The sixth and final essay in my series for 1up.com. Unlike every other title in this series, I’ve never actually played Wing Commander, or in fact any game in its series. As a result, this ended up very research heavy as I tried to understand why people liked those games before writing the essay. This also meant that it was more work for the pay I was getting. Right about this time, 1up.com ended for good (this was my third editor for the series), and though I would happily keep writing random nonsense of this sort for money forever, I also wasn’t too sorry to end things here. Turns out, writing for minimal pay about bad movies isn’t for the faint of heart.
The next video game adaptation made after Mortal Kombat was its sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, a movie that can conveniently summed up as “the same as the original, only not as good in every conceivable way.” It was the lone release during a period of time in which Hollywood, having now had time to gauge the relative (lack of) success of video game adaptations, wisely chose to put a stop to the genre for a few years. But just because the film industry made a correct decision for the first time in its history didn’t dissuade game director Chris Roberts from living out his dream of becoming a latter day George Lucas, despite the fact that that actual Lucas was making an actual Star Wars movie just down the road.
Anyone who played the Wing Commander series back in the day will tell you that much of the games’ original draw was its FMV sequences. Sure, they were cheap and the games’ writing was about on-par with Star Wars fan-fiction (with fewer Han-on-Chewie sex scenes), but that didn’t stop it from being a big thing. Of course game budgets in the 90s weren’t exactly in the same league as movie budgets, but Wing Commander III and IVactually came pretty close, and III’s $4 million budget meant it could hire such actors as Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and John Rhys-Davis to give the games’ roles some real gravitas, although as far as anyone playing it was concerned it could’ve been Mark Hamill and a gang of rowdy hand puppets.
Between Wing Commander III and IV, Roberts directed a surprisingly massive amount of video content to be awkwardly integrated with the game’s CGI. By the time he helmed his first and only feature, he actually had more experience than most first-time directors at working with actors. And while the results were certainly mixed, you had to give him the benefit of the doubt given what he had to work with. Fans were excited that for the first time ever a video game would be adapted by the games’ creator and hope returned once again that the genre could produce something that could be enjoyed on a non-ironic level. Then it was announced that none of the games’ cast would be in the movie and its plot would bear practically no relationship with anything in the games. Enthusiasm was downgraded to “cautiously optimistic” and, once the trailer was released, “cautiously pessimistic.”
In an interview with Salon prior to the film’s release, Roberts was asked why he thought movies based on video games had sucked so badly and his answer is that, “I think the ones up until now have tended to be from games that don’t really have a story or characters…. Wing Commander happens to be a game where the whole basis is story and character.” This does little explain why the beloved game characters were removed or at least radically re-imagined, nor why its story is only peripherally taken from the games, but it does say a lot about the type of cognitive dissonance apparently involved in creating the picture. In place of the game series’ excellent cast of thespians, Wing Commander cast Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, and Saffron Burrows as its leads, alongside a large supporting cast of actors you’ve never heard of before. The only real explanation for this choice is that Roberts wished to capitalize on the late-‘90s teen-slasher craze, despite Wing Commander’s PG-13 audience’s inability to see their prior starring roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream. While this choice was unfortunate for many, many (many) reasons, one odd side effect was that it continued the unexplainably prolific Prinze Jr./Lillard comedy duo. First began in She’s All That and later featured in the Scooby Doo movies and Summer Catch, it’s an Abott-and-Costello style act in which Lillard plays the wacky one whose acting is always over-the-top and Prinze Jr. is his straight-man foil who doesn’t know how to act at all.
Before we even get to its cast, though, Wing Commander signals that maybe it doesn’t have a great grasp of this whole science-fiction thing. While the credits play over austere music, the film gives a brief recounting of the last 600-or-so years of history via that method in which all news broadcasts in the future evidently are captured: low-fidelity, crackly radio broadcasts. That’s right, just because we have interstellar travel doesn’t mean we can’t use an invention from the 1870s. Likewise, computers in the future display the Earth as what appears to be a 26-sided polygon because that’s apparently as accurate as it can render it, despite the number of 3-D holograms in the film.
This sequence also gives us a majority of the film’s exposition. Mankind has made it into space, but since then it’s been attacked by someone (turns out they’re a race of space cats called the Kilrathi that escaped from Jim Henson’s workshop) for reasons that are unclear. They’re evil and we’re good because… umm… because that’s the way it is, motivation be damned. So the film is an epic fight between races in high space-opera mode, the reasoning for which will never become clear. But since Wing Commander is so unwilling to pretend there’s a decent impetus for the Kilrathi to attack the Earth, it leaves the audience free to make up their own. In my mind, the Kilrathi simply learned that the Earth contains the largest supply of catnip in the universe and they’re headed to Earth because of humanity’s unwillingness to share.
The point being that the Kilrathi are attacking Earth for some undefined reason and the only way to stop them is to get there first, because despite its central importance to the humans, it’s completely undefended. This is either a subtle way of hinting that in the 27th century humans have dropped a few dozen IQ points on average (which, given the film’s casting, may be a more likely explanation than it seems at first glance) or a truly ridiculous and unrealistic contrivance, even for a movie largely focused on war with space cats. Our intrepid gang’s goal is to get there first, largely by doing hyperspace jumps through black holes, which we’re told is risky because the movie says so.
