The Last Starfighter (1984) | Movie Reaction | First Time Watching | A Sci-Fi Cult Classic! 

The absolute best final line of a villian, EVER. "We Die"

This movie really hit hard when I saw it. I was trapped in a small town, tied down by obligations to a family business and dying to get out and have my own life.

This movie was wish fulfillment for every kid who played video games in the 80s.

Only in a trailer park in the 80's, will you ever see a whole community get THAT excited over a kid beating the high score in an arcade game. lol. GOD!! Such a simpler time. I miss the 80's And even the 90's to a degree.

The Last Starfighter is one of the most underrated movies of the 1980's. It is a true classic in every sense of the word. I loved the movie as a kid and it still lives up to the test of time.

Fun Fact: An L.A. County Sheriff had just returned from vacation, and just happened to be assigned to patrol the area where the trailer park is. And when he came upon the trailer park in the evening, he saw a bunch of lights and the "spaceship". He thought that it was a legit UFO, and called it in. Dispatch and his fellow officers strung him along making him believe even more that a UFO had actually landed until he realized that it was just a movie set. LOL

Speaking of Catherine Mart Stewart, you should watch her starring in the 1984 sci-fi comedy "Night of the Comet."

"Itll be a slaughter !!!" "That's the spirit !!"

"Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada." I remember seeing this movie in the theater when I was fourteen. It's a nostalgic trip for me, and I love the music, too. I was excited to see you guys reacting to this!

"We die" -- EPIC 80s moment. Definitely one of my favorites.

For those that don’t know, if you have a Cinemark theatre near you they are playing this movie this coming Saturday. Tickets are only $5. I never saw this in theaters as a kid, so I’ll be there. Also it’s 1984 week at Cinemark this week, tonight they’re showing Gremlins.

Grig is the CEO in RoboCop

Mags is played by Catherine Mary Stewart. She was also in "Weekend at Bernies" and a sci fi horror called "Night of the Comet." Definitely a heart throb when I was growing up in the 80's.

Zuir is a great character, hilarious. Imagine a megalomaniacal character like him, but he works at a car wash, trying to become assistant manager and gain real power, complete authority over the towels.

Robert Preston "Centauri" played Harold Hill in "The Music Man"

Got me all 80's space flicks nostalgic up in here. Need to see some "Enemy Mine" next!

This and Buckaroo Banzai were my twin obsessions in 1984. Read the comic book adaptations and novelizations waiting for them to finally get to a theater near me. Never got to see this in the theater. Saw it at a drive-in, but the picture was blurry and the audio was terrible, so I didn't get to properly watch it until renting it on VHS months later.

This movie was so special to me. This was just a great movie ,the late great Robert Preston playing The Music Man but in space in his last movie is so perfect. They have been trying to reboot this for Years but has been in development hell for years. The computer graphics in this were beyond state of the Art for the time and many of the people went to word for ILM in its infancy

The mom is played by Barbara Bosson, who played Fay Furillo, the ex-wife of Frank Furillo on the tv series 'Hill Street Blues'. She was married to 'Hill Street Blues' creator Steven Bochco.

This is such a fantastic movie! So much fun! Robert Preston basically played the same character he played in The Music Man, but without the singing! It wasn't a real video game till someone created it for himself years later! Happy Birthday Patrick

Funny thing, but the video game scene where all the people start watching and applauding was an actual thing back then. I saw it on many occasions w Pac Man, Centipede, Defender, just to name a few. Having that top score was legit 'street cred' back then.

Wil Wheaton was in a scene that was cut but is still credited. He still receives royalty checks for this movie every once in a while.

Happy Brithday Patrick. My dad took me to this one as a kid. He took me to the majority of movies from the 80s that folks on the RU-vid react to. Miss him still.

The Last Starfighter was directed by none other than Nick Castle, the long time friend of director John Carpenter, who appeared as Michael Myers ("The Shape") in Halloween, and co-wrote Escape from New York.

Patrick has excellent taste in movies.

Does anyone realize that the lead in this film is Lance Guest, who played Jimmy the paramedic in “Halloween 2”, Laurie Strode’s “crush” who hopefully survived the hospital massacre? lol I love this guy

When they were finishing this movie they realized that the rendering time on the computer was so long that it would never be done in time for the release of the film! So they had to cut the quality of some scenes down just to finish on time. They had the technology to do better than this, but it just took a long time to render at high quality!

🙂GREETINGS STARFIGHTER. You have been selected by the Star League to defend The Frontier against ZUR and the Kodan armada.

The "We die" line made a huge impression on me as a kid when I watched this movie (at a drive-in theater 😁). I just thought it was rather bad-ass for someone who was about to die for sure.

Wow this never got a sequel make it happen Hollywood. #nomoreremakes Happy Birthday Patrick! 🥳

Little trivia knowledge. Grig is played by Dan O'Herlihy. The "Old Man" head of OCP in Robocop.

The ko-dan commander at the end. We are locked in the moon's gravity. What do we do. We die. So dark but badass.

Grig, the Gunstar navigator, was played by Dan O'Herlihy, who was the CEO of OCP in the first two ROBOCOP films.

This theme has lived in my head since I saw this as a kid!

Grig, the navigator, from this movie is also the "old man" big boss from Robocop. ACTING!!

I was just saying like a day or two ago I wish someone would react to the last starlighter wow this movie was epic and I use to watch over and over as a kid

Happy birthday Patrick. Great choice. I saw this when it came out and man was the theater wild! There's been rumors for decades for sequels and I think it had a short lived comic.

TRON was the first movie to incorporate CGI into the film, but The Last Starfighter was the first film to utilize a fully-rendered CGI environment. Back in the 1980's the movie required a Cray Supercomputer to render the CGI for the film.

Ah a classic VHS staple, my Dad rented this movie on a whim when I was little many years ago and we both loved it. After he passed away earlier this year, watching it was one of the first times I had some happiness after losing him, this movie just has such a charm to it that always makes me smile, like everything about it just harkens back to a much simpler and more optimistic time. And as the movie itself, I love the story and the casting is great.

Groundbreaking CGI in my favorite inspirational film. "I'm not any of those guys, I'm just a kid from a trailer park." "If that's what you think, then that's all you'll ever be." Learn from this, Patrick, and happy birthday.

This is a landmark film. The first film to use all cgi for visual effects, no models were used at all. This is also Will Wheaton's first film, but his scenes were cut.

The first movie I remember seeing in the theater with my dad. One of my all-time favorites. The theme song is my ringtone.

Fun trivia fact: Jolanda Egger was the Centerfold Playmate for the June 1983 issue of Playboy and it was the correct magazine in the stack. So a bravo & well done to them for accurately matching the dialogue with what is shown onscreen.

I never noticed this until your video, but the guy who owns the truck was Brian from V: The Miniseries. He was the father to the alien hybrid.

YES! Another react channel getting to one of my favorites!! Dad took my bro and I to this multiple times in 84 in Kalispell. When he passed, I got his copies of the movie. Between the two of us and the vhs, dvd, Blu-ray editions I have 7 plus the digital version 😂

Happy Birthday Patrick 🎉

Catherine Mary Stewart was in a bunch of 1980s films. Someone I was friends with went to high school with her and said she was a real sweetheart. She was not in Footloose. She was in Night of the Comet, Mischief, and a ton of TV movies. One of, if not the first major CGI film. They made a real arcade game for the film, but it was never publicly released.

I saw the paperback for the movie when it came out, read it, then saw the movie. I love this movie. It has heart, a good story, great casting, and a phenomenal score. Simply a great one and done flick.

Happy birthday Patrick 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Grandma with the shotgun is played by Meg Wylie who played The Keeper in the first star trek pilot, The Cage.

Happy Birthday Patrick! This one is an underrated gem.

Happy Birthday Patrick!

Very underrated movie.. no one talks about this one! Love it.

I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!! Behind Tron (1982), made me want to be a pilot even more than Top Gun did. Even though I'm blind as a bat and cant ever fly a plane, I have this. The Last Starfighter!!! This got me into computers and further making my life it is today. The Cray computer. A WOWZA!! For that time period. Watch the extras on it and how big of a leap CGI made from this movie. I dream of a sequel and I'm hopeful (like Tron Legacy and Ares(I hope is good)) will be Ultra Successful!!! Thank you two for watching this and HAPPY BIRTHDAY PATRICK and thank you for reminding me that we all have a start. This movie was part of mine. Thank you!

She's the "Night of the Comet" girl. Please, check out that movie, btw.

I used to watch this on syndication on TV all the time as a kid. It really deserves more recognition than it gets.

