Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Fantastic

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are a few Sci-Fi movies that still hold up as great entertainment, despite being decades old. The Last Starfighter is one of them. I remember when I first watched it in the theater and the joy it gave me; a true 80's movie experience with popcorn! You felt that even you could be Alex Rogan, the boy from Earth who travels to another solar system to fight for freedom. It also had a theme of not letting great opportunities pass you by, of being more than everyone expects of you. And the movie was just plain FUN! I dismiss people who always spout "It's just a Star Wars rip-off", as if Star Wars is the only 80's Sci-Fi movie worthy of any consideration. I think Star Wars paved the way for movies like TLS to be made, at least that is my assertion. The Last Starfighter is a great family movie as well as a neat experience. It did make history as the first movies to use computer graphics for rendering all spaceships and space battles. Go check it out!

This was one of the first movies I saw in a theater, 1985, the year after its release. And I tell you, this movie wasn't a big deal then; it was considered a well made but derivative B movie, and the CGI effects were almost never mentioned in reviews or articles. I have checked it now in newspaper archives online, so I know I remember it right.The ironic thing is that "Young Sherlock Holmes" (1985) was released this same year; I saw it soon after "The Last Starfighter". The Sherlock Holmes movie was hailed for its alleged groundbreaking CGI effect: a very short sequence where a knight of stained glass attack a priest. This effect lasted perhaps 20 seconds..."The Last Starfighter" is full of CGI sequences, and either me or my friends in the theater recognized them as computer images, and absolutely not as "cheap video game graphics" as some reviewers here describe it. And no journalist or reviewer saw it that way either, back then. But when I watch this movie on DVD today, many sequences really look distinctly artificial with unnatural sharp edges and light, much like computer graphics, which give them a style that cut them out from the rest of the movie. My theory is that the celluloid copies that we were watching in the theaters smothered this down and gave these sequences a much more natural look; and that the movie makers originally counted on this when they incorporated the CGI scenes with the rest of the movie.The movie is well made, with a rather original story and good performances by the actors. Not a very great movie, though, but it is entertaining and without doubt movie history.

Everyone dreams of being a pilot or an astronaut and this dream comes true for one kid from the trailer park. This wonderful tale brings out the kid in you and make you want to cheer on the good guys as they take on the universes evil. This was the first time a special effect team used nothing but computer animation in some scenes. So when you watch it just think all of this was done with 640K of memory on a 486 computer! This is a great popcorn flick filled with chases and shooting, good guys and bad guys, love and romance and growing up. It is fun, smart, great story line, and not at all predictable!If you have not seen this movie then grab your child or nephew and some popcorn and enjoy this.....Robert Preston is an absolute delight!

Alex lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. Alex becomes the top scorer of Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the Frontier" from "Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada" in a space battle. After achieving his best score, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri. Stepping into Centauri's vehicle, he is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life, he finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defence force when Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to another planet.....Its a sound idea, having a kid get recruited because he is great at a video game, but one cannot help that this was done before in the movie 'Nightmare' an anthology horror movie that featured Emilio Estevez as a gaming wiz who gets sucked into the video game.This was made a year later....But anyhow, that's just nitpicking, its a fun movie, with a hilarious villain, and who couldn't love a movie more when you find out Grig was played by 'The Old Man' in Robocop.And the effects. Even though they are nothing compared to today, or even a few years after this, they still make the movie, and they really compliment the films narrative.Other than that, its a fish out of water tale of your average Joe, becoming something they had never dreamt of.Plus it stars Lance Guest, the only person on earth who made a shark scream with a camera...