Videogame Cinema: Wing Commander

In the 90’s there was this weird little trend that emerged called FMV or Full Motion Video. With the advent of CD’s, game developers now had the storage capacity to have full video sequences in their games and sometimes would base and design their games entirely around it.

It was impressive at the time, but the novelty quickly wore off. A lot of FMV games simply weren’t very good. They had limited, subpar gameplay and the video sequences themselves were often B-movie levels of quality.

Basically, they weren’t very good games, and they weren’t very good movies. For as hyped as the technology was, with some systems like the Sega CD marketing themselves entirely around it, the games just didn’t have much staying power.

But not every FMV game was bad. There were quite a few games that used FMV well. Games that used the technology to enhance the storytelling and presentation while having great gameplay to boot. Wing Commander being a prime example of that.

For those who may be too young to remember it, Wing Commander was a PC game series developed by Origin. The same company behind the Ultima series and System Shock. They were one of the biggest names in PC gaming during the 90’s and Wing Commander was one of their crown jewels.

The game was a sort of hybrid of a space combat sim and a choose your own adventure. The first two games were decent successes, but it was the third and fourth games, the ones that used FMV, that put the series on the map.

I never played this series. Primarily because I was way too young when they were new. I hadn’t even heard about it until much later.  It also doesn’t help that it’s a PC series and I’m not a PC gamer. There were console ports of them, but they aren’t available on modern consoles, so I can’t play them for myself to see what they’re like.

Fortunately for me, fans of these games have edited the FMV sequences together with some gameplay to present them as a movie. So while I can’t speak for the gameplay, I can at least judge the stories, and they’re fucking amazing.

The best way I can describe it is it’s what happens when you take Top Gun and Star Trek and mesh them together. Taking the aerial combat, pilot dynamics and action of the former, and mixing it with the sci-fi setting, political intrigue, and interesting commentary of the latter.

They have great characters, an interesting and fun sci-fi setting, simple but engaging space opera story lines, and they have casts of recognisable actors. Mark Hamil, Malcolm Mcdowel, John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson, Tim Curry, John Bernard, and Francois Chau. Even if you don’t recognise some names, you will know who they are once you see them.

They were also shot incredibly well. Yeah, it involved a lot of green screen, but that was just the style at the time, and even that was done far better than most. Having cinematic lighting and great practical effects. They looked fantastic and had the look and feel of a classic sci-fi series. It felt more like Star Trek than, sadly, modern Star Trek does.

So, we have a series that already had good cinematic presentation, a great cast, and some very excellent scripts. Seriously, the writing and dialogue in Wing Commander puts a lot of modern games to shame. In short, you have a series tailor made for a screen adaptation.

How, fucking HOW, could they possibly screw this up? Well one quick look at the poster should tell us.

I’m going to ignore how generic the poster is, although believe me it is stupendously generic, and instead focus on the casting choices. We went from cast members from Star Wars and Back to the Future, to half the cast from Scooby Doo. You had actors that were well known for science fiction and replaced them with actors known for teen comedies? The hell is wrong with you.

Ok, ok, let’s be fair here. It’s not like the casting is that bad. They did get some well-known character actors like David Warner, Tchéky Karyo, David Suchet and Jurgen Prochnow. The casting isn’t a complete waste; I just can’t get over the fact that they replaced Luke Skywalker and Biff with Fred and Shaggy.

There is a reason behind this though. The Wing Commander movie is meant to be a prequel. The characters are meant to be younger, so it makes sense to cast younger actors. Which is fine I guess, but I still don’t know why they couldn’t get Malcolm Mcdowel or John-Rhys Davies involved. Age wouldn’t have been an issue for their roles.

There were apparently plans for Mcdowel to reprise his role, but he was busy with Fantasy Island and couldn’t do it. As for John-Rhys Davies, either he read the script and bounced, or he was also busy with another project. A certain ring-based movie trilogy that would have needed a lot of preparation for. I would believe either explanation.

One part of the games that actually did make it over was the director, Chris Roberts. Roberts had not only directed the live action sequences in Wing Commander III and IV, but he was also the creator of the series. This was his baby.

