The One 80s Classic That Actually Needs A Sci-Fi Reboot
Greeting Starfighter! It can feel like everything is being remade these days, with the 80s in particular turning into a gold mine for Hollywood studios. We’ve already received a new Conan, Footloose, Karate Kid, and even Time Bandits.
Few of those worked, but the one actually would, and be a license to print money, hasn’t happened yet. We’re talking about, The Last Starfighter. Stay tuned to find out what’s happening with plans for more.
The Last Starfighter Is Still Relevant
Given how popular video games are, The Last Starfighter is still the ideal fantasy of a new generation. Who wouldn’t love finding out that their video game is real, and now you have to go save an entire alien civilization? I remember the 80s, and I’d still love for that plot to be true. The Last Starfighter is the greatest example of a simple sci-fi concept executed well.
The movie’s title is a reference to both the name of a video game in the story and a rank given to a specially talented individual. A Starfighter is a job, not a ship. In the context of the film, a Starfighter is a being who mans the weapons of a Gunstar.
A Gunstar is basically a space-going fighter craft, like an X-Wing from Star Wars or a Star Fury from Babylon 5. Only it’s cooler than both.
The entire plot of The Last Starfighter is that Alex, an angry, going-nowhere teenager, is really good at playing a game called Starfighter. He’s so good that once he gets the high score, the game’s creator, Centauri, meets with him, and then kidnaps him and replaces him with an android.
Centauri was tasked with using Starfighter to find recruits for the Rylan Star League in their conflict with the KohDan Empire. Whisked up into the stars and teamed with an alien pilot named Grig, played with gusto by Dan O’Herlihy, Alex is now the galaxy’s last hope to save us all from a malevolent invading force.
Small Moments Make This 80s Classic Special
It’s creative little details that make The Last Starfighter special. Beta Alex, our hero’s earthly robot replacement, is hilarious, scary, and impressive. The strange background of Grig’s family adds a fun dimension to his character.
Catherine Mary Stewart, as Maggie, is the most perfect teenage girlfriend ever seen on screen, outside of Jennifer in Back to the Future. Last Starfighter’s side characters at the trailer park all hit memorable notes too. Their unwavering support of Alex, a way of returning all the kindness he’s shown them over the years, is a beating heart at the center of the film.
Most of all, there’s Robert Preston as the enigmatic Centauri. He’s the closest I’ve seen any movie come to matching the on-screen mentor magic of Back to the Future’s Doc Brown.
The Last Starfighter is so pure and so classic in its storytelling style, that English professors could use it to teach Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. The film achieves every single beat with all the grace and elegance of Babylon 5’s Kosh.
How The Last Starfighter Was Received In The 80s
The Last Starfighter, mostly only because it was released in 1984, was accused of ripping off Star Wars by critics at the time. But, that could be said of almost every sci-fi movie released after George Lucas’s box office dominance. In the case of The Last Starfighter, it’s not a fair critique. The Last Starfighter is more of a starry fairy tale, complete with the feel-good: everyone gets a moment of happiness ending.
Not every sci-fi movie needs to launch a trilogy or have enough meat on its bones to create decades of merchandising opportunities. Often the most satisfying movies get in, tell a fun story, and get out. And few movies are more satisfying than The Last Starfighter.
Like that Star Wars ripoff complaint, most of the flak the movie got from critics was for all the wrong reasons. Roger Ebert, in a rare review misstep, called it “pretty lame material.” At the same time, Ebert and other critics praised The Last Starfighter for its use of computer graphics, standing alongside Tron as an early pioneer of CGI.
A Cray supercomputer created the movie’s special effects, which sounds strange today when a smartphone has more processing power. The result was 300 scenes of spaceship CGI and a 1983 eye-popping budget of $14 million.
Unfortunately, those special effects don’t hold up at all. That’s not the movie’s fault, technology has simply progressed. Conceptually, the film’s effects are still great. That Cray supercomputer just wasn’t up to the challenge of meeting modern CGI standards.
Dated special effects are only one of many reasons The Last Starfighter is so ripe for a remake, but its a big one. When The Last Starfighter is finally remade, those space battle scenes will be able to match the quality of the movie’s still relevant story.
Ready Player One proved audiences love stories about going into their favorite games and that movie’s story isn’t half as good as The Last Starfighter. It is, however, proof that The Last Starfighter is already as perfect for today’s kids as it was for the kids of the ’80s.
Every gamer dreams of being praised for their skill. I should know I won a Mech Warrior team tournament in 2005, and you better believe I still work that into every conversation. Yes. I still wear the first-place T-shirt.
In the last few years, Hollywood has stayed away from films about being a gamer, to bring games to life instead. But that resulted in Borderlands. We all agree that movie was a horrible mistake, so why not get back to basics?
The worst thing I can say about The Last Starfighter is that a true video game tie-in never happened. The NES game called The Last Starfighter was a re-named version of another game. And the Atari game was just a bunch of shapes that had little to do with the film.
By approaching The Last Starfighter as it was meant to be, namely, wish fulfillment and a fairy tale instead of a hard sci-fi epic, it’s still as charming today as it was back then. The movie’s over-the-top 80s acting and cheesy costumes are now a great reminder of the way magic can happen when sci-fi doesn’t take itself so seriously. It can be great.
The Return Of The Last Starfighter: Current Plans For Remakes And Sequels
The Last Starfighter was great. It’ll be even better again. So where’s that Last Starfighter remake? Some iteration of a Last Starfighter sequel has been in development since at least 2005, but if you think that means it’s close to fruition, think again.
Things were looking so good that three years ago, we received a concept trailer for The Last Starfighter 2 from writer and director Gary Whitta. Unfortunately, in 2022 Witta took to Twitter and said, “To be honest there’s a decent chance it never happens. But if it doesn’t, it won’t be for the lack of effort on my and Jon’s part.”
Whitta mentions Jon Betuel, who wrote the screenplay for The Last Starfighter and has been attached to the sequel ever since the original director, Nick Castle, was hoping to helm a follow-up himself. Whitta, best known as the writer of 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, was the most recent director who was hoping to take on the project.
Last year, Whitta was singing a much different song, saying on Twitch: “We’re very, very close. We’re basically on the one yard line and I believe it will happen.” Since Whitta did not expand on what stopped The Last Starfighter sequel on the proverbial one-yard line, there’s no way to know for sure what happened.
More recently, Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell have expressed interesting in remaking this classic 80s movie. How serious they are about getting something done remains to be seen.
Decades before The Last Starfighter‘s sequel was in development, the original film hit theaters to modest box office returns. It wasn’t a failure, and it’s not a dead franchise. But for now, it seems like it may be a while before the movie gets a much-deserved revival.
Things need to change, and it’s up to you. You have been recruited by the Star League to bring back, The Last Starfighter.
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