The Last Starfighter
March 9th, 2007
The Last Starfighter is a 1984 science fiction adventure film. There was a subsequent novelization of the movie that year by Alan Dean Foster, as well as a video game based on the production. In 2004, it was also adapted as an off-Broadway musical. The movie was directed by Nick Castle and was marketed with the tagline “He didn’t find his dreams… his dreams found him.”
The film made early use of extensive computer graphics to depict real objects in place of physical models.
The Last Starfighter was the last film role of character actor Robert Preston before his death. The character of “Centauri” was a “lovable-con-man” nod to his most famous role as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
The film’s premise was based on the well-known urban myth that video arcade games were in fact military recruitment tests for fighters.
The Last Starfighter represents the narratavist approach to video game studies. The narrativists approach video games in the context of what Janet Murray calls “Cyberdrama.” That is to say, their major concern is with video games as a storytelling medium, one that arises out of interactive fiction. Murray puts video games in the context of the Holodeck, a fictional piece of technology from Star Trek, arguing for the video game as a medium in which we get to become another person, and to act out in another world. This image of video games certainly received early widespread popular support, and forms the basis of films such as Tron, eXistenZ, and The Last Starfighter. But it is also criticized by many academics (such as Espen J. Aarseth) for being better suited to some linear science fiction movies than to analysis of interactive video games with multiple narratives.
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