a5c7b9f00b Alex Rogan lives in a trailer park with his mother Jane Rogan and his younger brother Louis. Alex is a handyman that helps his neighbors in small tasks. He is waiting for a loan so that he can attend university and move with his girlfriend Maggie Gordon to the city. However, Alex receives a letter informing that his request of loan has been denied. When Alex breaks the record of the Starfighter video game, he is visited by a man called Centauri that tells him that he works in the company that manufactures the game and invites him to a ride in his car. Soon Alex learns that Centauri's car is a spacecraft and the Starfighter game is actually a test to find skilled warriors to protect the Star League frontier against Xur and Kodan armada. Alex arrives in the planet Rylos but he refuses the invitation. Alex returns to his house and finds that he is hunted by alien agents sent by Xur to kill him. He summons Centauri and learns that all the starfighters have been murdered in a treacherous attack on the Rylos' base. Now, Alex and his partner Grig are the last chance to avoid the invasion of the cruel Xur. Alex Rogan lives in a trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. He beats the Starfighter video game to the applause of everyone in the court and later that day finds he has been turned down for a student loan for college. Depressed, he meets Centauri, who introduces himself as a person from the company that made the game, before Alex really knows what is going on he is on the ride of his life in a "car" flying through space. Chosen to take the skills he showed on the video game into real combat to protect the galaxy from an invasion. Alex gets as far as the Starfighter base before he really realized that he was conscripted and requests to be taken back home. When he gets back home, he finds a Zando-Zan (alien bounty hunter) is stalking him. Unable to go home and live, Alex returns to the Starfighter base to find all the pilots have been killed and he is the galaxy's only chance to be saved from invasion. To defeat the invaders, who are paying the bounty on him, he must be victorious. The film has a great script by Jonathan R. Betuel and it is nicely directed by Nick Castle, otherwise best known for playing Michael Myers in "Halloween" (1978). Along with "Tron", it is remembered for its groundbreaking early use of CGI and the special effects, state of the art for the time, hold up surprisingly well. Although the film has a comparatively serious plot, there is a great undercurrent of humour throughout the film.<br/><br/>Lance Guest is a very engaging male lead as both Alex Rogan and his robot duplicate Beta Alex while Catherine Mary Stewart is likewise very good as his girlfriend Maggie Gordon. It's a shame that neither of them had any other big successes as they're both likable and talented actors. In his final film, Robert Preston is great as the interplanetary con man Centauri. However, in spite of his relatively limited screen time, the show is stolen by my fellow University College Dublin alumnus Dan O'Herlihy as Alex's alien navigator. His great voice and Irish accent were as recognisable as his face was unrecognisable and he gets many of the best lines in the second half of the film. His papers in the UCD Archives, where I seem to spend most of my working life these days, so I really must have a look at them one of these days to see if there is any Hollywood gossip! <br/><br/>I think that part of the reason that the film works as well as it does is that the actors generally play it straight in both the dramatic and the comedic scenes rather than going over the top in the latter. There are several hints in the film that a sequel was planned but it never materalised, unfortunately. From the first orchestral figure with it's screensaver-esquire star background of this film you can determine this film is attempting to copy Star Wars. Not just in terms of story and visuals but also with it's characters, costume design and even it's lucrative corporate tie-ins (Atari game available!). However due to it's lower budget and considerably less expansive film environment the film fails somewhat miserably in comparison to it's bigger brother.<br/><br/>Newer viewers will probably find greater enjoyment from it;s kitsch value. 80s hairstyles, ridiculous arcade games and and special effects that look like they were designed by a dog on MS Paint are in spades. To be honest it's probably worth watching the film just to see a 'supercomputer' receive a production credit.<br/><br/>There is a small sugary coating to this otherwise bland offering. A glut of supporting characters, who on a handful of occasions are genuinely entertaining, round out the film surpprisingly coherently<br/><br/>All in all a film more enjoyable than initially suspected The Last Starfighter is a well-made movie. The special effects are competent. The acting is good, and I enjoyed Robert Preston's fast-talking The Music Man reprise (we've got trouble, right here in the galaxy) and the gentle wit of Dan O'Herlihy's extraterrestrial. But the final spark was missing, the final burst of inspiration that might have pulled all these concepts and inspirations and retreads together into a good movie. Yes and no.<br/><br/>The game in the movie was a mock-up. The game cabinet is shown, but the screens were just computer-animated. The cabinet had colored lights for that scene. At the time this movie was made, an arcade game with graphics like that was not possible. There were plans to release an arcade version with vector graphics like the Star Wars arcade game (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=S&game_id=9773) but this never got beyond early stages and was never finished.<br/><br/>On the home front, there were plans to make an Atari 2600 version but that game was nothing like what is seen in the movie. The game was later renamed and released as Solaris (http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/solaris_). There was a Last Starfighter game created for the Atari 5200 computer (http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=789) which was never released, and one for the Atari 400/800 which was renamed and released as Star Raiders II. It was also ported to other systems of the time, like Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC (http://www.mobygames.com/game/star-raiders-ii).<br/><br/>In 2006, a company called Rogue Synapse (www.roguesynapse.com) created a version of the game seen in the movie that is designed to run on Windows, and they provide plans for how to make a replica game cabinet. Centauri wanted his death to motivate Alex to fight Zur and the Ko-Dan armada. Give Alex a reason to help save Rylos and the Star League as well as saving Earth and his own family and friends. Give Alex a reason to fight as a Starfighter. Grig was in the hanger working on the prototype of the advanced Gunstar which was to be Alex's Gunstar, when the base was attacked and destroyed. When Alex and Centauri return to Rylos, they learn that all the Starfighters were massacred in the destruction of Star League Command. Since Alex was away on Earth, he was the only Starfighter left to stand against Xur, as Grig was only a navigator. In 2009, 25 years after the film's release, it was announced that there was to be a long-awaited sequel entitled "Starfighter" which was to take place 30 years after this film. The only original cast member rumored to be returning was Norman Snow as Xur. The sequel was shelved. However, given the current spate of revival shows and reboots, including Paramount's upcoming remake of Joe Dante's 'Explorers', it wouldn't come as a surprise if it made it to theaters. The movie tie-in novel published by Berkley Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Books.