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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Review of The Last Starfighter (no spoiler)
Message-ID: <2314@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Jul-84 23:54:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2314
Posted: Fri Jul  6 23:54:31 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jul-84 07:21:29 EDT
Reply-To: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 49


Nano-review: Fun

I saw the sneak preview of "The Last Starfighter" tonight.  It was fun,
although not great.  It is sort of a ripoff of the original "Star Wars",
but it doesn't take itself as seriously as SW or any of the other
clones.  Instead of taking place "a long time ago in a galaxy far away"
it takes place now, in midwestern America.  The hero is a teenager who
longs to escape from the trailer camp where he has grown up.  He breaks
the record on a video game, and is soon drafted by the Star League to
defend The Frontier against the treacherous Xur and the Ko-Dan warriors.
Can't go much further into the plot without spoiling it.

It was kind of hokey.  However, they injected a good amount of humor
into it.  For instance, when the protagonist is about to break the video
game record everyone in the trailer camp gathers around, cheering him
on; it is obvious that this is the most exciting thing to happen in
years for this bunch.

The characters are mostly pretty shallow (even more so than in SW).
Lance Guest, who plays the hero, gets to play two characters (can't say
why without a spoiler).  He does a good job with the second character.
Robert Preston is the best character in the film.  He plays Centauri,
who planted the video game in various locations in hopes of finding
someone with "the gift", and who drags the hero off to be heroic.  He
plays him as the standard Preston con man, the same one as in "The Music
Man" and "Victor/Victoria."  He is so cool and suave, in his own way,
that I rarely get tired of him.  I also like his voice.  Barbara Bosson
(Faye Furrillo (sp?) from "Hill Street Blues") has a medium-sized role
as the protagonist's mother; she plays this character pretty much like
Faye.

Then of course, there are the special effects.  Most of the special
effects were done using computer animation, taking up lots of computrons
on a Cray X-MP.  The credits even read:
	Supercomputer: Cray X-MP
They were quite good, much better than Tron.  It was quite obvious,
though, that they were computer generated.  This seemed to me to be due
to lots of the angles that you saw on things.  It might have been on
purpose, or it might just be me expecting certain objects to be smoother
and rounder than the animators wanted them to be.  On the other hand,
there were times when if you looked at the thing on the screen in just
the right way it *almost* looked solid.

Recommendation: go see it if you like escapism.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar