The movie The Last
Starfighter has always been a guilty pleasure for me (okay, when I was a
kid it was just a pleasure), so when I heard there was a musical version, I was
very intrigued to see what had been done.
It's a significant movie in several ways- it was Robert Preston's last
film, and it was the first movie to have the majority of its special effects
done with CGI. The musical cannily goes much
lower-tech, since it's really the human story that matters the most.
The plot: Alex Rogan (Danny Binstock), a young man who lives
in a trailer park called "Starlite Starbrite" with his mother (Adina Alexander)
and younger brother Louis (Patrick O. Henney).
Alex has big dreams of going away to college and making something of
himself, but when his college loan doesn't come through, his main
accomplishment is breaking the high score on "Starfighter", the only video game
in the trailer park, which exhorts Alex to battle "Zur and the Kodan Armada". Enter Centauri (Joseph Kolinski), who informs
Alex that he invented the Starfighter game, and hearing about Alex's high
score, has a business proposition for him.
Alex gets into Centauri's car, which promptly turns into a spaceship and
brings them to Rylos, the actual planet in the videogame, which turns out to be
less and less fictional, the more Alex hears.
He discovers that Centauri made a tidy profit over delivering Alex, and
then witnesses a holographic conversation between Enduran, leader of the good
guys (Tom Treadwell), and his son Zur (Ryan Jesse), leader of the bad guys, during
which Zur kills one of Enduran's spies. Alex is naturally freaked out and
demands to be returned home to Earth. Meanwhile,
Centauri has sent a "beta unit", an android (sometimes Jonathan Richard
Sandler), to fill Alex's shoes back on Earth, and he's messing things up both
with Alex's handyman job and with Maggie (Nora Blackall), Alex's girlfriend. Alex is returned to the trailer park, where
Centauri gives him a device to call him if he changes his mind. Alex meets his double, who informs him that
an alien assassin, a Zandozan (Jesse JP Johnson) has come to kill Alex, since
he was seen among the other Starfighters. Alex and the Beta Unit battle the
Zandozan, Alex calls Centauri who comes to the rescue, and they kill the
Zandozan, Centauri getting wounded in the process. Alex and Centauri return to Rylos, where they
discover Zur has killed all the other Starfighters, and Alex is the only one
with any skills, and Centauri offers to go with him as navigator. Meanwhile, Beta Unit is trying to keep things
going with Maggie, on a Spring Break trip to the lake; by eying other teens,
he's mostly able to keep things up until he scents another Zandozan, who shoots
him, revealing to Maggie and the Zandozan that "Alex" is actually a droid. The Zandozan rushes to inform Zur, but the
Beta Unit sacrifices himself to stop the message transmission. Zur only gets "The Last Starfighter is…",
assumes the rest of the message is "…dead", and celebrates until Alex and
Centauri come and kick their asses. Alex
returns to Earth, but not to stay- only to get Maggie and bring her off into
space with him. She goes with him after
some dithering and the trailer park becomes a tourist attraction.
This is one of the main conceits of the musical- at the end
of the movie Otis has a line about how the trailer park is going to be famous
as the place where Alex and Maggie left for the stars- in the musical it
already has become so, and the trailer park residents are performing the show
to tell the story to we audience members (who apparently just got off a tour
bus), with Otis (Don Mayo) as narrator.
It's a cute idea, as the trailer parkers take on the roles of aliens in
their homemade costumes, and play "rock, paper, scissors" to see who gets to
play the Zandozan this time. The
effect is sort of a more sci-fi Red,
White, and Blaine (the tongue-in-cheek costumes by Mark Richard Caswell are
very amusing, both for the aliens and the 1980s trailer park).
Fred Landau's changes to the story mainly strengthen it, though getting
rid of Centauri's Obi-Wan Kenobian middle-of-the-movie death leaves Grig with
little to do as Centauri assumes his role in the story as Alex's navigator,
though it strengthens Centauri's character and gives him an emotional arc as he
puts away his conman ways to support Alex (though why Centauri is still wounded
by the Zandozan is confusing).
Fortunately Grig = Otis, who has a much larger role.
