Greetings. The delightful film "The Last Starfighter" (1984) has a hallowed place in CGI history as the first major film to use computer generated imagery for all spaceships, planets, and other advanced hardware -- and with fully integrated CGI backgrounds as well! Though they of course look rather crude today, back then they were absolutely groundbreaking, and involved about half an hour of imagery rendered on a Cray supercomputer.
The film itself is a great deal of fun. Very much tongue in cheek -- in my view the absolute star of the film is veteran actor Robert Preston (Professor Harold Hill from "The Music Man") who plays an alien who is very much an analogue of his Music Man role. Just wonderful! -L
@lauren Yes, indeed. The same machine, an X-MP, was then used for 2010's CGI.
What we were most excited about was being able to solve the problem of "too much motion at once" using models. It was possible for the ship to move while the weapons doors were opening, while each of the covers were opening -- dozens of things in motion at once.
