VGMRP: WING COMMANDER REVIEW

Jesus.

I recently wrote about Star Trek and Space Movies being fun again. When is space not fun? When you're watching Wing Commander, that's when. We're not just talking a bad Video Game Movie, we're talking about one of the worst space movies ever made. There's lots of crash, bang boom; but there's an equal amount of "ugh", "you're kidding me," and "who gives a shit?"

Directed with love and incompetence by game creator Chris Roberts, Wing Commander attempts to bring the C-level saga of the Wing Commander games to the big screen, with dispiriting results. Wing Commander, the game, was a rip-off of Star Trek plotting (the Klingons-as-Russians Cold War) with Star Wars combat (lots of little starfighters shooting at each other, lots of anonymous pilots screaming, "I can't shake themmmmm AAAARRGGHHH-!!!"). The play mechanics weren't bad but the story was derivative, and with each game more convoluted and pointless. That was okay, because hey, you got to blow things up and fly around like a fighter pilot. The only thing from a story perspective that was worth a damn was the performance of Mark Hamill, simply because when given a script of fine cheese, he knows how to be a ham.

I regret to inform you Mark Hamill is not the star of Wing Commander: The Movie. I further regret to report that there is no reason to watch this movie, not even to laugh at how bad it is. The effects are good for a video game but bad for a movie, which mean they look fake without being hilariously so (you feel like it's a late 90's CD-ROM game on the screen). The script is mediocre and thoughtless through and through, with lots of poor writing, but nothing that's memorably bad. Nothing reaches the insanity of Super Mario Brothers, the vamping of Raul Julia in Street Fighter, or the shocks-the-conscience bad taste of Postal. Maybe Mark Hamill would have made something hilarious out of it, but instead we of ham we get the black hole of screen presence of cinema known as Freddie Prinze, Jr. Behold:

Commander Babe: Disobey my director and I'll have you court marshalled.

Freddie Prinze Jr.: Like I care.

The end result is a grab-bag of leftover story concepts from better sci-fi projects and a production design that was purchsed from the Space Salvation Army, coupled with men in curious uniforms shouting "hard to port!" as their ships try to avoid space torpedoes. The torpedoes make lots of WHOOSHING sounds despite the fact that space is a vacuum where sound cannot travel. The suspense of disbelief re: sound in space is stretched to the breaking point during awful sequence when everyone is told to be quiet, because "a space destroyer is hunting us!" They all stare and listen to the pinging above, like they're in a submarine. Never mind that they could be having the party of the century and NO ONE WOULD HEAR THEM, because in space, no one can hear Matthew Lillard scream. And he screams a lot in this movie.

In other words, WING COMMANDER doesn't have the wit to be epically bad, only epically boring.

For extra credit, the movie also rips off its plot from U-571/Enigma by having the main point of the plot being a stolen 'navcom machine.' See, if the Kilarathi/Klingons/Empire get their hands on it, why, they could control space travel and therefore win the war? What war, you ask? Oh, they want to destroy us. Why? Because they hate our freedom. Or something, I don't know. When they finally find the 'navcom' on a Kilrathi ship, they're so excited that they found that they leave it on the ship, leading one to wonder why the hell it was so important. Maybe it's because they're in such a hurry to get off the alien ship due to the quality of the aliens themselves: when we finally see them, they look shitter than the vampires in I Am Legend. Should they win the war, the universe will be populated with nothing but ugly, ugly children.

Anyway.There are two hard-won truths here:

1) unless your explorers/adventurers/rebe

ls/Wing Commanders/space plumbers touch down somewhere, on some planet, space movies become little more than actors on cheap sets looking at green-screens with varying levels of concern. Even Shatner had to land the ship every once in awhile.

2) Some video games shouldn't be adapted because they're plotless shoot'emups (Postal, Doom); others shouldn't be adapted because the material is both too ambitious and too thin at the same time. Wing Commander falls into the second category, where a credit prologue sequence tries to tell some 300 years of interstellar history, and at least a third of the dialogue is spent discussing the history and racist attitudes towards Pilgrims. But wait, aren't we hunting the Kilrathi? What is a Pilgrim anyway? What do they worship, exactly? Why am I watching this movie?

In short, Chris Robert's science fiction fantasies may have been enough to get you to the next level, but they're not enough for a major motion picture. It's the same lesson we learned yet again in Terminator Salvation: if you don't care about the characters, you don't care about if they get blown up by shitty antagonists.

There is not a single thing I can say for it in its favor; nothing that is good, fun, done well or even memorably bad. No clips to YouTube. No overacting to savor.

I saw this movie 10 years ago, and was pissed. Some 10 years later, I'm happy I only watched this crap via 10 youtube clips instead of renting it, but I would have been happier if I hadn't watched it at all. Hell, I would have been happier watching POSTAL again. At least that movie has monkeys. They were monkeys that were sexually assaulting Verne Troyer, but they were still monkeys, damn it.

STAR RATING: Zero Stars (out of 5)

P.S. Fox had such a low opinion of their own movie that they attached the first Star Wars: Phantom Menace trailer on it to get people to show up. They showed up, paid to watch the trailer and left. I remember a printed sign at the Box Office that said, "no refunds will be given for Wing Commander after the Star Wars trailer is shown." Happier days, before we knew what legacy Phantom Menace would bring.

P.P.S. Like Top Gun, all the pilots are hotshots who spend a lot of time taking off their breathing masks so that they can dramatically, slowly put them back on again. Why they need an extra breathing hose when they're in deep space, I do not know. Why the camera for all the cockpit scenes is zoomed in so close on the actors so you can't see what's outside their window I can guess: so they they wouldn't have to film the extra greenscreen.

Like I care!