In theory this should have been a good thing. Then again Final Fantasy Spirits Within was also directed by that series’ creator and it was a pile, so maybe not. Although unlike Hironobu Sakaguchi, Chris Roberts did have film directing experience since the Wing Commander games were effectively interactive movies. So on paper this should have worked out great.

The problem is that the film was rushed. Twentieth Century Fox only gave Roberts and crew three months of preproduction. For reference, the standard preproduction phase is around six months. Meaning they were only given half the time they needed.

Now if this was a grounded indie movie they might have been able to make it work, but this was an effects heavy sci-fi action movie, so it was not what they needed. If anything they would need a longer pre-production time for it to live up to Robert’s vision. Because if there’s one thing Chris Roberts is good at its overly ambitious productions that go on for way too fucking long.

The reason for this rushed production was due to Fox wanting to avoid competition with Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace. Oh you may laugh at that now, but Phantom Menace was a big deal back then. Fox had a good reason for not wanting to go against it. Mainly because they were also distributing Phantom Menace. Don’t want to cannibalise yourself after all.

The sad part is that one of the big selling points of Wing Commander was the debut trailer for Star Wars Episode I. Jesus, how depressing must that be in hindsight.

It wasn’t just an issue with time either. The budget for this movie was an issue too. While the reported budget is around $30 million, Roberts would clarify on a Wing Commander fan site called wcnews in 2012 that the actual budget was around $24 million.

$24 million is a pretty small budget for a film like Wing Commander. I mean the games were full on space operas with space battles and aliens. You would need a lot of money for something like this. Most of the Star Trek films had double or triple that amount.

So they didn’t have the budget to do all the effects they wanted, nor the time to really polish up the script. Speaking of which, there were apparently clashes with Fox and Roberts on the story. Roberts had originally planned for the film to be a Das Boot styled movie in space, but Fox wanted a more traditional sci-fi action movie. They would eventually compromise, but the tighter production schedule meant they didn’t have time to iron out the kinks.

There may have also been some fuckery going on with the script. Freddie Prinze Jr would later say in an interview with Movieline in 2000, “I read the script and loved it. So did my buddy Matthew Lillard. We both got the parts. We went on location and they said, "Here's the new script." It was a piece of shit.” When Freddie Prinze Jr is calling out your script being bad, you know the script is bad.

Although Roberts apparently disagreed. In the same fan site statement I mentioned earlier, he was quoted as saying, “As for the script quality – it's a better script than the film ended up being and by Hollywood standards especially for this genre it didn't suck. It wasn't Oscar material delving into the inner struggles of pilots in a futuristic war, but next to Starship Troopers or other genre work, I think script wise it stands up.”

Did he just imply the script was better than Starship Troopers. Because he would be dead fucking wrong if he did. Imagine comparing this movie to Starship Troopers, what dumbass would do that? Apparently, the writers of the DVD box. Because they wrote on the case that this was like a mix of Top Gun and Starship Troopers. I don’t know what drugs these jokers are on, but could I get the name of their dealer.

Oh lookie, another videogame movie with a troubled production. At this point I should probably make a bingo card for this shit. To what should be no one’s surprise, the film was a commercial and financial flop, and it’s been largely forgotten about outside of the dedicated Wing Commander fanbase.

It’s not hard to see why after watching it. It isn’t that Wing Commander is a catastrophically awful mess, it’s just that it’s so underwhelming in nearly every aspect. It’s the most nothing burger of a movie I’ve reviewed. It’s THE video game movie of all time.

The movie takes place in the year 2654. Humans have colonised the stars under the Terran Confederation and are at war with the Kilrathi, a warrior race of bipedal space tigers. Think Klingons if they were furries.

The movie begins with a Kilrathi attack on a vital Confed base where there happens to be a navigational computer, Navcom, with coordinates to Earth. Since this would mean an imminent attack the Confed fleet is recalled to Earth, but their ETA is two hours after the Kilrathi. Typical, the fed never shows up on time.

