Top SFX shots No.15: The Last Starfighter

SFX wizard John Dykstra marks Nick Castle's CGI-laden adventure as the moment that it was clear where optical effects were heading. Only two years after TRON (see #9), even the Cray X-MP computer couldn't hope to integrate non-stylistic live footage seamlessly with computer-generated special effects, and the film's 'computer game' link (TRON's excuse for the low-res effects) was too tenuous to bridge the gap. Nonetheless we see advancements here in rendering phong shaders, huge advancements in transparency shaders and also diffused shadow rendering. There's still no bitmap-texturing, but this shot is one of the most ambitious in Starfighter and it foreshadowed the SFX revolution of the 1990s by over six years.

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