer-park would give the impression of the community being more close-knitted.

* I was taken off guard big time with the CGI, because I had no idea that CGI was even being used on this scale in the 80s. That blew me away. I can't remember CGI being used on a large scale in any movie before Jurassic Park, honestly. With that said, you know the old saying: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Because, while the CGI is absolutely fascinating from an historical standpoint, since they went in that direction the FX looks nowhere near as good as they would have if they had used models.

They actually had to re-do many of those effects. The original animations had an rendering time of 17 months! So they had to scale back on quality because the studio was having none of that.

But overall I thought they made some sound decisions. They only animated smooth, sleek, methalic objects like starships, which are easy to do for computors, and didn't jarr so much against the background since it was mostly blackness anyways. Anything biological -- or with a multitude of diffrent feutures -- is much harder to do life-like and thus stands out a lot more. The astroid terrain was really what I thought looked jarring and bad.

* It's always fun to see what past generations thought futuristic shit would look like. Inevitably they think the future will mostly look like the current era, but with some weird tweaks.

As a rule-of-thumb people imagine some pretty outlandish technology. But the fashion and social conventions stay the same. Here are some fun futuristic speculations from 1899!

https://singularityhub.com/2012/10/...ld-of-the-future-in-this-series-of-postcards/

View attachment 201423
View attachment 201425

* I have to say, considering the movie is called The Last Starfighter, there's really a distinct lack of action in the film. You expect a lot of, well, you know, starfighting but that's not really what happens. Instead of him being the LAST starfighter, I think the storyline would've worked better if they had just made him the first starfighter from earth--that's what makes him special--but he works with a squadron of other starfighters to kick some ass. I also think a training montage would be pretty awesome here. And a great 80s metal soundtrack for while all this training and ass kicking is going on.

Yeah, it was probably to expensive to do considering the focus on animation.

Grig is unhappy about Alex being selected as a StarFighter pilot because Earth is too primitive, they aren't even part of the interstellar community so he tells Centauri, "You are up to your old Excalibur tricks again huh" This was a great line and it passed by quickly so you might not have noticed it. Excalibur being a reference to King Arthur's sword and a story from Earth but its great because only the chosen one could pull Excalibur from the stone and be king and Centauri placed the arcade game there to see who could pull the sword out and it was Alex.

Yeah, as the trivia section states, Jonathan Beutel the screenwritter was reading "The Once and Future King" at the time and drew inspiration of the Starfighter game from the Excalibur legend.

 

[Guestx]

Dan O'Herlihy

As I was doing my research for this film, I was pretty damn surprised to learn that this guy. . .

Is also this guy. . .

 

[Guestx]

Yeah that was just... bizzare. So this entire community is downright elated that this random teen manages to break the high-score? Everyone sprints down to the arcade to watch him do it? They're all smiling ear-to-ear and cheering him on?

That has to be really weird for the actors too. "He's doing computor stuff -- something you know nothing about -- act all excited and awed!" <45>

Those were some faked smiles in the audience. Watching Catherine Mary Stewart smile so fakely -- not having an idea about what she was excited about -- gave me sort of a flashback to Wargames, where Ally Sheedy likewise had to act super-enthusiastic about computers and it was clear that she had no idea what a computer actually was.

LOL

What really got me about that scene were all the senior citizens. If it had been a bunch of teenagers who happened to live in the trailer park then it would've made a lot of sense, but all these old people are losing their shit because a kid's about to break the high score on a video game? That is just pure comedy.

Yeah I did notice that it was really neat and tidy. Not at all what you normally see trailer parks like.

My google-fu on this film informs me that they originally were going to shoot in a suburb. But changed it so to not draw connections to E.T. And they also thought that making it a trailer-park would give the impression of the community being more close-knitted.

A search for "nice trailer park" lead me to this image. Whatever trailer park has homes like this is where all the snooty, pinky-raising trailer people live.

They actually had to re-do many of those effects. The original animations had an rendering time of 17 months! So they had to scale back on quality because the studio was having none of that.

