The Last Starfighter (1984)
Directed by Nick Castle
Video game expert Alex Rogan finds himself transported to another planet after conquering the video game The Last Starfighter, only to find out it was just a test. He was recruited to join the team of best Starfighters to defend their world from the attack.
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What critics compared The Last Starfighter to
One 1980s pop culture item it might have referenced is “The Last Starfighter” (1984), which has a very similar plot.
Like I said, the premise of "Pixels" (which was inspired by a 2010 short) is sound, and in a perfect world, it could have been the hi-tech hybrid of "The Last Starfighter" and "Ghostbusters" that it clearly wants to be.
This noxious stew -- part "The Last Starfighter," part "Ghostbusters," part "Wreck-It Ralph"-- doesn't even bother to look expensive.
The kind of risk which family-friendly film The Adam Project shares along the same lines as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Flight of the Navigator (1986), pushing the bounds of the PG-13 rating in its action set pieces, character interactions, and narrative themes to feel a touch more like Timecop (1994) from time to time.
Take “The Last Starfighter” (1984) and “Back to the Future (1985)” and mix them with a healthy dose of father-son relationship angst, a trademark of Levy’s films at this point, and what you have is “The Adam Project.”
Reminiscent of ’80s favorites like Flight of the Navigator , The Last Starfighter , or *batteries not included , this heartwarming adventure is a lot of fun.
But then again, The Last Starfighter came out in 1984 with some of the same ideas, and it was a lot more fun.
Ender is a whiz at computer-controlled war games, but to win the real battle he must become a cold-blooded killer – so we're basically talking The Last Starfighter meets Heart of Darkness .
Like The Last Starfighter and War Games, Ender’s Game is very much porn for video game addicts.
Director Gavin Hood lets you know right away that this ain’t camp like “The Last Starfighter”; in an early scene, Ender’s implanted head monitor is removed messily as he shrieks.
Card’s military meritocracy, on the screen, plays like “Starship Troopers” without a tongue-in-cheek touch to its fascism, “The Last Starfighter” without the wit.
This “Ender’s Game” film will seem entirely familiar to those who’ve seen such films as “Starship Troopers,” “Star Wars” and “The Last Starfighter.”
Dozens of films have failed at bringing established video game properties to the movie screen, but for their latest piece of feature-length digital animation Disney has borrowed a page from fun flicks like Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Wargames.
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Or that he’s waxing nostalgic more generally — quoting the 1980s sci-fi he grew up on, like Joe Dante’s Explorers , Randal Kleiser’s Flight of the Navigator and Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter .
There are hints of Flight of the Navigator, The Last Starfighter, The Goonies, and D.A.R.Y.L.
Like many an old adventure before it, The Last Starfighter for example, the narrative trajectory is clearly delineated from the get go.
Only it hasn’t been—the tale of seemingly average human woman Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) learning that she’s a secret space queen and falling in love with an extraterrestrial human-wolf hybrid named Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) is an original Wachowskis creation, although it draws heavily from sci-fi/fantasy classics ranging from Dune to The Last Starfighter to Brazil to The Matrix itself (with a little Cinderella thrown in for good measure).
Maybe it's the presence of spasmic and overly colorful visuals, the way Channing Tatum roller blades in the air, or Balem's dragon/dinosaur henchmen that gives the film this "Super Mario Bros." meets "The Last Starfighter" kind of tone, but the Wachowskis delayed sci-fi actioner slips on its visuals like a barrel full of banana peels more often than not.
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The premise, for what it's worth, involves the journey of self-discovery undertaken by failed MMA fighter Cole (Lewis Tan) after he learns that his dragon birthmark is more than a mere birthmark--that it is, in fact, his destiny, The Last Starfighter -like, to defend the earth from alien invaders.
Misleadingly pitched as Lord of the Flies meets Lost (it’s actually more like The Prisoner meets The Last Starfighter – with giant spiders) this finds 16-year-old Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) waking up in the mysterious Glade where similarly amnesiac young residents live in fear of the Grievers – monsters who maraud the only exit route, a huge killer labyrinth.