The actress that played granny starred in the original series of Star Trek in the pilot episode The Cage as an alien.

I broke a million on Defender in my roller skating rink a couple of years before this and the DJ announced it on the speaker. That scene when the trailer park runs over to watch it hapoen still makes me smile to this day.

Love this movie. Watching this first time 1987 with my dad and brother. I was 10 years old. I wear my brother bike helmet all thru the movie, because that was a space helmet 😃 The scene, where the fake Alex was regenerating was horrible,,, remember that always. Great reaction and a great movie.

Trivia: Centauri was played by Robert Preston. This was his last screen appearance as he died shortly after this film's release. He is mostly known for playing the showman in "The Music Man". This character is quite similar to that one.

This movie is very sentimental to a lot of people, including me, for some reason. Yeah the ‘CGI’ doesn’t really hold up, but the story has a lot of heart. I’d love to see some kind of sequel.

There were some real gems back then. Cloak and Dagger, D.A.R.Y.L. and such were movies I grew up watching as a kid.

Happy birthday, Patrick!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

According to Lance Guest(Alex), he said this movie is where they started using the “green screen” green material. Before this movie productions used a blue material.

"Greetings Starfighter" Classic!

For me this movie did what very few do in stories like this, usually when the character finds themselves journeying to some other world, dimension or reality and ends up having this amazing adventure making great friends, finding their true selves, and being recognized for their actions they end up going back home to live their normal everyday life like nothing happened, this is one of the very few where they make the choice to keep having the adventure.

Great movie !! And Happy Birthday Patrick!!!

Ahhh, one of my guilty pleasures from my childhood. Thanks for bringing it to the surface. My favorite line is from Grigs... "Now you look Human!"

Hey guys another great reaction. This was one of my favorite Sci-Fi movies as a kid. My grandmother had taken me to see it in the theater for my 12th birthday. My grandma thought it a bit strange, but was glad I liked it. I had hoped that they would have made THE LAST STARFIGHTER II a few years after the 1st one, but as the years passed I gave up on the idea. I thought they were supposed to make the sequel 10yrs after the 1st, but then it got scrapped for some reason. So much time had passed, they'd have to have Alex's son take over.

The Last Star Fighter was one of the first heavy version 1.0 CGI films. Some fans in the early 2000's did create the video game. You can find the emulator, download and play it on your computer.

That's the spirit!!

Ahh, one of my favorite films! So glad your Patron suggested it! Happy birthday. I’ve seen this one a couple dozen times and enjoyed it each time.

Summer of 1984: Sixteen Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, The Last Starfighter, and Red Dawn. A great season of air conditioned cinema for an American teenager. Night of The Comet also came out this year, but in the fall.

7:00 - I literally never noticed the Zaxxon machine in the background of this shot. In reality, that was a Coleco tabletop LED arcade game that was NOWHERE near as big as it looks here. It was actually about the size of a classic lunchbox. It's interesting that they chose to make it look like a half-sized arcade machine. I can't see any possible way they could have filmed this normally and have it look that large. 16:23 - Most used sci-fi prop ever. It's been seen in dozens of movies and TV shows. Most people just know it as "the thing with the light tubes". 22:46 - "Who's this guy?" - Marc Alaimo, who would go on to play the Cardassian commander, Gul Dukat on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 40:55 - "Why did Grig treat him like he was dead, then?" - I'll willing to bet that the whole idea that he was just regenerating was written in because of a test audience. I think it's likely that he originally did die, but test audiences didn't like it, so they shot this happy ending. At least that's my theory.

Grig was played by Dan O'Herlihy, who you may remember as the old man boss of OCP in Robocop as well as the evil owner of the mask company in Halloween 3:Season of the Witch.

26:20 This is the same setup as an AH-63 Apache helicopter. The pilot flies the helicopter, sitting above and behind the gunner. It seems to work well in both sci-fi and real-world.

Seeing Mrs Movies laugh is the best thing ever. I recently saw her reaction from pet cemetery and that was not pleasant

Fun fact, the guy who played Alex also played Martin Brody's Son Martin in Jaws: The Revenge

Robert Preston's Centauri was basically the same character he played in Music Man. Unfortunately he died soon after this movie. Greig was played by Dan O'Herlihy.. The Old Man in RoboCop. He said loved playing Greig. 42:21 Will Wheaton had most of his parts cut, but you can see him in the background here The Beta unit was very popular with test audiences, so they wanted to shoot more scenes of him. Lance Guest had already cut his hair for another role. In the scene where Beta took his head off you can see he is wearing a wig. The Starfighter arcade game is not real, but just a few years ago, someone made a homebrew game that looks and plays just like it did in the movie.

