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THE LAST STARFIGHTER – Craig Safan
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Last Starfighter was a popular science-fiction adventure film for kids, directed by Nick Castle. The film tells the story of Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), an average teenage boy living in a trailer park, who passes the time playing – and getting very good – at an arcade video game called Starfighter. One day, shortly after Alex breaks the all-time record points score of the game, he is approached by Centauri (Robert Preston), the ‘inventor of the game’. Before he knows what’s happening, Alex is whisked off into outer space, where he is recruited by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war: it turns out that Starfighter was actually a training tool to find the best starship pilots in the galaxy, and Alex is now the last line of defense for the peace-loving people of our solar system against the threat of the evil Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. The film was a major commercial success in 1984, and has the distinction of being one of the earliest films to use extensive CGI effects to depict its many starships and battle scenes. Not only that, but the film boasts a rousing score by the great Craig Safan, in what was one of the most significant box-office hits of his career. Read more…
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