The Last Starfighter Blu-ray
Alex Rogan is a video game fanatic that gets the high score on a Last Starfighter video game at his trailer park and ends up on the ride of his life.
Film making 22/25
Cinematography 23/25
Audio 21/25
Bonus Features 18/25
Total 84/100
Alex Rogan, played by Lance Guest, is a high school teenager about to graduate with hopes of getting out of small town life and community college. He plans on going to a state university but his application for a student loan is turned down and his future is suddenly bleaker than he had hoped.
His high score on the stand up arcade game The Last Starfighter brings a fleeting moment of fun and frivolity but things do look down for Alex until Centauri, an alien in human disguise turns up on Alex’s doorstep. Centauri placed the arcade games throughout the world in hopes of finding a human worthy of fighting Xur and the Ko-Dan armada defending the Frontier.
Alex is whisked off the planet and through a black hole to the Frontier where he reluctantly is given the opportunity to fight alongside other beings in defending the Frontier. The Frontier is a barrier defending the Rylan Star League from Xur and his Armada that has been trying to defeat the League and kill everyone there.
Alex does not want to fight when he finds out all this is not a dream but real, he may also really die so Centauri takes him back home. Finally back on Earth Alex finds out that Centauri left an android in place of Alex so no one would know Alex was gone but Xur found out about Alex and sent assassins to kill him.
Alex narrowly misses being killed by an assassin and returns to the Frontier to find out that Xur attacked the League and killed all the Starfighters and destroyed the fleet of starships. Centauri was shot by the assassin and just makes it back before dying and Alex finds Grig, his assigned Gunstar navigator who survived the attack while working on a Gunstar prototype not at the base.
Gunstars are the space ships the Starfighters protect the Frontier along with the automated devices that block ships from coming across the area. The Ko-Dan Armada uses a new technology to cut through the Frontier and invade the League space.
Grig and Alex, the Last Starfighter, must defeat Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada using their cunning and skill that Alex showed in the video game as well as the new weapons of the prototype Gunstar. In saving the League Alex will also save Alex’s home world Earth because Xur is sure to attack that after defeating the League planets because Alex came from there.
After defeating the Armada, Xur escapes just before the command ship is destroyed and Alex returns to Earth to cheers from his friends and family from the trailer park Alex called home. They cheer and wish Alex well as he takes his girlfriend Maggie with him to rebuild the League’s Starfighter’s and protect the Frontier from Xur.
The Last Starfighter is a great film and was the first to use CGI animation for all the space scenes and starship fighting. While you can certainly recognize the scenes as animated using computers it does a great job with blending the scenes and making things realistic to a point.
This is a film that started the animation and computer film industry and shows the technology at its infancy for a great science fiction drama. The film came out a year after Return of the Jedi which still had models of ships and showed what could be done for computer animated filming.
The story may be a bit cheesy but it is a classic in science fiction with all the right mix of good and evil with a few extras thrown in like the hero’s girlfriend and the faithful sidekick. The Last Starfighter is a great film and the release on Blu-ray is about as good as your going to get for a film made in 1984.
The Blu-ray quality of the films transfer is pretty good but not great in quality as much of the main real film is a bit hazy or smoky in a lot of the scenes. Much of the flesh tones appear a bit subdued but colors are generally very good with great black and real crisp whites.
The film does transfer well into Blu-ray but the film is old but looks very good and blends well with the two parts of real film and CGI. The video is good and the audio is as usual a step ahead with good but not great surround sound and pretty good bass.
The film in audio is also dated and surround does not sound as good as more current films so this is not a big surprise here. The audio is probably as good as you’re going to get from an older film that used Dolby Surround Sound and trying to transfer it into an HD Master Audio track.
The Blu-ray edition has the film in high definition as well as a few good bonus features including audio commentary by director Nick Castle and production designer Ron Cobb. There is a making of feature called Crossing the Frontier: The Making of The Last Starfighter and a new feature that looks back at the film by cast and crew called Heroes of the Screen.
The audio commentary seems to be an older audio track added to the film while the Heroes feature is a current talk with the actors and crew of the film. The Heroes of the Screen really takes a look at the characters and cast as they appear to audiences as heroes or mentors that people look up to in the film industry.
The feature is a great look at the film and how they try to break away from other previous films and stand on their own as a science fiction classic in its own right. The features add a lot to the film especially the added features that look back at a film that is 25 years old as well as the making of feature Crossing the Frontier.
The Last Starfighter is a great film and a fun science fiction movie that broke grounds in filming using the newest technology with computers. If not for CGI animation the film would never have made budget and so to save money they actually started the filming industries use of CGI animation as a mainstream technology of film.
In spite of this it does look good enough to call a great movie and is well worth owning in the newest format of Blu-ray for a great total entertainment package. The Last Starfighter on Blu-ray includes a never before seen additional feature so this is a must have for science fiction fans as well as movie buffs.