lkbradshaw9 An excellent film well acted, Directed good all round story. Excellent special effects for the time. I have watched it several times over the years and I enjoy it every time.

Eric Stevenson I'm going to admit right now that this isn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it's still quite fun. I knew little about it except that it's plot was alluded to in the "South Park" episode "Best Friends Forever". It features a guy who gets the highest score in a video game, only to find out that the game was a test created by aliens to recruit people from all over the Universe to use starships to fight. Okay, I admit the premise is pretty goofy, but it's still a standard film. The makeup effects are quite good. This was in the very early days of CGI, so I can understand that those bits don't hold up well. The guy is replaced on Earth by a robot duplicate who meets up with his girlfriend, Maggie. The ending is really one of the most heartwarming I've seen in a long time. He goes back to Earth after finding out that they need him in space to rebuild the fleet. He decides he at least wants his girlfriend to join him on his adventures and eventually she goes. Honestly, these are some very heartfelt scenes and they more than make up for slower bits in the movie. I love how they set up the story to continue too. ***

Dalbert Pringle OK. If this were 1984 (the year of The Last Starfighter's theatrical release), you can be sure that I'd most likely be raving about this Sci-Fi/Comedy, kiddies' film with a little bit more enthusiasm. And, yes, rating it with a higher score than just 3 measly stars, as well.But, as things stand - Now 30 years later (after being thoroughly saturated for the past 3 decades by an onslaught of CGI effects in every single alien-related movie around), one can't help but see how totally inferior The Last Starfighter is in so many, many ways.Had I been able to somehow relate to the youthful characters in the story, I might have leaned a little less critically on this film, which I view as a blatant rip-off of Star Wars.But, as it stood - The Last Starfighter's story was a pretty well-worn tale that held no surprises and quickly got stale within its first half-hour.Yes. I will admit that some of the visual effects here were quite good - But this didn't come anywhere near to compensating for the rest of The Last Starfighter which, pretty much, sucked to infinity, and beyond.

FlashCallahan Alex lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. Alex becomes the top scorer of Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the Frontier" from "Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada" in a space battle. After achieving his best score, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri. Stepping into Centauri's vehicle, he is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life, he finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defence force when Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to another planet.....Its a sound idea, having a kid get recruited because he is great at a video game, but one cannot help that this was done before in the movie 'Nightmare' an anthology horror movie that featured Emilio Estevez as a gaming wiz who gets sucked into the video game.This was made a year later....But anyhow, that's just nitpicking, its a fun movie, with a hilarious villain, and who couldn't love a movie more when you find out Grig was played by 'The Old Man' in Robocop.And the effects. Even though they are nothing compared to today, or even a few years after this, they still make the movie, and they really compliment the films narrative.Other than that, its a fish out of water tale of your average Joe, becoming something they had never dreamt of.Plus it stars Lance Guest, the only person on earth who made a shark scream with a camera...