The Last Starfighter

You have been recruited by The Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

The Last Starfighter is directed by Nick Castle and written by Jonathan R. Betuel. It stars Lance Guest, Robert Preston, Catherine Mary Stewart, Dan O'Herlihy and Norman Snow. Music is by Craig Safan and cinematography by King Baggot. Story sees Guest as Alex Rogan, an everyday teenage boy who upon breaking the high-score record on a trailer park arcade game, suddenly finds himself recruited by an alien defence unit to fight an evil army out in space.

The advancements of computers and all their devilish electronic off shoots have rendered many of the pioneering effects films of yesteryear as rudimentary antiques. Where once films like...

Didn't grow up watching this, though sort of heard of it over the years, but gave it a watch and immensely liked it, even with the cheesy game-like graphics/effects. Lots of fun and liked the lead actor, Lance Guest. Definitely has some replay value down the road. 3.75/5

Overall, it's a decent movie, if not a very good one.

There is no doubt that, if there is something that marked sci-fi in the 80s, it was arcade games and the popularization of information technology and the personal computer, with the potential that this allowed in everyone's life. However, I have some doubts about the quality of the films it spawned.

In this case, the film begins by showing us a young teenager addicted to a gaming machine who, after beating the last levels of the game, is taken in a futuristic car by a stranger to discover that everything the machine showed was real, and it was in reality true training to find and recruit space pilots for a war in a faraway galaxy, in the best Star Wars style. Of course, the mov...

Just think back to when you spent hours on your Atari games console playing space invaders, without realising that one day you might save the world? Well "Alex" (Lance Guest), a bored teenager living in a trailer park doing odd jobs might just prove to be just such a man. Well, at least this is what "Centauri" (Robert Preston) thinks and leaving a perfectly plausible android doppelgänger in his place, recruits our young man to prevent the evil "Kril" (Dan Mason) and "Enduran" (Kay Kuter) and their overwhelmingly superior force of spacecraft from conquering us all. Can he do it? Can he thwart the cunning plan? It's quite a fun fantasy adventure this, Guest joins in wholeheartedly as does Preston and there are plenty of special effects to dro...