In order to slow the Kilrathi fleet down and gather intelligence, fleet admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn sends a relay order to Lieutenant Christopher Blair for his new assignment, the TCS Tiger Claw. The mission is to try and delay the Kilrathi by any means possible, which is basically suicide but there aren’t many options left.

He’s sent there with fellow Lieutenant Todd “Maniac” Marshal and Captain James “Paladin” Taggart. When they arrive though no one really likes Blair. Partly because he speaks about a pilot who was already killed, and that’s taboo on this ship since they pretend pilots who died never existed as a bizarre and frankly disrespectful coping mechanism, and also because he’s descendent from Pilgrims.

I don’t mean the guys with the goofy hats that massacred the Native Americans, no these are space Pilgrims. The gist is that they were the first human colonists that gained special abilities from… actually I have no idea. Being in space? I don’t know. Anyway, they abandoned humanity, got a god complex and then started a war with Confed that nearly wiped them all out.

None of this is from the games. it’s this weird mystical part of the setting that the movie just made up. I don’t know if this was an executive order or if it was something Chris Roberts himself wanted. Regardless of how it got added, it really doesn’t work.

For one it clashes with what Wing Commander is. Wing Commander largely avoided fantastical elements like this. It’s meant to be more like Star Trek than Star Wars. Star Wars was basically just a fantasy movie with a sci-fi coat of paint, so having magic powers like the Force worked well. Star Trek, and therefore Wing Commander, are more grounded by comparison.

It’s still fantastical, like it still has aliens and crap like that, but it has a bigger emphasis on political intrigue and philosophical debate. It didn’t have magic powers because that isn’t what the series is about.

I know Star Trek had mystical elements to it, but it was mostly reserved for god like beings that were beyond human comprehension, and it usually used those powers to explore deeper thematical ideas. The Pilgrims are just psychics. That’s basically what they are. It’s too basic to be interesting, and it doesn’t use it to explore anything other than a basic anti-prejudice message.

On top of that, the whole Pilgrim thing is the main defining character trait for most of the cast. I’m not kidding. Nearly the entire movie revolves around it. Blair’s one and only character trait is struggling with his heritage and the prejudice that comes with it. Since people aren’t too keen on Pilgrims due to the whole war thing.

That’s basically how most people interact with him. They just treat him like dirt because he’s a Pilgrim. Jurgen Prochnow’s character exists purely for that reason. All he does in the movie is give Blair shit for being a Pilgrim and blaming everything that goes wrong on him for being a Pilgrim. That’s his one and only thing.

I mean there’s nothing wrong with this. Spreading an anti-prejudice message is a noble goal, but it doesn’t do much interesting with it. I don’t even get the feeling that Blair overcomes the prejudice by the end. There’s no big moment where it feels like he’s earned everyone’s respect. It just feels like it gets arbitrarily dropped from the movie.

The Pilgrims aren’t even explored that much. They make a point that there are Pilgrim saboteurs affecting the war effort which is never followed up on. There was supposed to be a sub-plot involving the Tiger Claws captain being a traitor that could have been about this, but it was cut from the movie, so we’ll never know.

It’s pretty obvious it was cut too. There are hints that the captain has something more going on, but then he dies. Well that was a waste of screen time. There’s also a part where Blair loses his Pilgrim cross, but we never see him lose it. There was apparently a planned knife fight that never got filmed that might explain that, but since it got cut it’s now just a massive plot hole.

I don’t even understand the whole prejudice sub-plot. Not that the Pilgrims are ostracised, that’s fine. Well, ok it’s not fine to ostracise someone, but fine in that I understand why it’s happening. Starting a war would do that.

No I’m more confused on why the war started in the first place. The idea is that the Pilgrims saw themselves as Gods and went to war with humanity. Why? Why would they do that? What was the reasoning, was it like a Magneto thing where they wanted to subjugate the human race.

Why would they care? It made sense for Magneto to do it because he was stuck on Earth and he had that whole backstory of being a holocaust survivor and wanting to prevent that from happening again. These guys are in space. You have the whole galaxy as your playground. Why would you need or care about the Earth?

It’s never properly explained. We’re only given vague details about what happened. It doesn’t actually explain much on why the war started or the details of what happened during it. I get they started a war, but what did they do during the war. How bad was it? What damage did it do? These are important world building questions to ask, and the movie never addresses them.