48:41 "Obviously, They'd Have To Recast It?" Yeah, especially since a couple of the actors involved in this movie have since passed away: Robert Preston, who played Centuri The actor who played Grig had also passed And most recently was Barbara Bosson, who played Alex's mother

Bit of TV trivia. The grandmother also played the alien leader in the original Star Trek pilot.

7:00 I love how supportive everyone is.

I always liked that line..a gungho iguana telling me to relax. 😂😂

The movie is basically about a child soldier, abducted and forced to fight.

About the game: Atari was working on an actual arcade game, although it probably wouldn't have looked exactly the same as seen in the movie, since those graphics were rendered on a supercomputer. Apparently some Atari exec canned the project when he felt the film wouldn't be that successful. It wasn't theatrically successful, but became a cult hit on cable and home video. A Last Starfighter game was created for Atari 8-bit computers, and the Atari 5200, although it didn't look much like the one in the movie. When the film wasn't a hit, the 5200 version was scrapped (a prototype exists), and the computer version was released as Star Raiders II, with the whole Last Starfighter intro removed. The game was also ported to the Commodore 64 under the Star Raiders II name. The version with the Last Starfighter branding and intro can be found on the net for Atari XL/SE computers. There was a Last Starfighter game planned for the Atari 2600, but that game was eventually released as Solaris, which bears no resemblance to the movie. There was also a Last Starfighter game for the NES, but it was actually just an older computer game called Uridium with a name change, and minor graphical tweaks. Then in the mid 2000s or so, a group called Rogue Synapse wrote a freeware Windows game of Starfighter to mimic what was shown in the film. It can still be downloaded and played. At least, I think it still works on current versions of Windows. It mimics the whole boot up procedure of a real arcade machine, with the intention that people could use it to build their own Starfighter arcade machine and have it seem authentic. I don't think it actually detects alien assassins though. Maybe in the next version...

As an 80's teen, Catherine Mary Stewart was high on my celebrity crush list. As others have said, along with this movie, she is perhaps best remembered for the sci-fi horror film, "Night of the Comet," which is a must watch.

I used to watch this all the time as a kid at my grandparent's. Such an underrated classic!

*THIS* is the movie little Andy saw! I;m not kidding. Disney saw this and thought "Starfighters and star command... We can do something with this!"

Happy Bday Patrick. Starfighter got rewatched so much as a kid so this is a treat!

@You, Me, and the Movies, the interesting thing about this movie was the fact that it has many inspirations to the transformers movie because of the concept that the computer programs that they used for the special effects for the movie was still being developed while the movie was being filmed and produced

Hey Patrick and Christi, interesting fact for you: This movie marks Robert Preston's final role before he'd passed away

When you think about it, Alex did what many other young adults did when they failed to get into college: He joined up. Not in the same way with the same military but the principle is still the same - He chose to find his own path forwards.

There is a HILLARIOUS show called "Future Man" that uses this same setup and premise but then goes in every different direction. 10/10

Actually, that 12:15 looks like George Washington hair. Hey, now maybe HE was one of THOSE aliens.

So this movie is directed by Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in Halloween. Alex is played by Lance Guest, who played Jimmy in Halloween II. And Grig is played by Dan O'Herlihy, who played Conal Cochran in Halloween III!

I remember in the early ‘90s in a small town in Missouri seeing a license plate, “RYLOS.” I couldn’t believe an adult would be that into this movie.

The actress that played Granny, also played one of the two aliens in Star Trek the Original 1960s TV series "The Menagerie" a two part episode in 1966. You will be able to recognize which alien she is.

Lance Guest (Alex Rogan) later starred as Michael Brody in the hated "Jaws: the Revenge".

I had no idea Wil Wheaton was in this movie until you mentioned him in the credits. I had to look it up, he can be seen popping his head round behind 'granny with the shotgun' at 42:21

Wil Wheaton appears in the background of a couple of scenes, which is why he was credited. He originally had several lines to speak, but those were cut before filming.