In this day and age when the bulk of big budget movies are comic book and various other “geeky” pop-culture adaptions, it takes a lot to make a video game adaptation fade from collective memory. It helps if said movie was an attempt to bring space dogfights and galactic war with hairless space-cats to the big screen circa 1999 (which, yes, requires the casting of both Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Matthew Lillard). Wing Commander was the first and only feature film in the Wing Commander franchise, which consists of several video games and a 1996 animated series. Watching it is an odd experience. It’s such an overwhelmingly ’90s product, but its sci-fi is at heart a throwback to ’70s offerings like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. While it may have merits as a video game series, the film’s random departures from the games only heightened the sense of it being a mangled blend of rip-offs.
Creator Chris Roberts put out the first Wing Commander game in 1990 for PC, and the bulk of the franchise would follow suit, although games were also ported to consoles like SNES over the years. The genesis of Wing Commander is simple enough. Remember all that X-Wing fighting in Star Wars? Remember Top Gun? Remember Das Boot? Let’s combine them all! What you end up with is a space combat simulator with a loose backstory. But one of the most defining characteristics of the series – and perhaps the reason a film adaptation sounded perfectly logical – was its prolific use of cutscenes. Beginning in 1994 with Wing Commander III, every game incorporated live action scenes featuring noted sci-fi actors like John Rhys-Davies, Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, Clive Owen and Christopher Walken.
But while Chris Roberts had the luxury of directing the film adaptation of his series, he did not have John Rhys-Davies or Malcolm McDowell in his cast. Instead, he had Jürgen Prochnow, David Suchet, Tchéky Karyo and David Warner joining the likes of Prinze, Lillard and Saffron Burrows. As Christopher Blair and Todd “Maniac” Marshall, Prinze and Lillard are your typical high-flying buddy duo, but Lillard’s portrayal makes Maniac out to be more of an unhinged annoying ass than he ever was in-game. His boundless energy and ceaseless antics don’t pair well with Prinze’s stoic (read: expressionless) lead. And Karyo as Commodore Taggart throws everyone familiar with the games for a loop, since Taggart had been previously portrayed by Rhys-Davies and was unquestionably Scottish. Karyo, needless to say, is not and spends most of the film spewing dissensions like “Forget your artificial intelligence or we’re all dead!” in semi-broken English with a French accent.
Roberts could be forgiven for not spending much time establishing characters in his film, given that audiences had a decade of games to become acquainted with them, but it seems as though certain changes to canon were just too tempting, leaving us with vague approximations of the games’ characters that are at once confusing and hollow. Taggart aside, Blair’s Pilgrim ancestry (the first human space explorers) comes across more like a cheap rip-off of the Force than a somewhat forgivably simplistic way to explain his heightened navigation skills. Rather than explain the history in the narrative, Blair is outfitted with a talisman that easily identifies him as part-Pilgrim, and Roberts makes use of a very ’90s representation of “mystical” powers: super-fast typing on a computer. Whatever drama Wing Commander hopes to drum up is constantly being dampened by its dependence on unoriginal archetypes and banal war movie babble.
What Wing Commander does have going for it is a $30 million budget that ensures space travel and battle sequences look surprisingly decent. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make up for the laughable results of blending submarine warfare and aerial dogfights. There is a reason why Roberts referred to his creation as “World War II in space.” It very literally is. When the Terran Confederation go up against the feline Kilrathi, they move out from asteroid bases in sub-shaped spaceships whose helm designs make no attempt to hide their submarine influences or their incessant sonar pinging. Not only that, but Roberts sticks to the lingo, with frequent calls for “radio silence” and shouts of “Hard to port!” (in space?). But the real kicker is when a Kilrathi ship passes overhead searching for a hidden Terran ship. The captain calls for “passive systems only,” and the entire crew hold their breath, as if simply speaking would give them away regardless of the fact that vacuums don’t conduct sound waves.
For all its faults, 1999 was not an ideal year to release Wing Commander, anyway. It was bound to be overshadowed by The Matrix and, of course, The Phantom Menace. Add to that the fact that the film’s simplistic good versus evil plot was made even simpler and more banal by Kevin Droney’s battle-stacked script, and Wing Commander couldn’t hope to be a commercially competitive space saga. Given that the film managed to destroy the future of the Wing Commander franchise and Roberts’ directing career in one fell swoop, Roberts may have done well to just release a mastercut of cutscenes from WC III or IV and call it a day.