If you’ve ever day dreamed of being the highest scoring player of a video game, winning the final round where you destroy the enemy squadron’s command ship and later that night, you’re approached by the game’s inventor identifying himself only as Centauri, who invites you to take a ride in his exotic-looking car. Then ‘The Last Starfighter’ is the movie for you!
Turns out the car is actually a spaceship; the old man is in fact a disguised alien who abducts you to a far off planet called Rylos and in your absence, an android double named Beta does such a bang-up job of impersonating you that no-one is any the wiser you’re gone! All that happened to Alex Rogan played by Lance Guest in the movie.
A case of life imitating art
Alex plays ‘Starfighter’, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends ‘the Frontier’ from Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada in a space battle. After arriving on Rylos, Alex discovers that the images and territories in the Starfighter arcade game represent an actual conflict between the Rylan Star League and the Ko-Dan Empire, an alien lizard-like race that’s led by Xur played by Norman Snow, a traitor who the Ko-Dan Emperor has promised control of Rylos. It appears the game was intended by Centauri as a test to find those ‘with the gift.’ Alex is expected to pilot an actual Starfighter spacecraft called The Gunstar.
Crossing the Digital Effects Frontier
‘Starfighter’ is a 1984 American sci-fi adventure and was the very first feature film to ever use 3D graphics to generate scenes intended to depict reality. It did this at a time when the industry was still decades away from realising concepts such as ambient occlusion; a method used to add realism or anisotropic surfaces where the surface changes in appearance as it rotates about its geometric normal, computer-rendered motion blur, pre-rendered CG production where the movie is outsourced by the developer to an outside production company, and many other features now common to modern computer games but weren’t back then.
‘Starfighter’ was ahead of its time from a technical point of view and although it was considered a box office failure (grossing just $7 million) it appears that the ultimate boy/child wish fulfilment has since seen it become a video cult classic. Photo Credit: Gizmodo
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