I am reporting from deep within the bowels of New Nerd America: a pop art dystopia in which nerds have decidedly won the culture war and allowed the media landscape to rot in decades-old rubble instead of encouraging anything fresh to flourish.  What I mean to say is that there’s nothing especially interesting to me in theaters right now, because all the local marquees are cluttered with nostalgia-bait IP.  Our poptimistic celebration of vintage nerd culture has gone too far, to the point where nearly all American screen space has been gobbled up by bajillion dollar intellectual propertie$ that service some long gestating fandom: Marvel fans, DC fans, Mario fans, Transformer fans, Fast & Furious fans, Little Mermaid fans, oscillating fans, and fans of the Boogeyman.  Even the more artistic alternatives to this deluge of summertime corporate schlock—the new Spider-Man and the new Kamen Rider—are reverently referential to the nerdy histories of their titular superheroes; they just happen to be better crafted than most other nerd-culture nostalgia stokers currently on the market.  In these moments of early-summer panic, I always think back to Spielberg’s dystopian adaptation of Ready Player One, a movie that mourned the cultural brain rot of a society willing to dwell in the artistic triumphs of the past instead of innovating new populist art for the future.  As you’ll remember, Ready Player One was a critical failure upon its release, mostly for its association with its vapid source-material novel, which celebrated the dawning of the New Nerd America with uncritical nerdgasmic glee.  I personally thought Spielberg did a good job of undercutting the nostalgic poptimism of Ernest Cline’s book, though, the same way that Verhoeven “adapted” Starship Troopers into an argument against its own militaristic thesis.  To me, Ready Player One was a nightmare vision of a near-future Hell dominated by 1980s nerd culture bullshit (one we’re already living in just five years later).  The only way its Pre-Existing IP Futurism could possibly look fun & celebratory is if nerds were still the pop culture underdogs fighting to earn wider cultural respect for their personal pet obsessions.  Basically, it’s as if everyone misread 2018’s Ready Player One as a remake of 1984’s The Last Starfighter.

There’s something fascinating about the pop culture ouroboros of The Last Starfighter borrowing heavily from early Spielberg, then being echoed in Ready Player One, which was then adapted into a legitimate Spielberg film with outright contempt for its own source material.  Like in Cline’s celebration of New Nerd America, The Last Starfighter is the story of a Fanboy loser who proves the local Haters who doubt him wrong when his video gaming skills end up saving the planet instead of just wasting countless hours of his youth.  The 1980s setting means that he’s addicted to an arcade cabinet instead of a VR headset, but the spirit remains the same.  Lance Guest “stars” as a frustrated, go-nowhere teen who earns the high score on his trailer park’s communal arcade game while all the Cool Kids are off enjoying a social day at the beach.  The game turns out to be an intergalactic recruitment tool for a noble space alien army who need the nerd’s joystick skills to win their space-laser war with a vaguely defined enemy.  Instead of directly adapting the gameplay “plot” of a specific game the way most Video Game Movies would (the animated Super Mario Bros movie being a recent example), The Last Starfighter instead portrays the reason nerdy kids obsess over those games in the first place.  It’s a live-action illustration of the escapist power fantasy the medium offers its pasty shut-in players.  And since video games were still a nerds-only proposition at the time The Last Starfighter was produced, it’s a charming prototype for the much sourer escapist power fantasy that would be echoed in the Ready Player One novel, which is a gloating celebration of the dominant pop culture of its time.  The Last Starfighter is almost just as much a celebration of 1980s kitsch as its 2010s equivalent.  Its titular arcade game is a shameless Star Wars rip-off; its space-age adventurism is directly informed by early Spielberg titles like E.T. & Close Encounters; and its basic video-game-recruitment premise is essentially a too-soon remake of Tron‘s.  It’s so deeply steeped in 80s nerd shit that its inclusion of a DeLorean-shaped spaceship feels like an homage to Back to the Future, even though it was released a year earlier than that Zemeckis touchstone.  There’s just something wholesome about that reverence for 80s nerd culture being filmed when it could still get you dunked in a toilet or shoved in a locker, as opposed to it being screen-printed on every Target brand t-shirt on the shelf.

Not every aspect of The Last Starfighter is wholesome & quaint.  In my dusty DVD’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the movie’s “continued popularity”, the computer effects artists behind its creation are loudly proud of their contribution to modern blockbuster filmmaking, claiming that The Last Starfighter was the first feature film to primarily use CG effects to produce its “real world” space-fighting environments.  The early-80s CG has aged about as well as you would expect, often giving the film the feel of a vintage PC video game instead of a proper sci-fi picture.  It was certainly ahead of the industrial curve, though, which you can tell in how improbably advanced its star-war graphics look in the arcade gameplay vs. how surreally dated they look once our nerdy hero is playing the game “for real.”  It was also made in a time before programmers were brave enough to attempt computerizing their space alien characters, so there are thankfully plenty of adorable rubber-mask monsters cheering on & fighting alongside our fanboy gamer hero.  The computer animation team did a decent job for their era, but they could have done even better if the studio had given them the proper time & resources needed to complete the project.  Even in my DVD’s victory lap featurette, they complain about the stress of completing the project on time, having been given an impossible 6-month deadline to finalize their effects work. As a result, they rushed the project to completion, putting in overworked, undercompensated hours to make sure the movie could hit its predetermined release date.  In that way, the New Nerd America is nothing new at all.  The way the computer animators behind all the nostalgic fan service behemoths currently on the market are treated by the studios who subcontract them is bottomlessly cruel & abusive, especially considering how much money their employers are making on their undervalued labor.  The Last Starfighter was a template for modern nerd culture filmmaking both its reverence for schlocky 80s pop art (which was at least fresh & interesting at the time) and in its exploitation of the actual, real-life nerds behind the keyboards that made it come to life.  I’m going to guess that the Ready Player One film, no matter how much higher in quality than the Ready Player One book, also participated in that modern industry standard, which has only gotten worse as the demand for this kind of material has exponentially risen.

I didn’t revisit The Last Starfighter in order to heap more praise onto a five-year-old Spielberg film most people hate or have totally forgotten.  I also didn’t revisit it to make some kind of Galaxy Brain point about the state of modern populist filmmaking.  I revisited it because I was bored, I wanted to watch a movie, and nothing currently playing in theaters looked novel or exciting enough to justify leaving my couch.  However, I did venture out the next day to sell my Last Starfighter DVD (along with other dusty pop culture leftovers) and was greeted with two bittersweet responses from the incurably nerdy clerk at my local 2nd & Charles: 1. “We’re no longer buying back DVDs,” which is a real heartbreaker for me — the end of an era.  And, 2. “That movie’s badass,” which I hope is the same reaction whoever picks up my copy from the Mid-City Goodwill has as well.  It turns out these 80s nerd culture leftovers aren’t worth all that much after all.  They’re meant to sell popcorn & digital downloads for a few months then promptly be forgotten forever, which would be the ideal amount of reverence for this kind of nerdy pop art if it weren’t for the fact that all of its latest examples are regurgitations of past triumphs. 

-Brandon Ledet