No one is willing to believe Prinze Jr. and his mentor, Taggart, that they need to rush to Earth because rather than pulling rank and showing that he’s a Commodore, Taggart sits on his butt and pretends to be a civilian regardless of this making absolutely no sense. This also creates tension because Prinze Jr. is left explaining things and he’s half-“pilgrim,” which is also a bad thing because Wing Commander says so, despite pilgrims having godlike Jedi powers. Everyone hates pilgrims because pilgrims think they’re better than everyone else just because they are.
That’s right, despite its multi-racial, confusingly-accented utopia (if you take a drink every time a new character has a different accent you won’t make it through the first hour) the future is full of racism/religious persecution—which one it is depends on what’s more convenient for the plot on a moment-to-moment basis. If you guessed that this racial commentary would be heavy-handed yet ill-explained, you’d be right on the money. You’ve also probably guessed by now that despite its nominally progressive message, the movie’s sole black character with a name—who also happens to be one of only two women—dies halfway through to serve as pathos for the surviving white characters, because that’s what racial sensitivity is all about.
Still, while it’s full of half-assed exposition, generic fighter pilot clichés, and wave after wave of inexplicable accents, the first half of Wing Commander isn’t that bad. It’s Star Wars-light, right down to its focus on a confederacy fighting against an empire, but that should surprise no one, since it’s coming from a director whose definition of science fiction is, “For me, ‘science fiction’ is spaceships flying around.” Things don’t really head south until the second half of the film, when it needs to supply a string of irrelevant obstacles in the way of its protagonists.
First their ship is ambushed, resulting in the death of the only likable or in any way believable character in the entire movie. Then, because maybe they needed to pad out the picture, the ship is ambushed again. It’s one of those moments where it seems like the filmmakers aren’t aware of their own movie. At an earlier point, jokes are made about the way in space no one can hear you, yet in the second half the crew is afraid to speak because their voices might be picked up by radar. Likewise, they’re so afraid of the Kilrathi destroyer that they won’t speak, but that doesn’t mean in just a few minutes they won’t attack and easily destroy the ship in order to steal its fuel-cells. Looking for continuity in Wing Commander is a lot like looking for a needle in a methadone clinic—one’s probably there somewhere, but it’s still disappointing even when you find it.
This second battle also leads to the weakest section of the entire Wing Commander, in which the search for fuel cells leads Freddie to the inside of the destroyer. Here they handily lay waste to the Kilrathi without breaking a sweat, but worse than that we learn that the Kilrathi look less like the furry game cats and more like a race of wet space weasels . Their appearance explains why they don’t appear earlier, since they look like something Ed Wood would’ve knocked together if told he only had two hours and $22 to design an alien race, but does little for audiences still trying to treat things seriously.
Then, after stealing the fuel cells, our crew is of course done with silly, unnecessary battles that serve no purpose. Just kidding, they’re ambushed once again. But Prinze Jr., with his magic Jedi pilgrim powers, can save them by jumping out of the system and thereby ending the movie. Wait, did it just… end like that? Without a climactic battle or any sort of ratcheting up of drama? Yes, yes it did, and all of a sudden we’re told that all our loose ends are tied up. Roberts apparently decided three ambushes in a row was enough for one hour, and with that was out of ideas. It’s a finale that makes Street Fighter’s “strike a pose” ending seem somehow satisfying in comparison.
Even with its modest $30 million budget, Wing Commander flopped hard, opening at number seven in the box office and making just $11.5 million. Much of that likely came from featuring a trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and reports of early screenings mention much of the film’s audience walking out either before the feature began or midway through the movie. Yes, Wing Commander was so abysmally bad that it made The Phantom Menace look good in comparison. Critics were even harsher. Roger Ebert described Wing Commander’s script as “submoronic,” and most reviews mentioned how much of the film was unintentionally laughable. My personal favorite review that’s quoted on Rotten Tomatoes is one by Blake Davis, which simply says, “Oh my God, what a piece of crap!” There’s no link to a full article, but it’s not really necessary.
Oddly enough, Roberts seemed to have been encouraged by Wing Commander. While he maintained his old interest in working on video games for a few years, he soon seems to have lost his passion for them in favor of Hollywood. He worked as a producer or executive producer on The Punisher (Rotten Tomatoes: 29%), The Jacket (44%), The Big White (30%), Ask the Dust (35%), Lord of War (a career high 61%), Lucky Number Slevin (51%), Who’s Your Caddy? (6%) and Outlander (38%), evidence that while he hasn’t improved as a filmmaker in the past decade, he has earned bucketloads of cash.
Conversely, the Wing Commander game series itself was all but killed off by the film. EA, who owns its rights, has released only one Wing Commander game, 2007’s radically different Wing Commander Arena, and seems to have no interest in revisiting the series. Perhaps it’s the wet space weasels who had the last laugh after all.