The Last Starfighters sizzle reel from Star Wars scribe

“Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.” For a generation of video gamers (myself included), those words heralded the promise of adventures like Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far, far away...

Somehow, I missed The Last Starfighter in the cinema and didn't see the pioneering sci-fi adventure until a school friend hired the movie on rental video in the mid-eighties. It became a regular weekend treat as we played video games on Atari VCS, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Back in 2018, Gary Whitta, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story screenwriter, teased a reboot of The Last Starfighter on Twitter. Today, he shared a sizzle reel for The Last Starfighters (working title) and with it all the feels.



"We are, I believe, very very close--closer than anyone has ever been to making a new Last Starfighter fighter movie, like right on the one yard line," Whitta said. "After pushing the boulder uphill for years we are very, very, very close. I can't really say anything more. Other than that, you know because it's there's all stuff happening behind the scenes now, like there's things I can't tell you but we are very, very close, I believe it will happen."

Whitta's working with the original movie's scribe, Jonathan Betuel.

"We weren't interested in re-inventing or rebooting or remaking the movie," Whitta continues. "We wanted to do a sequel that kept the original in canon; which kept the original storyline and honored the original. The idea was to pass the torch to a new generation of heroes in the same way that The Force Awakens does. You wanted to see Han Solo and Princess Leia, but at the same time, we all knew that they weren't gonna be the heroes of the movie going forward. It was a new, young [cast]: Rey, Finn, Poe. That movie was about passing the torch and we wanted to do a movie that [does the same]. We called it a 'requel.' It's a sequel, but it also kind of reboots and brings the franchise back."

Are you excited for The Last Starfighters? Let me know in the comments below.