Maybe the idea was to keep it vague to expand upon it in future sequels. Yeah, fat chance of that. So, all we’re left with is a vaguely defined backstory that just serves to add a prejudice sub-plot that goes nowhere, which is bad since it’s also the only defining character trait for the protagonist.

But there’s something about this that feels awfully familiar. A group of space colonists that split from an Earth alliance that later go to war with them, and they also happen to have psychic abilities from being in space. That’s Zeon. This whole Pilgrim thing is a rip off of the Principality of Zeon from Mobile Suit Gundam.

Except that Zeon was done far better. For one we actually see the war with Zeon. We’re shown why they went to war and why they were bad. As opposed to Wing Commander where it’s just told to us and purely exists to add some backstory to the setting. Which is fine, if it wasn’t also confusing and riddled with holes.

Second, Zeon’s motivation actually makes sense. In Gundam the reason why Zeon went to war is because they wanted independence from Earth, and also because the leaders were dictatorial assholes, but it was started for independence. That is a far more believable explanation for why the war started rather than what Wing Commander gave.

It’s especially bad considering the Pilgrim’s super-power that made them feel like gods is really fucking lame. You want to know what they had? A good sense of direction. There super-power was that they could sense pathways through cosmic phenomenon. I mean, it’s kind of cool I guess, but couldn’t we just use computers for this.

In fact they do. That’s what Navcoms are for. Why would the Pilgrims think themselves gods when we can replicate their power through technology. Basic technology when you think about it, shouldn’t a navigational program have been installed on a starship before you guys colonised the stars.

This is why these idiots went to war? At least in Gundam the New-Types had more unique and distinct powers. Ok the explanation for how they got their powers was ridiculous, but the powers themselves were at least kind of cool. It wasn’t just having a sat-nav in your brain. At least there was an explanation for where they came from instead of a vague pseudo-religious one.

Maybe this is an unfair comparison. Gundam is a TV series, it has more time to go over this kind of stuff. But that’s the thing, one of the reasons why it works so well in Gundam is because it has the time to invest in this kind of story.

Wing Commander does not. The reason the Pilgrim war is so undercooked is because it doesn’t have the time to go into it. It barely has enough time to go into the main war with the Kilrathi. If you never played the games, you wouldn’t have a clue who they were or what their deal is.

I think the issue is that Chris Roberts is too used to writing for a video game and not a movie. The game might have been an interactive movie, but it was still more game than movie. In a game you have more time to tell the story. Not only are games longer, but they also have more side content to explain more about the lore and characters. Side conversations, data-logs that kind of thing.

Movies don’t have anything like that. They have much tighter running times which means they need to be more efficient in how they use said time. Wing Commander should have just dropped the Pilgrim story. Not just because it doesn’t make much sense, but it eats up screen time that could have been spent on developing the main conflict.

This whole Pilgrim thing is just dumb. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, it’s poorly explored, it’s a blatant rip-off of other science fiction series, it doesn’t fit with the setting, and it wastes time that would be better spent on the main story. It’s just a baffling addition.

But you know what the worst thing is? It’s the only interesting part about this movie. Everything else is just a series of sci-fi and submarine movie clichés. You’ve got the main character with the special power who doesn’t fit in anywhere, the overbearing XO who’s hard on the main character, the wise mentor who knows more than he lets on, the reckless fighter pilot whose antics get him into trouble, and the angsty love interest with a tragic past that can only be fixed by the love of the main character.

These characters are beyond stock. They’re like leftover extra’s from Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re also very different from their in-game counterparts. Blair is so boring in this. In the games he’s supposed to be the standard sci-fi hero. The guy that stands up for what’s right and represents the ideals of Confed, but he’s not afraid to go against them when they go too far.

I’ll admit that the game version is a little all over the place, but that’s to facilitate player choices and he still feels like a defined character. He’s somehow both a blank slate, and a defined character which is something few things have pulled off.

