The Last Starfighter

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 movie also has a hormone-filled romance in the middle. Upon seeing the film, I was a little skeptical about the script and its verisimilitude, but after a bit of reading, I came to discover that, nowadays, there are a lot of digital military systems, and even weaponry, that are made in such a way that be more easily controlled by soldiers who have already had some contact with computer games, and have some dexterity with this type of entertainment. This is something quite ingenious, and also perverse, on equal measures: ingenious because of their pragmaticism, perverse because it puts "innocent" video games on an equal footing with real weapons, which destroy and kill real people. Philosophies aside, the film seems to me more accessible and more interesting than others of the same genre and from the same era. The script isn't particularly clever, and it's not difficult to predict the course of events, but it does things reasonably effectively. The cast is not the strong point of the film. We don't have any major actors involved here, and the whole movie looks like it was made with fairly amateur actors. Lance Guest was credible in the role of the hero, and he does what he needs to, but without great competence and in a relatively weak way. Robert Preston is a little better, but he doesn't have much to do other than be the movie's Yoda. Catherine Mary Stewart appears simply because someone thought the hero had to have a minimally attractive girlfriend. Technically, the film bets heavily on cinematography, which is reasonably well done, and on good visual and sound effects, which do their job well and look realistic, even if they are a huge distance from what we can do today, which makes the film quite dated but still nice.

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 drown out the occasionally boo-hiss romantic elements with "Maggie" (Catherine Mary Stewart). There is plenty of humour, too - mostly from Preston and Guest makes for an easy on the eye hero for all to get behind. It's actually stood the test of time quite well, as many simple ideas do, and I really quite enjoyed it.