Trailer
Plot summary
Alex Rogan, a handyman in a trailer park, lives with his mother Jane and his younger brother Louis and is waiting on a loan that would send him to university and take him and his girlfriend Maggie Gordon to the city. The loan is refused. That night he breaks the record on Starfighter, an arcade game that tells its players they are defending the Frontier from Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. Centauri, who says he works for the company behind the game, takes Alex for a ride in a car that is really a spacecraft and carries him to the planet Rylos, where he learns the game is a test for gunners and that the Star League needs fighters. Alex asks to go home.
Cast
- Chris Hebertas Louis Rogan
- Dan Masonas Lord Kril
- Charlene Nelsonas Rylan Technician
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Last Starfighter (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Atari promised a real The Last Starfighter arcade game in the end credits, but it was never released: it would have been Atari's first 3D polygonal arcade game, and was abandoned once Atari representatives saw the film in post-production and decided it was not going to be a financial success.
- Digital Productions estimated that using computer animation required only half the time and between a third to half of the cost of traditional special effects, and the result was a cost of $14 million for a film that made close to $29 million at the box office.
- Computer graphics for the film were rendered by Digital Productions on a Cray X-MP supercomputer, and across the 300 scenes containing computer graphics each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons at a resolution of 3000 x 5000 36-bit pixels.
- Because Lance Guest had cut his hair short after initial filming was completed, and he contracted an illness during the re-shoots, his portrayal of Beta Alex in the added scenes has him wearing a wig and heavy makeup.
- Robert Preston appeared in his final role in a theatrical film: the character of Centauri, a "lovable con-man", was written with Preston in mind and was a nod to his most famous role as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
- Composer Craig Safan wanted to go "bigger than Star Wars" and used a "Mahler-sized" orchestra, giving the score an unusual breadth of instruments including quadruple woodwinds and eight trumpets, trombones and horns.
- Wil Wheaton had a few lines of dialogue that were ultimately cut from the film, but he is still visible in the background of several scenes.
