CHANGING THE CAME
THE LAST STARFIGHTER
IT WAS ALL SET TO BE A 1980s BLOCKBUSTER — BUT THEN GOT LOST IN TIME. FORTY YEARS ON, THOUGH, WE DISCOVER HOW BONKERS SCI-FI FANTASY CREATED THE FUTURE
WORDS MIKE RYAN PAUL SHIPPER
REMEMBER IN SUPERMAN III —let’s be honest, if you’re reading an article about The Last Starfighter, it’s probably a safe assumption you remember Superman III —when Superman compresses a piece of coal in his hand, turning it into a diamond? That’s an apt metaphor to describe The Last Starfighter, a movie compressed by metric tons of pressure into pure 1980s pop-culture concentrate. It has Star Wars-esque space battles, it has arcade games as a plot device, it’s the first movie to extensively use CGI… all directed by a 35-year-old who was best known, at the time, for playing Michael Myers in the first Halloween.
“They were looking for someone, I think, that wasn’t going to be too expensive, frankly,” says Nick Castle today. At the time, Castle had a handful of credits, most notably co-writing Escape From New York with his Halloween collaborator, John Carpenter. But Castle had only directed one film, Tag: The Assignation Game, a movie about college kids involved in an elaborate elimination game involving suctioncup darts that, as you might guess, turns deadly. (It’s most notable for the screen debut of future Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton.)
Castle remembers his first meeting with executives at production company Lorimar, in early 1982. He liked Jonathan Betuel’s script, but saw some improvements that could be made, and decided to air these concerns. “I don’t know if I’m going to get this picture, but you need a lot of work and let’s start on page one,” the young director demanded. “This is too derivative. It’s not based strongly in anything particular. It just has a great idea.”
Looking back with 40 years of hindsight, considering the ambition from this then rag-tag crew, it’s a miracle The Last Starfighter exists. And though it wasn’t a dynamo at the box office —its competition was a true murderers’ row of iconic ’80s films —it has endured. Certainly, the groundbreaking work behind the scenes has a legacy that very much lives on in, well, just about every studio movie you see today.