Blair in the movie is just there. His only arc is the Pilgrim stuff, and outside of that he’s just the bland everyman lead. I also have to laugh at the idea of them trying to take a good-looking white guy and turning them into a victim of prejudice. I just don’t buy that, no matter what sci-fi bullshit you have to justify it.

Angel Devereux, or Deveraux as it’s spelled in the movie and it’s not the only misspelling either, is just the typical bitchy love interest. She exists purely to get together with the main character and doesn’t have a character arc outside of that. I’ll admit I’m not too familiar with Angel in the games because she only had a role in Wing Commander II which I haven’t played, but she had to have more to her than this.

The only thing I know is different is her ethnicity. In the games she’s Belgium, that’s why her name is Devereux, but in the movie she’s British. This isn’t the only example of this. Paladin in the games is Scottish but in the movie he’s French. Does this count as race swapping? Eh, I guess it’s borderline. I just don’t get this. Why not get actors that match the game’s nationalities. You could have at least gotten people that can do an accent.

Then there’s Maniac. In the games, Maniac is supposed to be a hot-shot pilot who is only out for himself. He’s brash, arrogant and a total dick, but he has the skills to back up the bravado. Movie Maniac is a reckless idiot. He is still a skilled pilot who tries to show off to everyone, but he comes across more as, well as I said a reckless idiot.

I think he was meant to be more of a comic relief character. Which is how Maniac is depicted in the games, so they at least got that part right, but I don’t find him nearly as funny in the movie. In the games his cockiness often backfires on him to humorous effect, but that doesn’t happen much in the movie.

He gets away with a bit too much, and when his actions do blow up in his face it’s a literal blow up in his face. He gets a pilot killed which is a bit too serious a moment. The games just had him get slapped by a woman he was hitting on, this movie has his girlfriend die in a horrible fiery wreck. It’s a bit of a contrast.

Maniac and Blair also have a very different relationship than in the games. In the videogame they’re portrayed like how Maverick and Iceman are in Top Gun. They’re the two best pilots, but one is more strait laced and the other doesn’t like to play by the rules. Both are rivals that clash in their approaches and attitude, but there is a mutual respect between the two,

In the movie they’re just friends. They’re fresh out of the academy and they both have each-others backs. It’s not a bad idea, it’s just not as entertaining or interesting. I guess it doesn’t help that Mathew Lillard is pretty heavily miscast in this.

I don’t hate Mathew Lillard or anything. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, and I have liked him in other things, but he’s annoying as hell here. I think it’s the mugging, he does that a little too much. I’ll give him this though, he had better chemistry with Freddie Prinze Jr than Safron Burrows did.

The acting in the movie is for the most part decent. Everyone is at least being professional and trying to do something with the material. I never felt like anyone was phoning anything in. Even Mathew Lillard is putting his all into this, even if he goes a bit too far.

The problem is these actors don’t have a lot to work with. There isn’t much to the characters beyond their core archetypes, and they don’t have much in the way of character development. And a big reason for that is because not a lot actually happens in this movie.

The whole movie is just a really slow reconnaissance mission with no big battles or any kind of escalating stakes. This is a war movie, without a war in it. We never see many battles or get any idea of what the war is actually like.

Wing Commander III also didn’t directly show much of the war, besides the battles and missions you partook in, but it had news reports going over the war status and the crew members would often chime in on their thoughts on the war effort. It was a constant presence throughout the story. Here they talk more about the Pilgrim war than the war their currently in the middle of.

What makes it worse is the lack of an antagonistic force. The Kilrathi are barely in this. We see their ships a lot, but because there’s barely any space battles we don’t see them much in actual combat. Yeah, this is a movie based on a space combat game with barely any space combat in it. F- you clearly didn’t understand the assignment.

We don’t even see the Kilrathi in person that much. We saw them in the games constantly, there was even a main Kilrathi that would serve as the main antagonist. Helping to make them a near constant presence. Mind you, there is a reason they don’t show up that much in this.

What in the fuck am I looking at. They look like hairless mole rats. Who was the model for them? Mr Bigglesworth. These animatronics are awful. Even besides the design they don’t animate very well. This was sadly a result of the lower budget and time constraints. I can’t be too hard on them, but I can certainly laugh my ass off at them. They look way goofier than they do in the game.

