The Last Starfighter is an 80s science fiction movie about a teenage boy who gets a high score on a video game that is meant to recruit people to an actual war in space. His big score leads to an alien abduction and joining a small class of others destined to pilot a Gunstar for the Star League. He’s a reluctant hero, but he does become a hero. The eponymous Last Starfighter.

It’s a fun concept, and it works great for kids. I loved this one when I was young. So did my mom, who was barely out of teenagehood when it released. There’s something near-universally appealing about the fantasy of being swept out of your ordinary (crappy) life into a bigger world. The hero, Alex, is very much a chosen one: it’s believed humans can’t even have the aptitude for piloting Gunstars, yet he’s the one who stops the Zur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

The Last Starfighter is obviously coming for Star Wars’s wig, using a lot of the same mechanisms. It’s an extremely straightforward Hero’s Journey screenplay. The humble hero comes from a humble trailer park rather than a dead-end moisture farm on Tattooine. The grand score absolutely competes with that of Star Wars. And the 3D graphics — among the first extensive uses of them in a movie — are more sophisticated than the miniatures and film etchings used for Star Wars.

What TLS misses is that much of the Star Wars charm comes from the quality of the writing, not its use of tropes. You really can’t undervalue what Marcia Lucas did to that original screenplay. It radiates humanity and adventure. TLS mostly focuses on hitting the beats of the Hero’s Journey, and it relies on (admittedly wonderful) charming actor performances to give it life.

But it feels like it’s missing a whole act. Remember how Luke Skywalker needs to develop his skills with Obi-Wan Kenobi? How he’s defeated but rebounds? How Bilbo Baggins takes on side quests so we can actually see him develop? The time Katniss Everdeen takes to repeatedly fail before she develops enough to figure out survival?

Here, Alex isn’t given that time, and what time he gets is spent on Earth — a total misfire that loses the opportunity to develop the Star League beyond a few brief, shallow scenes. The focus on his Beta replacement is funny, but does no good for the story whatsoever.

I think the screenplay is so anemic because of the limited imagination of the filmmakers. See, they blew their load on about a half hour of spectacular CGI, which was only matched in its era by Tron. There are a couple of simple science fiction sets we only see for a short time elsewhere. They can’t imagine any other way to utilize those spaces to work around lacking more Gunstar and combat, so with the budget expended, they just return the story to the trailer park. Even when Alex is being rewarded for his victory at the end, it’s done on a bare black screen, rather than with the grand matte painting of Leia bestowing medals on Luke, Han, and Chewie.

The trailer park just isn’t the right place to spend time in a movie that’s about escaping the drudgery of life for a space adventure. It’s a really nice depiction of a trailer park, though. I mean it! Can you think of another time that a trailer park is painted with such warmth and sentimentality, without even a hint of classist sneer? We just shouldn’t have seen it between his abduction and his return at the end. There’s no sense that Alex has grown bigger and changed and can’t go back home anymore. He’s barely left.

Absent of an act really letting him develop out in a great big galaxy, The Last Starfighter feels like a hollow grasp for Star Wars-like fame. It’s not an adventure so much as a bunch of conversations, and then also some pretty excellent early CGI.

If you love all the character stuff, you might love this movie. A lot of people still do. It’s an extremely polished cult classic. My 13yo found it adequate. My mom still giggles adorably through it. I was less impressed with it now than when I was a kid, and I wish we could do some reshoots on some cheap sets to flesh out the middle. I can think of so much science fiction that taped together great stories from very paltry budgets. What’s the excuse here?

The score is still one of the absolute greats, they’ve got a good Gandalf/Obi-Wan, and this is another fun use of a Delorean. But there are much better, cheaper science fiction movies worth your time than this, and the contemporary box office numbers agreed. Show it to your kids, though.

(image credit: Universal Pictures)

I have nothing but biased opinions about Lord of the Rings. I think of this as the greatest movie trilogy of all time, and I won’t listen to any opinions that say otherwise.

Of the three movies, whichever one I’m watching at the moment is my favorite. Today, The Two Towers was my favorite. It’s got some of my favorite parts of the trilogy, anyway: great speeches surrounding Helm’s Deep, the most amazing satisfying battle, gorgeous goth Arwen, a score that makes me cry evry tiem, the Dead Marshes, po-ta-toes, “What Do Your Elf Eyes See?”, Faramir proving himself stronger than Boromir, and on and on and on.

It’s difficult to review any individual part of the trilogy without the rest, since they’re a cohesive unit. Nine to twelve hours of flawless filmmaking, depending on what edition you’re watching. (I always watch the Extended Edition.)

You’d expect the middle movie to be the saggiest entry, since you’ll find saggy middles throughout most movies, series, books, and media in general. There’s definitely some parts that stretch out longer than they need to. I’m not exactly bolted to my chair with all the Ent stuff — even though I love the Ent stuff too! — and everything with freeing Rohan from Wormtongue’s sway feels a little bit like a side quest you don’t *really* want to do in the game. I also feel like things slow down a lot once Frodo is with Faramir. It’s more of a jarring moment of quiet than a moment of needed respite from the high energy of the fighting going on elsewhere.

