Damn calluses on my palms.
“You haven’t seen The Last Starfighter?” says my husband, incredulous. “I’ll add it to the Netflix queue.”
I can’t remember why I never saw The Last Starfighter. Given that it features a cute boy, aliens, spaceships, space battles and a romance, it would have made my teenage self go “Squee!”
The Last Starfighter swaps out the planet Tatooine for a trailer park, and takes the whine out of the young hero, but trades on the same basic theme as Star Wars. A young man, Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), longs for a life beyond the confines of the trailer park that he calls home.
Luke Skywalker had Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen holding him back; for Alex, the obstacle to his dreams is some bureaucrat who turns down his student loan. (As obstacles go, this one’s pretty lame. The kid lives in a trailer park, where his mom is the manager and probably isn’t paid much as she also works as a waitress. He shouldn’t have any trouble getting financial aid.)
Alex’s hobbies include playing a Starfighter arcade game and occasionally feeling up his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart). The evening after he learns his loan application has been turned down, Alex consoles himself by playing Starfighter. Because he does a lot more gaming that girlfriend groping, Alex is really good, and this night, he wins the game.
Happy to have conquered the gaming universe, but still stuck in the land of mobile housing, Alex mopes about, a fake night sky the backdrop to his pathos. Alex’s Obi Wan arrives in the form of Centauri (Robert Preston), driving what looks like a DeLorean on steroids. Centauri introduces himself as the inventor of the Starfighter game. Perhaps because he is male, or maybe short on common sense, Alex gets in the car with Centauri and is whisked away to the planet of Rylos. This is where I realize that A) there hasn’t been a remake of this movie, and B) that’s a good thing, since the remake would no doubt feature Shia LaBeouf screech-whining his way through space.
Alex is a bit confused, but takes this rather well, largely unfazed by the motley assortment of aliens, including the Rylans who look like the ancestors of Babylon 5’s Mimbari, and another alien who might be Futurama’s Dr. Zoidberg. He’s cool as a cucumber until his fellow Starfighters start doing a “Victory or death” kind of chant. This is where Alex demonstrates that some teens do have a sense of their own mortality, and demands to be taken home. But you can’t ever go home. Especially, if you’ve been replaced by a robotic version of yourself. And said robot is mucking up your lovelife by refusing your hot girlfriend’s advances. (Honestly, the antics of Alex’s doppelganger Beta are more amusing than the main story.)
As one might deduce from the film’s title, something really bad, read “fatal,” happens to all the other Starfighter’s, and Alex will reluctantly answer the call to his hero’s journey.
By today’s standard’s the CGI in The Last Starfighter is primitive. But for a movie that was created before desktop computers, it holds up rather well. The plot is cheesier than Mom’s lasagna, but so earnest in its approach that its really kind of sweet.
My inner teenager goes, “Squee!”