Ok it looks silly, but at least it looks like a tiger. It has an intimidating presence. The funny thing is Chris Roberts didn’t like how the Kilrathi looked in Wing Commander III, so he redesigned them for the sequel and the movie. He should have quit while he was ahead.

If the animatronics didn’t tip you off, the special effects are not good. Sometimes the CG looks passable, but for most of it, it winds up looking like a cutscene from the videogame. Scratch that, the CG in the games was passable by videogame standards. The CG here would be laughed off an episode of Reboot.

The whole movie looks cheap. Even the costumes range from bland to outright laughable. The flight helmets look like they’re from a children’s Halloween costume. I know I can’t be too hard on it. It had a low budget for this kind of thing so of course it’s not going to look great, but that isn’t the whole issue.

Even ignoring the quality of the effects, the designs are just lame. I already showed the laughably bad Kilrathi, but the ships are completely indistinct. Lacking any kind of visual identity or personality. Something the ships from the game had a lot of. Granted, most of them simply took fighter jets and made them space themed, the main ship you piloted was very clearly based on the F-14 Tom Cat, but that worked just fine given it’s obvious Top Gun inspirations.

The ships in the movie look like the spaceships from every other sci-fi movie ever made. There’s nothing memorable about them. Which isn’t helped by their lack of presence in the movie itself. As I said earlier there’s barely any actual space combat in this. There’s barely any… anything in this.

Nothing happens in this movie. A lot of it is just characters talking, and some of that is actually ok. I actually do think the character moments are handled decently well. But when it isn’t having those it’s just boring ass exposition.

Half this movie is just characters explaining shit. It’s just going over plans and backstory we don’t give two iotas of a fuck about. This film is dull. Dull, dull, dull, my god it’s dull. It’s so tired and drab and cliché and desperately dull. This is one of the most stock sci-fi “adventure” movies I’ve seen. And yes, the quotations are there for a reason.

There is no adventure in this movie. You spend the entire movie inside the goddamn ship. You never see any other planets and the space scenes don’t have much interesting in them. The only thing remotely interesting about them is how fucking stupid they are.

I am convinced this movie doesn’t know how space works. At one point a Kilrathi destroyer is searching for the Tiger Claw, so the crew has to stay real quiet so they don’t get spotted. Are you fucking kidding me. Did you guys not watch Alien?

You wouldn’t even need to do that, did you even see the poster? Why do you think the tag line for it was, “in space no one can hear you scream.” Sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum motherfucker. They could be playing Motorhead on full blast and not one person outside the ship could hear it.

It’s a scene ripped directly from a submarine movie. This idea isn’t new for sci-fi. Honestly a lot of the space battles in Star Trek are akin to submarine battles. But those movies take the structure and pace of a submarine battle and apply it to the science fiction setting.

They put a lot of thought in how to take these tropes and apply it to a new setting to make it make sense. Wing Commander just takes a bunch of the clichés and puts them in as is. There’s no thought into how the different setting would change how these scenes play out.

Here’s another example. When the space fighters fly off the runway it’s presented like how it happens in real life. Flying off the runway and dropping down slightly. I guess they wanted to be realistic. You know, be an accurate depiction of how fighter pilot’s work. There’s just one teeny tiny problem with it. There is no gravity in space! So how in the hell are they dropping off the runway.

I wouldn’t mind this so much, but we’ve had a pretty good visual idea of how space fighters would take off. Simply hovering over the launch platform and blasting off. Star Wars showed it in 1979, and you know what else had it like this? Fucking Wing Commander. How did you unlearn this.

The worst example of this though is when Maniac’s girlfriend crashes her fighter. She crashes it on the runway, outside the gravity field of the ship. Already it shouldn’t have crashed the way it was shown, it should have crashed and drifted off into space. Not only does it not do that, but it also stays on the runway and has to be pushed off.

This is hysterical. I’ve seen cheesy b-movies with better understanding of physics than this. At least they knew how gravity works. Isaac Newton isn’t just spinning in his grave; he’s doing a full-on acrobat routine.

