So I continued my movie thick weekend with a bit of pop fun from 1984, and one of the first films to attempt photo-realistic CGI, The Last Starfighter.

The story is about a young man, Alex Rogan ,on the edge of college age, who lives with his mother and brother in a trailer park in the boonies of California.  The location is so isolated and so very little happens that even an event so minor such as Alex breaking the record on an arcade video game will draw a crowd.

Alex dreams of bigger and brighter things than living life in a place filled with senior citizens and endless chores. However being poor and unable to secure a loan for college his dreams seems as barren as the trailer park’s nights.

However all this is changing because Alex did break that records and soon he will find himself a stranger in a strange land with the lives of billions, including everyone on Earth, riding on his skills and dexterity.

The film start Lance Guest as Alex, Catherine Mary Stewart as his girlfriend Maggie, Robert Preston in his final screen appearance as a flim-flam man who is not at all what he seems to be, and another veteran actor Dan O’Herlihy  as an engineer and navigator that mentors Alex through his most difficult transformation from adolescent to warrior.

Now this is a Science-Fiction film so you can guess that there are aliens and starships, and you would be correct. One of the things that makes this movies stand out is that it was the first to use computer graphic solely as the means of representing ships in space. By today’s standard, 30 years down the road from the release of the film, the graphics are inferior. You will find much better graphics on the last generation of home video game consoles. However at the time the film was made, and I did see this on its original run, these were amazing images and for those with the foresight indicated the future of special effects. It would be interesting if for a 30^th anniversary if someone rendered new graphics for the special effects but left all other aspect of the film untouched.

Like most 80’s SF films, this one has a generally positive tone with quirky characters and scarcely any cynicism. This is the sort of movie you put in to have a good time, feel good about humanity, and enjoy the spectacle of evil people (mainly aliens) getting their just rewards.

For a pleasant evening of light movie watching, this selection perfectly fitted the bill.