Where were you when you first realized that there was no hope, and never will be any hope, for movies based on video games? For me, well, I was in the movie theater watching Wing Commander. This thing is a huge, steaming pile of weapons grade crap. I will concede that this wasn’t the first video game movie I saw that was utterly terrible. Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter, and Double Dragon were all released many years before this and every one of them is completely irredeemable. The difference is that the Wing Commander franchise actually had a chance to be a pretty good movie for many reasons. First of all, this film was written and directed by Chris Roberts, the same man who produced and directed several of the video game installments. Secondly, the games were famous for their cinematic full motion cut scenes that featured several established Hollywood actors like Mark Hamill, John-Rhys Davies, and Malcolm MacDowell lending their talent to the projects. Thirdly, and finally, a story about fighter pilots in space battling evil aliens should translate very easily to the big screen. This film, at the very least, should have been on the same level of quality and entertainment as The Last Starfighter.
Our story begins in the future, obviously, and humanity has been flexing its manifest destiny muscle for some time by establishing colonies across the galaxy. Through its exploration efforts the human government, known as the Confederation, has managed to piss off a race of giant cat people called the Kilrathi (ten years before Avatar) and we are now neck-deep in a war against them. All of this story is explained in little sound bites as we scroll over a map of the galaxy that appears to have been drawn by 16th century pirates. Seriously, I think that explorers charting out star systems IN THE FUTURE would have a better means of documenting their discoveries than inking them on stained parchment.
Our first glimpse of spaceship-on-spaceship violence is when the Pegasus base, a station built into the top of an asteroid is bombed, Pearl Harbor style, by about half a billion Kilrathi ships. I’m not sure why a military outpost that seemed so vital to the Confederation’s war efforts didn’t have any scanners or patrols that would warn them of a massive enemy fleet approaching, but, for what ever reason, the station is caught completely off guard. Plot hole aside, this would be a great way to start off a science-fiction action adventure film, except the audience never really gets a good look at the action. Our point of view is either several kilometers above the station looking down with barely visible flashes of what I can only assume are explosions ripping through the base, or inside the station’s tiny command center as a bunch of officers talk in great detail about the extent of the destruction the enemy is raining down upon them. Hey, director, how about showing the audience some of that awesome devastation your characters keep talking about. The cat army eventually boards the station and, in what seems like a good decision, the director does not give us a good look at the terribly fake-looking cat people suits. He’s saving that reveal for later. The Kilrathi manage to get their kitty paws the station’s navigation unit, which looks suspiciously like a car battery, and blow up the rest of the station.
We then cut to the bridge of a space cruiser that might as well be named the USS Exposition. There, Admiral Tolwyn, played by David Warner, lays out the plot of the rest of the movie for us. After receiving the distress call from Pegasus station, we know that the Kilrathi fleet has the coordinates to Earth and can get there in 40 hours. The main Confederation fleet, which seems to be dicking around well outside the major theater of war, won’t be able to reach Earth for 42 hours. So, ticking clock established, the Admiral sends a coded message to a transport vessel en route to the Tiger Claw, the only carrier between Earth and the Kilrathi fleet. So we cut to the transport ship on its way to the Tiger Claw when the terrifying realization suddenly hits that this is, in fact, a Prillard movie. For those of you not familiar with the term, a Prillard movie is one that stars both Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard. If there is anything that will turn off the predominately young male demographic that plays the Wing Commander video games or goes to see sci-fi movies, it is a double dose of the most annoying teeny-bopper poster children of the late 1990’s.
On this transport ship, Freddie Prinze Jr. as Lieutenant Blair (the hero from the video games) sits around in some red pajamas fingering his weird necklace while Matt Lillard as Lieutenant Marshall (also from the games) stares off into space with a dopey expression on his face. A dirty space Frenchman, played by Tcheky Karyo, enters the command deck to receive the coded transmission and then changes course to fly through a black hole to get to the Tiger Claw faster. Nothing really happens here except for dirty Tcheky talking to Blair about his bling and how it has something to do with the Pilgrims, whoever those are. Anyway, they make it to the Tiger Claw and Blair manages to piss off his commanding officer ‘Angel’, Saffron Burrows, within three minutes of arriving by sitting in the cockpit of a fighter that belonged to Lt. Chen, a pilot that recently died. Chen must have slipped in the shower or choked on a muffin or something because his starfighter, that still bares his call-sign on the fuselage, is surprisingly undamaged. Blair’s necklace also seems to upset a lot of other people on board the ship including Commander Gerald, Jurgen Prochnow, because it signifies Blair as a Pilgrim. Pilgrim must be space-talk for mutant because not only can Pilgrims navigate through the cosmos with what can only be called super-powers, but everybody hates them because a long time ago Pilgrims were at war with regular people. So, the Commander of the Tiger Claw gets the message that they must find and delay the Kilrathi fleet to buy the Confederation time to set up defenses around Earth. So maybe now we can get to some dogfights or some big ship battles that might be entertaining. No. In fact, we don’t get to see any real starfighter action until the 50 minute mark. Imagine if the people playing the video game had to wait almost an hour to start flying around in space fighting enemies. And where in the hell is Malcolm MacDowell? He was in the game. It’s not like he hasn’t been in bad movies before. The only explanation I can think of is that director Chris Roberts didn’t want him in his film. Even in a supporting role, Malcolm MacDowell would have made this movie ten times more enjoyable. But no, he’d rather have Matthew Lillard chewing scenery and making goofy faces. I cannot stand Matthew Lillard. He is a truly wretched actor, and the way he looks reminds me of Beaker from the Muppets.
So where are we? Half way through the film and we get our first major engagement between the Tiger Claw and the Kilrathi. As far as the special effects are concerned for this part, they aren’t all bad. Sure, they haven’t aged well, but some shots of ships swooping by the camera are convincing enough to get by. The real failure of the visuals here is in art direction. None of the spaceship designs used in the film are distinct or iconic in any way. The Rapiers that our heroes fly around in look like the front half of existing aircraft (the props were, in fact, built from scraps of British jets) and the Tiger Claw itself looks like giant metal almond. Our heroes manage to blow up a few enemy ships and then go hide next to an asteroid to avoid taking more damage from the enemy fleet. Then, we get a hilarious moment where the dirty transport captain, who was actually a military intelligence officer all along, tells everyone on the bridge to be quiet so a Kilrathi destroyer won’t find them. I hate to break it to you, Tcheky, but you’re not on Das Boot. The enemy won’t be able to hear anyone on your ship because SOUND DOES NOT TRAVEL THROUGH SPACE, you moron. The fighting from earlier and a bombardment from the destroyer has damaged the carrier’s life support which they say needs fuel cells to be repaired. A boarding party attacks an enemy ship to secure its fuel cells as Blair, a pilot, is sent in with the marines armed with a rifle to shoot up some badly made and poorly lit Kilrathi puppets. In all honesty, they look more like otters than cats. Blair finds the car battery, I mean, Pegasus Navcom and gets the Intel on where and when the enemy fleet is attacking Earth. So Blair has to fly this info back to the Admiral and uses his Pilgrim powers to navigate through a quasar and save the day. Wow, this movie is just as painful to remember as it is to watch. It has destroyed my expectations that there will ever be a good video game movie and left me with nothing but questions. How come everyone in space aside from Blair and his buddy had a European accent? Why were the Kilrathi so inept that their major offensive is thwarted by one Earth ship? And where in the bleeding hell was Malcolm MacDowell?
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