39 Years Ago, One Heartwarming Sci-Fi Classic Quietly Changed Everything

What if an arcade game actually taught you to be good at something? This simple, yet, high-concept premise is the entire foundation upon which several wish-fulfillment fantasies are built. No, endless hours of gaming aren’t rotting your brain and wasting time — you’re training to do something amazing! WhileTronimagined that the skills of ‘80s button mashers might be put to could use in a virtual world,The Last Starfightertook it to the next level: Some arcade games are actually recruitment devices, created by an interstellar league of planets to see who has the right stuff. And on July 13, 1984,The Last Starfighternot only executed this wonderful premise perfectly but predicted the next phase for blockbuster movies entirely.

Thirty-nine years after its release, one of the strangest truths aboutThe Last Starfighteris that it came out beforeBack to the Future. This factoid has doubtlessly sent you to Wikipedia or Google because it feels impossible, right? And yet, this one of those ‘80s paradoxes that’s just true:Back to the Futurehit theaters on July 3, 1985, but a year priorThe Last Starfighterhit on July 13, 1984. If you watchedThe Last Starfighteron cable or VHS in the ‘90s, this will feel strange, only becauseThe Last Starfighterrepresents the ‘80s sci-fi formula so perfectly, that it feels like itmusthave been influenced byBack to the Future. There’s even a flying car, with doors that open kinda like a DeLorean!

But, the great thing aboutThe Last Starfighteris that it was very much its own thing. The movie was shot in less than two months — just 38 days total — but, featured a massive orchestra, and thus, a musical score from Craig Safan, that rivaledStar Wars. Our young hero, Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is stuck in a trailer park, but the scope is galactic.The Last Starfighteris one of those great sci-fi ‘80s movies that feels like an indie film and a studio sell-out at the same time. And the success of the film comes down to essentially two components: The movie has a lot of heart, and its special effects are so surreal and unique that it’s shocking how we take this kind of thing for granted now.

Briefly, in case it’s been a while,The Last Starfighteris about Alex, a down-on-his-luck recent high school graduate, whowantsto go to college, but keeps getting rejected for financial aid. He’s got copies ofPlayboyhidden under the mattress and, because it’s the ‘80s, his kid brother Louis is always trying to look at them. Alex is a good guy though, and everyone in the trailer park loves him because he’s not a burnout or a jerk. Guest plays Alex with genuine affability, channeling Mark Hamill inStar Wars ‘77,but minus the whining. Essentially, Alex is what Luke Skywalker would be like if he wasreal, in the ‘80s, but with a touch of fairytale good-guy magic. So, when he breaks the high score of an arcade game called “Starfighter,” and learns it’s really a recruitment tool for arealspace armada, you’re already rooting for him.

Borrowing from the kind of logic thatDoctor Whooften relies on;The Last Starfighterposits that there’s just a bunch of bipedal aliens out there that look, to varying degrees, like humans with funny haircuts, or are lizard aliens, or have face tentacles, or whatever.The Last Starfighterpacks in all these sci-fi tropes — including the idea of instant language translation — very quickly. So quickly, in fact, you barely notice that some of the instructions for how to destroy the villains do seem outright ripped off fromA New Hope.

But here’s the thing:The Last Starfighteris allowed to make a lot of its structure look likeStar Wars’77, and the reason why is simple: This movie’s premise says: Yes, but what if that was happening out there in therealgalaxy, right now? This conceit leads us to the second big reasonThe Last Starfighteris so influential: The visual effects.

Instead of trying to create a photo-realistic spacescape,The Last Starfighter使太空视觉效果computer-generated, and obviously so. At the time, other thanTron, nobody had really done computer-driven visual effects for a feature film like this. The difference, of course, is that inTron, the video-game aesthetic matches the fact that the characters are literally in a computer matrix. InThe Last Starfighter, the computer-generated VFX aresupposedto represent the “real world,” IE, we’re meant to think this is what outer space looks like in this reality.

Here’s why this works and has actually aged beautifully. First, the design of the spaceship, the Gunstar, is awesome. Second, the effects create a sense of surreality that only makes the rest of the breezy world-buildingmorepalatable.Last Starfighterdirector Nick Castle clearly wasn’t really going for “realistic” with these effects. Instead, the effects match the tone of the movie. And as the years passed, these smooth, very unique spaceship effects have only become more artistic and bold in retrospect.The Last Starfighterhas aged gracefully, not because its CGI seems primitive, but because the artistry with which it is used is novel and smartly deployed. Unlike some recent big blockbusters (cough, coughQuantumania, The Flash) with this film, the CGI feels like part of the story and isn’t even ashamed to be recognized as unreal.

In this way,The Last Starfighterrepresents something that a lot of contemporary blockbuster sci-fi movies have forgotten: The visual effects don’t need to be convincing per se, they just need to feel new and unique. And more important than that, the effects need to match the story, and in that department,The Last Starfighter我是一个n a million.

The Last Starfighteris available to rent oniTunes,Amazon, and elsewhere.

You can also grab the excellent Blu-ray from Arrow video, which is stacked with special features and looks amazing.