This movie is beyond dumb. Its scientific knowledge is on par with a creationist. But even ignoring that, the movie relies way too much on plot convenience or outright stupidity. Remember that destroyer I mentioned earlier. Well they decide to raid it they can disable it and get away.

While raiding the destroyer, which internally is eerily similar to the Scimitar from Star Trek Nemesis, they just so happen to find the stolen Navcom unit. Not only that, but the Navcom has been updated with information on how the Kilrathi attack will go.

Of all the ships in the Kilrathi fleet, the one that hunted them just so happened to be the one carrying the Navcom unit with the data for the Kilrathi attack on Earth. What are the odds on that? Gladstone Gander with a goddamn leprechaun would not be this frigging lucky.

Though they apparently used up all their good luck from this, as their long-range communications were disabled during the attack. Forcing them to send out two fighter pilots to relay the information they gathered to the main Confed fleet.

Naturally it’s Blair and Angel but they’re attacked by a Kilrathi squad and Angel is left without power, and Blair has to leave her behind with only an hour of air left. He doesn’t contact anyone with her position or anything, he just leaves her to die. At least launch a distress signal. Paladin does decide to go looking for her, but he probably would have gotten to her faster if he knew where she was. Just saying.

Anyway, Blair is still being chased by the Kilrathi so he decides to trick them into flying into a nearby gravity well. This had shown up earlier in the movie when Maniac accidentally plotted a course through it, and I honestly don’t know how anyone could miss it. The thing is massive and has a gravitational pull several thousand times stronger than our own sun.

Apparently only the Pilgrims were able to detect it. I don’t know how. You mean to tell me that all of our long-range detection equipment, sonar, satellite imaging or even just a frigging telescope couldn’t find this thing. It isn’t even like it’s in some far-off galaxy; it’s within our own solar system.

You may be wondering how Blair is able to get them to fly into this thing. Simple, it’s because the Kilrathi are complete and utter morons. They apparently do detect it on their radar, but they think it’s the enemy fleet.

Ok, one, how in the hell does that happen? You mean to tell me that the radar signal for a space fleet is near identical to a gravity well. That has to be the case right. Why else would they confuse the two.

Second, why do they not just look out the window. A quick glance would confirm what it is you’re flying into. It isn’t even like they don’t have any. They’re looking out it while chasing Blair. Did none of you see the giant ship eating astral body? Stevie Wonder could see this thing coming.

But Blair escapes, the message is delivered, Confed’s fleet destroys the Kilrathi attack force, Angel is returned alive despite the time frame presented implying she should be long dead, and then the movie just kind of ends.

The film doesn’t really have a climax. The big battle is over in ten seconds, and it doesn’t feel like anything was accomplished. Sure, the Earth is saved, but the war isn’t over. It just feels like we watched a minor victory in the grand scheme of things.

Wing Commander is not a very good movie. As a sci-fi movie it’s laughable. It shows a complete lack of understanding of basic science, it doesn’t deal with interesting ideas and even if just viewed as fun spectacle it doesn’t work since the special effects are really bad.

As a videogame adaptation it’s also not very good. It has characters, names and some concepts from the games, but they’re too different from how they were depicted in them. It introduces a completely unnecessary mystic element which is at odds with the setting, and worse still it doesn’t have the same spirit as the games.

It doesn’t have the same kind of style or tone the games had. The games had the feeling of Star Trek and Top Gun; this feels like a generic sci-fi movie mixed with a submarine movie. It just doesn’t feel the same.

It is at least more accurate than something like Super Mario Bros or Final Fantasy Spirits Within. At least it somewhat resembles the games on which it’s based unlike those movies, but like those it isn’t able to accurately depict the same tone, vibe, or soul that the games had.

It would be easy to blame this on Fox. Executive meddling has ruined countless productions, and it is easy to believe that the clashes they had with Chris Roberts would have negatively impacted the movie. But in this instance, I think the problems started with Roberts own creative decisions.

Making Wing Commander a Das Boot style movie was not a good call. Wing Commander isn’t a submarine movie; it’s a fighter pilot movie. Both of those require a different approach.

