WING COMMANDER (1999) Somehow, even worse than it looks Tcheky Karyo, David Warner, and Jurgen Prochnow in the same movie? How cool is that? As it turns out, in this case, not very cool at all. I know I should know better than to see something like this, but hey, I like space battles, and I like space battle movies. Even if it's bad, it might be bad in a good way, right? Boy, was I wrong. I was expecting a howler - what else could it be, with Freddie Prinze Jr. playing a fighter pilot? But I didn't think I'd get such a big bore. It's several hundred years in the future, and the evil alien Kilrathi want to kill everybody (and that includes your descendants, so don't think you have nothing at stake). So, we must defeat them ship-to-ship. Our biggest hope for salvation is Freddie Prinze Jr. (to my knowledge, the only movie he's ever made that isn't aimed at 13-year-old girls) and his hotdogging friend (Matthew Lilliard), who kills or almost kills several people with his showing off, but since he's wacky, I guess we're supposed to still like him, instead of wondering why he hasn't been shitcanned by now. It's about forty minutes before we actually get a space battle, and it's pretty weak stuff. Effects-wise, Wing Commander would look passably good as a video game several years ago, but I know I'm right to expect better from a movie. The fighters are goofy-looking and what little battle there is, isn't very good. I guess I can't expect too much from these fighters, if Prinze can type faster than their computers can calculate. This movie is almost entirely an inspiration dead zone - the one (count 'em, one) inspired aspect to this whole damned movie is how we see, when the Kilrathi are speaking, subtitles first scroll across in (presumably) Kilrathi, and a moment later, in English. I thought that was pretty neat. The rest of it is a cut-and-paste job from other movies (inevitably, all of them better than this), the worst of it coming in the "bullet time" moment when a ship launches into hyperspace (or whatever). Conveniently for the cameras, this happens exactly when Lilliard is falling over and causing a glass of milk to fly through the air. Saffron Burrows, who plays Prinze's flight leader, even has to go through a sob story about how she can never love. That's how stupid this movie is. There's a teary farewell, and a lengthy "You are not going out there!" fight. When somebody on a spaceship (outer space, remember), says to everyone "Be quiet, shh! There's a destroyer hunting us!", does he know that sound doesn't travel through space? Or in a movie (indeed, a genre) where spaceships always go "WHOOSH!" as they fly by, does this actually work within the film's logic? Hell if I know. But I do know this: the message an emergency beacon records is obviously a different take than the one it plays back. And - my favorite - when we're shown this red, RED I said, and rocky, cloudless planet, the subtitles tell us this is VENUS. As for Prinze...well, it's kind of interesting to see him try out a role like this. He seems to have modeled his vocal delivery on that of pilots he's seen in the movies. To say this role isn't right for him is like saying...ach, it's just too easy. I haven't seen enough from him to know whether or not there's any talent he's wasting. I'm just gonna say what a lady I know once said - Freddie, you really, really, really need a new agent. Filmed in the seemingly endless countryside of Luxembourg. Remember that show Space: Above And Beyond? Sure, it had its share of problems, but it had Kirsten Cloke (rowr!) and every space battle I ever saw in that show looked better and was more exciting than anything I saw in this. As for Karyo, Warner, and Prochnow, this is the kind of thing that leads some men to bore holes in their own skulls and pour in ammonia in their desperate attempts to erase unpleasant memories. I hope they don't go that far. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE