I bet this movie launched the hopes of a thousand video game nerds.When I told Christy I had never seen this movie, she gave me the kind of face I usually give her when she tells me she's never seen Casablanca or It's a Wonderful Life. Our tastes may differ, but our judgment is the same.
Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) lives in a trailer park with his mom, but dreams of going to college and making a successful life in the big city. The trailer park doesn't offer a lot in the way of entertainment, aside from his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and an arcade game called Starfighter. When Alex beats the high score, he unknowingly alerts the game's designer, Centauri (Robert Preston), who comes to find him and offers him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
No, not to play video games for a living.
Essentially, he abducts Alex, replaces him with a robotic replica, and hauls him off to the planet Rylos to actually become a Starfighter. He had designed the game as a training module to find talented candidates across the universe to fly in an elite unit tasked with keeping the evil Xur (Norman Snow) from enslaving multiple galaxies. Alex is paired with a navigator named Grig (Dan O'Herlihy) and given a ship. However, because Earth is not part of the Star Union, Alex is sent back home. Xur does a sneak attack and kills all the other Starfighters, even sending an alien assassin (who looks like a werewolf goldfish) to Earth to kill Alex.
The computer graphics are beyond dated but this was still a fun little picture. Robert Preston was clearly doing someone a favor here as no one else comes close to matching his name recognition. According to IMDb, Wil Wheaton is in this, but he has no speaking lines and I couldn't find him so he was probably just part of a crowd shot near the end. You can't really count that.
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