Rating: 

The Info

Directed by: Chris Roberts
Written by: Chris Roberts, Kevin Droney
Starring: Freddie Prinze Jr, Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tcheky Karyo
Produced by: Todd Moyer

The Nutshell

A small group of  space fighter pilots must save Earth from the evil Kilrathi

The Review

    In the late nineties, ideas for films come from numerous sources. Books and live theatre have been a source of inspiration for film for years, but who could have seen the emergence of the video game adaptation? Several films have been made from arcade games, including the awful Street Fighter and Double Dragon, and the surprisingly enjoyable Mortal Kombat. A film version of Wing Commander was almost inevitable.

    Wing Commander is a typically testosterone-packed war game involving bombing your enemy from a fighter jet. This alone is not enough information to write a screenplay, so as in Street Fighter, a story was written that has few ties to the game itself but uses all of its elements. In the future, humanity discovers easy ways to fly through space, and a group of explorers called Pilgrims are sent out to map the universe. These Pilgrims eventually gain a sixth sense which gives them the ability to fly through space better than the rest of the human race. Later into the future, humanity is threatened when the evil Kilrathi steal a machine called a NavCom from a farflung space station. Only a small band of fighter pilots can get to Earth in time to save the day.

    Writer/director Chris Roberts steals numerous images, dialogue and entire scenes from earlier films. There are scenes in Wing Commander that will be instantly recognizable to fans of such films as Top Gun and The Hunt For Red October. Even the callsign of the main character, Chris "Maverick" Blair (Prinze Jr.) is the same callsign of Top Gun's Tom Cruise. The script is unimaginative, with the actors (Prinze Jr, Lillard, Burrows) not realizing how cheesy and laughable their lines are, with only Lillard's goofy presence providing any positive reaction form the audience. The space fights are poorly choreographed and repetitive, and the big bad enemy, the Kilrathi, look faker than the original Godzilla, almost like one of those bad guys on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. This film was apparently rushed to completion so that the highly anticipated Star Wars trailer could be shown in front of it. The lack of a single good quality to the film tells me that, maybe, just maybe, the film should have been worked on a little more.

Copyright - Tim Chandler

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