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WATCH: Oliver retro-reviews The Last Starfighter

August 25th, 2014 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at The Last Starfighter – we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…

Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…

The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.

“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…

The Last Starfighter (1984)

The early to mid 80s saw Hollywood use video games and computers as the key elements to their movies. 1982 saw the first video game related feature… TRON!
Then the following year Superman III centred its story around computers and included a video game sequence, then 1984 saw The Last Starfighter which used computer generated graphics to create photo realistic visual effects. TRON attempted to create a video game world but The Last Starfighter tried to go with the realistic approach and blew many people’s minds in 1984. Looking at it now it’s extremely dated but there is a unique charm to its design and execution.
The last Starfighter was a special film to many when they were kids and it’s a movie that still retains its fanbase and more people have started to show their appreciated for it over the years. Taking a down on his luck teenager away from Earth to defend the galaxy thanks to his skills playing The Last Starfighter arcade game. It’s The Sword in the Stone for the computer game generation!
I take a look back at this classic and discuss its production, visual effects, music, the video game crash of 1983 and share with you my thoughts and feelings on The Last Starfighter!
Oliver’s review

Original trailer:

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.