The Last Starfighter: 25th Anniversary Edition
Movie: 3 out of 5
Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter from 1984 has, over the years, garnered a large fan base, despite its paltry $28 million domestic box office take. Lance Guest plays Alex, a teenager living with his mother and younger brother in a country trailer park, desperate to escape to the big city with his girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stuart). To occupy his time, Alex plays Starfighter, a space battle videogame, and achieves the high score. Later that evening, he’s approached by Centauri (Robert Preston, in his final film role), who whisks him off into space as a Starfighter recruit to “defend the Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada.”
The Last Starfighter is an entertaining, sometimes derivative, film, borrowing liberally from Star Wars. Some early scenes with Alex in the trailer park, talking with his friends, are very familiar, almost taken word for word from episode one of the radio dramatization of George Lucas’ classic. But that’s not always a bad thing, as it adds some fun to the setup of the movie. What has made The Last Starfighter a B-movie classic from the 1980s is its first use of fully-rendered, three-dimensional computer graphics instead of the traditional stop-motion miniatures often used in movies of this type at the time. Unfortunately, these effects date the film considerably, giving the battle sequences a videogame look to them. All of this, though, does give The Last Starfighter its charm.
Video: 3 out of 5
For The Last Starfighter’s 25th anniversary, Universal has provided a new 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer that is better than it has ever looked. Black levels are adequate, flesh tones accurate, but the colors seem a bit muted at times. Although the print used has some occasional specks of dirt and minor black scratches (most of them appear to be embedded in the negative as part of the optical effects process used in some shots), compression rtifacts and noise are minimal and not distracting.
Audio: 3 out of 5
Encoded at 448 kbps, the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack sounds very dated, with limited fidelity and surround activity. Dialogue, although intelligible, has a tinny quality to it. LFE is virtually non-existent, especially during explosions. Originally mixed in Dolby Stereo, this 5.1 remix is a good representation of how the movie sounded in theatres that were lucky enough to have a decent Dolby Stereo optical sound system.
Special Features: 3.5 out of 5
This 25th anniversary edition is chock full of features surrounding the making of the film and its legacy.
Audio Commentary with Director Nick Castle and Production Designer Ron Cobb: From the 1999 DVD release, Nick Castle and Ron Cobb discuss the making of the film, as well as their backgrounds in the industry (Castle got his start writing with John Carpenter).
Heroes of the Screen: This 24 minute featurette is newly produced (and in anamorphic widescreen), and includes interviews with director Nick Castle, writer Jonathan Betuel, actors Lance Guest and Catherine Mary Stuart, producer Gary Adelson, composer Craig Safan, and visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun
Crossing the Frontier: Making The Lst Starfighter: Taken from the previous 1999 DVD release and covering much of the same territory as Heroes of the Screen, this 32 minute featurette focuses more on the (then) groundbreaking computer-generated visual effects.
Image Gallery: A slideshow of production stills, design sketches, and marketing materials.
Trailers: Both the teaser (non-anamorphic widescreen) and theatrical (full screen) trailers are included.
Overall: 3 out of 5
Although somewhat dated in visual effects, The Last Starfighter still has its charm, and the 25th anniversary edition is a worthy upgrade to the 1999 release.