But I’m really straining here to find something balanced to say, and also kind of lying, because I love every moment of this.

I mean, c’mon. This movie starts with Gandalf fighting the Balrog and ends with Gandalf bringing Eomer’s men to rescue Helm’s Deep from the brink of death. It’s incredible. Why don’t I have a fell beast? I deserve a fell beast.

It’s awesome to see the effects after more than twenty years too. Nothing looks as realistic as it felt at the time (I was 14), but it doesn’t matter. There’s a really cohesive artistic vision happening here. Everyone was given space to do their jobs right, and that means the bigatures, nascent mo-cap, photo composition, and other CG all come together to look *right* even as it ages.

Truly this is amazing cinema, amazing fantasy, and I think I could rewatch this trilogy every week for the rest of my life without losing the excitement. I get such chills throughout Helm’s Deep, it almost hurts. It’s that good.

(image credit: New Line Cinema)

How the heck do you review a movie like Martyrs?

The story is this: a ten-year-old girl escapes extreme torture, and nobody knows why she was being tortured in such a way. She meets another girl at an orphanage. The two of them grow up together and become extremely close. Fifteen years after her escape, she seeks revenge, and things…don’t go great.

As part of the French New Extremist movement in cinema, Martyrs (2008) is intended to be unpleasant to watch. The director said it himself. The plot of the movie involves subjecting young women to so much pain that they transcend it and become martyrs (witnesses) to the afterlife. To paraphrase the director, simply watching the movie is meant to somewhat turn viewers into martyrs too. It’s that kind of unpleasant. Cruelty is the point.

I often review movies based on my enjoyment, so how do you review something you’re not meant to enjoy?

Certainly I found the project thought-provoking, though not in all good ways. It seems terribly convenient that a man would write a script claiming young women are the best martyrs, which then lets him make a whole movie where beautiful young (often mostly naked) women are pantomiming extreme suffering. I’ve come across way too many men who get their jollies off on women who suffer — but also women who *transcend* the suffering, giving the men a sense of benevolence, because the women are better than being broken by it. I’ve got a particular loathing for this kind of misogyny. It’s all over Martyrs…and horror in general, honestly.

You’ll hear fans (is anyone a fan, really?) say that Martyrs is making a point about the way society uses women and their pain — or horror itself uses them — but if it’s meant to be criticism, then it’s the kind of criticism where they do exactly the thing they criticize. You know? How much of a critical leg does someone have to stand upon when they do the thing they say is bad? Why would you do it if you *really* think it’s bad? Creators are in full control of their message and its execution, after all. He could have said this in a way that didn’t involve a bunch of attractive naked actresses acting extreme suffering. But he did. So he must bear the same criticism ~fans claim the movie is making, in my opinion.

That said, it’s kind of naive to expect horror (especially of this movement) to do anything else. I feel like I have to set aside the above because Martyrs is what it is.

Once I get over all that, I’m left with the impression of a masterfully made movie. It’s shot beautifully, sorta, as much as a gory movie can be beautiful. The sound design (mostly a lot of screaming) is more impactful than the visuals, and the visual effects are beyond impressive. The editing is great. The score is lovely. The tender relationship between characters is genuinely touching, and they didn’t have to center such loving relationships in such a shocker of a film.

Very little is explicitly stated in Martyrs, which leaves ample room for interpretation. I always enjoy that. Why did Mademoiselle do what she did at the end, for instance? You have to comb back through the movie and watch the actress closely to draw your own conclusions about the motivations from character, plot, and theme. There is a sense of meaning — albeit possibly illusory meaning — to all the pain, and the way it demands time for analysis manages to make the film itself transcend torture porn to become actual art.

This is why I’m left giving it a four star review, even though I might wanna fight the director if we ever ate dinner at the same restaurant, and it wasn’t fun to watch, and I’m not sure I’ll watch it again. Martyrs is really skillfully made and it’s worth thinking about.

All the above said, I might actually watch it again because I think I missed whole levels to the flick. For instance: I didn’t realize the two main women would be considered nonwhite by the French filmmakers. I’m an American, and we absolutely have tons of racist biases, but I honestly just registered them as French. I feel so silly typing that out! But it means there is not just a gendered element to the people chosen as Martyrs, but also a racial element I didn’t begin considering. I mostly thought about gender, Catholicism, and the creator’s desperate need for therapy (said lovingly).

It makes me wonder if I even have enough context on French culture and cinema to really crack this movie. I’ve got to be missing tons of nuance. And I do think there’s lots of nuance.

Martyrs is the kind of movie you can’t really recommend to anyone, but if you think you can stomach extremely bleak and violent horror, it’s good to swing by at least once. Don’t watch it. I think I have to tell you not to watch it just in case.

(image credit: Wild Bunch)