Wing Commander - 1999
Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, Saffron Burrows
If you out there in script-writing land think it's a bitchin' idea to go out and make a 'film' from a video game, please direct yourselves to the nearest furnace, turn up the heat, and jump in, because you probably think THAT'S a good idea too.
Yes Folks, Wing Commander is brought to you by the people who spent most of their lives pressing little coloured buttons on a game pad, discussing the game genie and continuously humming the god-dammingly annoying music from the Mario Bros. Game. These geniuses also think that Nintendo is a omnipotent god, and that you don't PLAY playstation, you LIVE it. Have a little compassion for those of us who walk on two legs!
This is, in all reality, a cookie-cutter action flick. The only way you could be able to see this film as a piece of cinema genius would be if you have the IQ of that little piece of plastic on the end of your shoelaces. Stanely Kubrick made the mistake of seeing a early cut of WC, realized that there is no god, gave up on humanity and died. Okay, maybe not, but you never know.
Freddie Prinze ("I know what you did last summer" and "She's All That") and Matt Lillard ("Hackers", "Scream" and "She's All That") play two just-out-of-the-academy pilots who join their flight crew in the middle of a war with some aliens from the heretofore unknown Vega system. Let it now be mentioned that these aliens look a lot like larger version's of Dr. Evil's Cat, Mr. Bigglesworth. They also have a similar language to Charlie Brown's teacher, and they dress a little lick Robocop. If you're not already on the floor tearing your organs out in laughter, the visual will probably kill you. Anyway, they are renegade types who are genius pilots. Oh yeah, baby, feel the force. Speaking of which, the movie mentions Pilgrims. No, not the badly dressed british people who shared and shared alike with the natives on Thanksgiving, but thinly veiled Jedi knights wiped out in a war long before Wing Commander's time. Freddie character Chris is a half-n-half pilgrim/human who is God's gift to warp speed.
Saffron Burrows ("Circle of Friends", "The MatchMaker") plays Angel, a supposedly pretty little chickie who is the Wing Commander of the title. Of course, she has little to nothing to do, which makes me happy, because Saffron is in that much-talked about league of female actors who I wish were strapped to nuclear bombs a la Dr. Strangelove. I'll teach HER how to love the bomb, thank you.
Dialogue in this movie sucked. Why put thought into human speech when you can kill a few more Bigglesworth/RoboCop aliens? Hey James Cameron! Did you come up with this stuff or what? If you didn't, you'd better watch out, there's a Jimmy Cameron wannabe lurking around Hollywood, and he's thinking that maybe his ever-growing head could still fit into the spaces that yours grew out of about nine oscars ago.
Wing Commander's plot is non-existant. The opening titles are coming up across the screen and you know how it ends. If you really want to, come in, watch the Phantom Menace trailer (which by the way is abso-fricking-lutely amazing), watch the first five minutes and then run for your life. Because the acting, the dialogue, and the plot are all taking back burner spaces to special effects and dead alien cats with body armour and a speech impairment. Of course, you only see those aliens three times, because the aliens themselves are taking a backseat to shots of slow-moving targets that even a blind-man could hit, floating around in space.
Not that I expected oscar-winning material going into this movie, I was pretty much there for the Star Wars trailer and to appease Cathy, my movie pal, who had some strange satanic-like lustful urge to see this waste of $5.89. I knew it was action, and I knew it would be mind-numbingly silly. However, in the range of action flicks, this one falls about a millenia behind Armageddon and about a millenia ahead of, oh, say, Rambo VII. You want aliens? Go see Men In Black. Now THERE was an action flick that could blow you away with fight scenes and special effects, but the human relationship dialogue side was not written in the guise of Titanic's Jack & Rose.
My advice: Skip Wing Commander. Rent Men in Black or Armageddon or the original Die Hard, if you need action in
your life.
ALERT! Simon McCorquindale plays a cutesey Flight Boss in this flick. Keep an eye on him, because he's setting his sights on being the next Ewan MacGregor, and this Ewan MacJunior might just make it.