Nowadays, we are awash in an ocean of geeky sci-fi and fantasy media content--but, it was not always so. There once was a time when a single person could easily list every significant live-action film with fantastical content in the last decade, own them all on VHS, and watch them all in a weekend movie marathon. When I was a small child, The Last Starfighter was one of those rare and precious sci-fi films that my family had on VHS, and I loved it.
(Beware the Amazon affiliate link! If you click it, and buy the Blu-ray, you might end up giving me some money!)
The Last Starfighter was revolutionary in a number of ways. It took the kid protagonist out of the suburbs and into a trailer park. It emphasized the 3D nature of space for navigation and combat--spaceships don't all get conveniently aligned in a flat plane and all facing the same way up! It had the heaviest use of CGI since TRON, and while we wouldn't call the results "photorealistic" today, it was the first film to attempt photographic realism in computer generated imagery.
But that's not why you read this blog! You wanna know what the linguistic content is like!
The Last Starfighter does feature alien dialog from the Rylans, but not a proper conlang, or even a sketch of one--according to the Director Commentary, it's all gibberish. But, it's remarkably well-constructed gibberish! If you're going to do gibberish, The Last Starfighter ain't a bad reference to emulate! (Unlike, say, the Jabba's Palace scene in The Return of the Jedi.)
The alien dialog is entirely confined to a fairly short sequence in between Alex (our human MC) entering the Star Car for transport to Rylos and being given a translator device so that he (and the audience) hears everything for the rest of the movie in English. Some of that dialog is very difficult to hear clearly, as it is diegetically filtered through PA speaker systems in the background of the scenes, and the subtitles don't transcribe it. However, I managed to transcribe a few bits for reference:
[On approach to the Rylan base in the Star Car]
[Greeting, when Star Car door opens]
Centauri: Rita. Ritana. Ritana.
Traffic control: Ritana. Ritana sanswela. Ritana.
Rityensi. Kita / Kritar (pronunciation seems to flip between rhotic and non-rhotic versions over several repetitions of the word; would be good to get multiple sets of ears on it)[While gesturing through a door]
Kritar ina[While receiving uniform]
Incredulous Official: Isanjay!
Centauri: Isanjay? Onimatswela! Prita, Prita!
Hula!
[Calling for Alex's attention]
Iai. Kita / Kritar
Throughout the sequence, the filmmakers make heavy use of environmental and actor-emotional cues to communicate the intended meaning (making the exact meaning of the words Irrelevant, and broad gist Obvious), while simultaneously allowing the audience to participate in Alex's confusion at being thrown into contact with this alien culture, and showing through the use of an alien language that it is, well... an alien culture!
There is little enough there that the writers are not at risk of falling afoul of self-contradiction--there's enough freedom to induce a meaningful language behind these utterances if you wanted to. But at the same time, there is enough repetition of phonetic elements to make it feel cohesive and consistent, and re-use of common elements in the same situations. E.g., "Kita", combined with a beckoning gesture (cross wrists with palms inward), is pretty clearly something like "come here" / "go this way". There are lots of 'R's, 'T's, and 'I's, and the "swela" element occurs twice in different contexts--it sounds like a suffix, but maybe it's a distinct word.
Finally, Alex is presented with an automatic translator device pinned to his shirt collar, "so that people don't have to listen to that for the rest of the movie" according to the Director's Commentary. I, for one, would've been fine listening to that for the rest of the movie... but if you have that kind of bulk of dialog, it really would've required actually constructing a proper conlang! So, the writer & director knew their limits, and constructed the film accordingly. What I find quite odd, though, is that the Director's Commentary calls out the use of the automatic translator device as "cheesy"! On the one hand, that's a little overly self-deprecating in light of the ridiculously broad usage of Universal Translators in other SF media--notably, Star Trek. On the other hand, it's nice to hear a filmmaker explicitly acknowledging that not using that trope would have been better. And, while various Star Trek series and episodes really deserve their own separate posts, it is worth noting here that more recent Star Trek productions have been better about not completely background the existence of the translator mechanism--just to point out a couple of notable examples, Star Trek: Prodigy starts out in an environment where prisoners are isolated and unable to communicate with each other because they are not given access to universal translators (implicitly acknowledging that it is a real in-world technology, rather than strictly a narrative convenience); and in season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery Saru's sister expresses confusion about how she is able to understand Michael (who, to her, is an alien)--because, as a pre-technological alien, the existence of translator devices has not yet been explained to her. So, despite its imperfections in the linguistic department, we can identify The Last Starfighter as also being revolutionary in explicitly acknowledging the need for and existence of translators as in-universe technology in a way that is relevant to the audience experience!
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