[HAIKU REVIEW: People bitch about
most movie adaptations;
This time they are right.
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): Future war is full of racism and reckless pilots.
PEOPLE: Chris Roberts never got a chance to direct again after this… And that’s probably a good thing. He is much better as a producer, working on Lord Of War, The Punisher, and Outlander. I think the only reason they let him direct this is because he was involved in producing Wing Commander 1 & 2.
Starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (Freddie from the live Scooby Doo movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer) as the main character; Matthew Lillard (Shaggy from the live Scooby Doo movie, Without A Paddle, SLC Punk!, Scream 1 & 2, Hackers, Senseless) as the comic relief/reckless buddy; Saffron Burrows (Troy), as the wing commander. I was convinced she was Catherine Zeta-Jones the entire time. Upon further investigation, they don’t really share as many features as I had thought and are obviously not each other. Tcheky Karyo (The Patriot) as the civilian ship captian. Jurgen Prochnow (The Da Vinci Code, Sutter Cane in In The Mouth Of Madness, Dune) as a douchey racist (IIRC). David Warner (the ArchMage in Gargoyles!) as the admiral — and I can still have absolutely no capability in telling him apart from Alan Rickman. Ginny Holder as the love interest.
And an uncredited voice by Mark Hamill, who did voices in the original Wing Commander game!
QUIRKS: Based on a video game. Science fiction space war.
VISUALS: Don’t expect to see the Kilrathi for more than 5 seconds. They cut all their scenes out because they were so poorly executed and unrealistic. And even then, they don’t look AT ALL like in the video game.
BAD STUFF/CONCLUSION: A poorly told story. Fortunately for us we enjoy sci-fi space war movies, so we managed to barely scrape by being able to stand this. I’m glad we watched this as a Monday-night movie for completism’s sake, but this shall never be watched again!
RATINGS:
Clint: Netflix: 3/5 stars. IMDB: 5/10. Barely passable, and only due to the legacy of the video game.
Carolyn: Netflix: 3/5 stars. IMDB: 5/10.
The native public rating for this movie is: IMDB: 3.7/10, Netflix: 3.0/5 stars (Netflix‘s predicted rating for us was 2.7/5 stars).
RECOMMENDATION: Only see this if you were a fan of the Wing Commander game. Even then, don’t expect ANYTHING from the game, really. This is poorly done.
South Park S13E6 (Pinewood Derby) makes reference to the space battles in this movie, so now I need to watch that again sometime.
Mood: seroiusly
Music: The Get-Up Kids – Alec Eiffel
Claire's blog 
January 22, 2010 at 11:51 AM
[…] evar. • * Timecop – listed under ACTION, as it wasn’t too heavy in the sci-fi • Wing Commander (1999) – Ugh. Barely worth […]
December 20, 2011 at 10:36 AM
Good assessment of the movie, it was crap! Mark Hammill didn’t just do voices in the games, he was the main character in Wing Commander 3 and 4, as in those games were full of FMV cutscenes and such and he acted in them! If they made a movie with that cast, it would have been MUCH better: Mark Hammill as the main, the actor who played Biff from Back to the Future as Maniac (the crazy friend pilot), John Rhys-Davies (Dwarf from LoTR and many more) as Paladin (civilian pilot), Malcolm Mcdowell as the admiral.
Completely agree with your take on the Kilrathi. They were bad-asses in the games, 8 ft. tall walking/talking tiger/lion looking things, really scary. In this movie, they looked like wet, shaved cats! Horrible.
I also gotta see that South Park episode, what an obscure movie to reference, haha.