But overall I thought they made some sound decisions. They only animated smooth, sleek, methalic objects like starships, which are easy to do for computors, and didn't jarr so much against the background since it was mostly blackness anyways. Anything biological -- or with a multitude of diffrent feutures -- is much harder to do life-like and thus stands out a lot more. The astroid terrain was really what I thought looked jarring and bad.

I dunno, man. The impression that I got was that the FX people wanted to play with their cutting-edge computers and used this movie to do it. Like I said, from an historical perspective it's definitely fascinating, and I guess CGI had to start somewhere. But the physics are all wrong and the decision to go with CGI is what gave us this:

Instead of this:

As a rule-of-thumb people imagine some pretty outlandish technology. But the fashion and social conventions stay the same. Here are some fun futuristic speculations from 1899!

https://singularityhub.com/2012/10/...ld-of-the-future-in-this-series-of-postcards/

Fucking LOL! Those are hilariously charming.

It's exactly like I said, their own time period . . . but with a few tweaks!

 

[chickenluver]

I'm still waiting for the day when they develop technology that feeds knowledge and skill directly into my brain, Matrix style.

What the hell is going on here? Some type of peepshow?

 

[Guestx]

I'm still waiting for the day when they develop technology that feeds knowledge and skill directly into my brain, Matrix style.

I've actually thought about this. Do we really want such a development?

It would fundamentally change society, and I'm not sure it would be in a good way.

 

[chickenluver]

I've actually thought about this. Do we really want such a development?

It would fundamentally change society, and I'm not sure it would be in a good way.

Ideally I would be the only person with access to the technology

 

[Guestx]

Ideally I would be the only person with access to the technology

LOL. Indeed.

But the point still stands. Humor aside, would you actually want to live in an existence where you didn't have to work to acquire new knowledge, new skills? Wouldn't that take away some of your sense of meaning and purpose?

 

[chickenluver]

But the point still stands. Humor aside, would you actually want to live in an existence where you didn't have to work to acquire new knowledge, new skills? Wouldn't that take away some of your sense of meaning and purpose?

I don't want to spend 30 years learning how to flawlessly perform Franz Liszt's Piano Sonata. I want to be able to do that shit RIGHT NOW.

I would be thrilled if learning and acquiring new skills was instantaneous. There would be significantly more time for the application of skills.

 

[Guestx]

I don't want to spend 30 years learning how to flawlessly perform Franz Liszt's Piano Sonata. I want to be able to do that shit RIGHT NOW.

I would be thrilled if learning and acquiring new skills was instantaneous. There would be significantly more time for the application of skills.

I think that knowledge and skills are like money. If you don't have to sweat and bleed to acquire them, you will not value them.

 

[dissolved]

I'm still waiting for the day when they develop technology that feeds knowledge and skill directly into my brain, Matrix style.

What the hell is going on here? Some type of peepshow?

 

[dissolved]

I like the 80s but was never over the moon about sci-fi - I pretty much like all genres.

Anyway . . .

- I like that little trailer park, because it's actually not a mobile home park, it's a step down. But the location was nice. If things went south for me in a massive way, I'd head to California as an old person and live near the ocean in a 10k trailer with an excellent air-conditioner. I don't think it'd be that bad.

- I couldn't tell if this movie was a comedy for awhile. The scene where everyone gathers around Alex breaking the game record was so laughably . . . bad, unrealistic I didn't know what to think. I actually thought it was a spoof. But oh well.

- I loved that Starlight Trailer Park sign. Really cool.

- Catherine Mary Stewart is gorgeous. Such a natural beauty and I kind of forgot about her. Too bad she's 57 now lol.

- I just never got into the story much. Everything was alright as far as effects went, particularly for the 80s.

6/10

 

[Guestx]

22 posts the best we can do?

Still plenty of people left to chime in.

@TheRuthlessOne, this is your movie! Nothing to say about it?

@EL CORINTHIAN, @HUNTERMANIA, @iThrillhouse, @DaDamn, @Scott Parker 27, @BeardotheWeirdo, @AndersonsFoot, @coopdro. . . I'm calling you homos out, too!