"The Last Starfighter" (1984)

Let's get real here, "Guardians Of The Galaxy" owe this movie some royalty checks because it is tonally a masterful rip-off of this movie.

And "Stranger Things" and "Super 8," "Galaxy Quest" should also be paying these guys some dough. Or a block of these movies, since they all stole the "80's Panavision look" from this era. It's simple, shoot cinemascope using Panavision lenses. Cinematographers Allen Daviau, Vilmos Zigsmond, Nick McLean, and King Baggot all used this look.

Okay, tech shit aside, this movie is...well, in 2017, it's quaint.
Alex Rogan played by Lance Guest, is a teen-ish kid who lives in a trailer park. The people of this community seem sorta' misplace by life. To distract him from the banality of his life, he plays a video game called "Starfighter" He has a girlfriend who also lives in the trailer park named Maggie Gordon played lusciously by Catherine Mary Stewart (you know what they say about Catholic girls). Alex's dream of leaving entails that he needs to get a loan in order to attend a decent college and not the community college that usually awaits these people.

One fateful evening, while playing the video game, he charges up the neighborhood when he is about to beat the record. Forget the logic here, folks. You're in 1984 NOT 2017 now. The entire trailer park comes out to watch Alex beat the machine. This is like...in my hometown an opening of a new McDonald's draws out the community.

What Alex doesn't know is that the machine was actually created by a man named Centauri played masterfully by Robert Preston. He has been combing the universe to locate starfighters in an odd scavenger hunt of sorts. An almost Willy Wonka-esque weirdo. His discovery of Alex leads him to believe that he can save the universe from absolute collapse at the hand of...well, you'll have to watch.

"The Last Starfighter" is a charming fun movie. It's got a ton of problems for modern society, but it really made me miss the days when there wasn't much logic. Just that it had a solid heart. All the players in this movie do it with such sincerity it is impossible to hate the effort. A total shout out goes to Dan O'Herlihy who plays Alex's sidekick Grig. Not really a sidekick but perhaps...a mentor and ultimately friend.