Oh man I don't know how I managed to get to my current age without watching this gem. The Last Starfighter (1984) features a young high school age boy who lives in a trailer park community. The boy plays and masters an arcade game at the trailer park, which leads to him being recruited into an intergalactic defense force. The arcade game is used as a device to test the player's competency as a spaceship gunner. Once the player reaches a certain score, they are abducted and turned into soldiers set out to save the universe.The CGI in the film was impressive for how old it was. It must have cost a fortune to implement that kind of technology back then.
The story mimics almost every component of the hero's journey, which made it very predictable. But it's about a kid who goes from playing a video game to becoming a space gunner, meaning it probably wasn't in the Oscar running to begin with. One interesting thing I noticed with The Last Starfighter was its similarity to Ender's Game (1985), a novel about a boy who is brought up to lead a space armada against an intergalactic force. I wonder if there was any relationship between the movie and Ender's Game or if both were just coincidental products of that time period...
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