People are still trying to either reboot or sequelize “The Last Starfighter.” That was very much a movie of its time; the computer generated visual effects were reasonably dazzling in their day but are woefully antiquated today, and the story and characters are monumentally wide-eyed innocents compared to today’s grotty, cynical mire of sleaze and grimdark. Making a reboot of it would almost certainly be a massive failure of “Ghostbusters” and “Total Recall” and “Star Trek Discovery” proportions. But… get the right people on board, I could get behind a sequel. And it seems that some of the right people are trying:
Gary Whitta, writer of The Book of Eli and Rogue One, has been working with Last Starfighter writer Jonathan Betuel on bringing the 1984 classic back to life for years now. Today, he hopped on his Twitch stream to say the film is closer than it’s ever been to fruition. It’s “right on the one-yard line” he said, and he believes it will happen.
Well, we’ll see. The “sizzle reel” is just a collection of very, very preliminary concept art, showing generic scenes of a modestly evolved version of the Gunstar, with a few showing a return to the trailer court. This would indicate a likely return of the character of Alex… *hopefully* still played by Lance Guest and with any luck at all also including Maggie played by Catherine Mary Stewart. The modern Hollywood thing to do would be to say that those two got married, had a kid, got divorced, and now their kid has fallen to the Bad Side and is leading the Bad Guys. It would be terribly politically incorrect to show them in a healthy, happy marriage with a passel of kids – now likely with kids of their own, it having been about 40 years – leading cheerful, successful lives experiencing the wonders of the universe even if they do have to face down enemies from the stars.
Sadly, three of the stars of the movie are no longer with us. Robert Preston (“Centauri”) and Dan O’Herlihy (“Grig”) died *years* ago. And Rob Cobb, who designed the Gunstar and the Starcar and pretty much everything else in the movie (along with doing amazing work on “Conan the Barbarian” and “Alien” and “Aliens” and a whole bunch of other stuff) died just last year. Whoever does the production design for the sequel had best be on their game.
On vaguely related matters:
Some movies like “2001” and “Forbidden Planet” need to be left the hell alone. Tinkering with them is heresy on par with knocking down statues of Lincoln or scribbling on the Constitution. Other movies… I’d pay real money to see a Revised Version with wholly updated VFX. For example, “Firefox.” That’s a movie that could benefit substantially from having all of the aerial sequences replaced with all-new footage. It’s a reasonably good spy movie as-is, if a bit on the glacially slow side, but the scenes of the Firefox in flight… uuuugh. The full scale Firefox mockup? Spectacular. Don’t touch it. But the flying scenes could be improved, and, why not, expanded. Let’s finally see the MiG 31 Firefox in all its glory.
There are other movies that are not even remotely classics, and I say “improve the frak out of ’em.” If you have seen “Meteor” in the last couple decades, you probably noticed just how half-assed the model work was. I mean… just *awful.* Even by the standards of the late 70’s, it was just embarrassingly lazy stuff. All that could be easily replaced and improved by a film student and a laptop. Imagine what a budget of, say, half a million could do.
A case can be made for doing Special Editions of episodes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” and “Buck Rogers.”
What else?