Submarine movies are more about slow moving tension, building a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia, and the action is often slower and more strategic. It’s more about how the ships outmanoeuvre and outsmart each other. Fighter pilot movies are far more fast paced. The action in those is much more frenetic, and the drama in them largely comes from the various pilot relationships, their friendships and rivalries.

Obviously, there is more to these types of movies, and it isn’t like there aren’t similarities between them that one can draw on. But my point is that they’re both very different types of movies. Wing Commander tries to do both and it doesn’t succeed at either.

It’s not tense or claustrophobic enough to work as a submarine movie, and it doesn't have enough high-octane action to work as a fighter pilot movie. Because it couldn’t commit to a direction it basically just devolves into using a bunch of clichés. Which doesn’t make it feel like either, it just makes it cliché.

Worse still is how it doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Well, I say Star Trek but that’s only the example I used. Truthfully Wing Commander is meant to have the feeling of a classic sci-fi story. Star Trek is the one that I was reminded of, but it has a little of everything. It even has a little bit of the early pulp serials in there. The games all had a clear love for the classics.

The movie is just generic sci-fi. There’s no style or personality, it’s completely indistinct from a b-grade sci-fi movie you’d see on TV. This movie is the sci-fi equivalent of a rice cake, flavourless and bland.

Wing Commander isn’t especially horrendous. It’s not as bad as some of the other movie’s I’ve reviewed, and I’d certainly watch it over Mortal Kombat Annihilation or Spirits Within. Those movies pissed me off, but Wing Commander I was more apathetic towards. When it was over I didn’t care about it either way.

The one bit of praise I will give is that the technical aspects are decent. The acting is ok, the film is shot well, the editing is decent, and while the special effects aren’t great, it was the first movie to have a rotating freeze frame shot. Yeah, before the Matrix popularised it, Wing Commander did it. Ok it only beat Matrix by a few months, but credit where it’s due.

It’s not as poorly put together as some of the other movies I’ve seen. The big problem with Wing Commander is that it’s lame. it’s not entertaining, but in the most uninteresting of ways. Which in some ways might be worse. MK Annihilation is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed but at least it was memorable. I’ve just reviewed this and I’ve already forgotten about it.

So do I recommend this? stupid question, of course I don’t. This movie is just a complete waste of time. My advice is to just watch the cutscenes of Wing Commander III and IV on YouTube. The most insulting part about this movie is that the Wing Commander games are better movies than the actual Wing Commander movie.

And really, doesn’t that say everything about the state of videogame movies at the time. Even with a game that should have been flawless to adapt to screen, they still somehow found a way to screw it all up.

So what was the end result of all this. Well it bombed at the box office, and the Wing Commander series hasn’t been seen since, aside from an Xbox Live Arcade game that barely counts, and with EA being the current rights holder, we will never see this series again.

The film does have a small fan following within the Wing Commander fanbase. Not that they’re calling it an underrated gem, everyone admits it was a disaster, but more for the film it could have been. I stumbled across a fan project that is trying to create a version of the movie based on the original shooting script. Never underestimate the dedication of science fiction fans.

I don’t know how much has been done on the project, but I would be interested in seeing how it plays out. I doubt it would make the movie good, but it would be nice to see the movie as it was intended to be.

As for Chris Roberts, his attempts to break into movies never paid off. He never directed another movie again and largely stuck to a producer role. Though none of his projects did all that well. The only film he made that I had even heard of was the 2004 Punisher movie, which is probably the best one he did. Which tells you everything you need to know doesn’t it.

Don’t worry though, Roberts would eventually return to game development to work on his dream project. The space sim to end all space sims, Star Citizen. But you’ll have to look that up in your own time, because it is one hell of a rabbit hole and I don’t have the time or patience to cover it. That is a task for stronger men than I

I’m getting kind of sick of these movies though. They’ve almost all been bad and I need a change of pace. So why don’t we take a break from movies for a bit and look at a tv show. And with a new Mario movie coming out, why don’t we look at those old Mario cartoons. I mean it has to be better than the live action movie. Please let it be better than the live-action movie.