Wing Commander: movie or instrument of torture?
My thesaurus seems a little short on synonyms for the word "sucks," which is just as well since that just doesn't carry enough punch. I saw this movie in part because I enjoyed the Wing Commander video games, in part because the Star Wars trailer was playing before it (hint: see the trailer, then sneak into any other movie in the theatre playing at the same time because once the trailer ends, it's all over but the crying).
Watching Wing Commander is about as fun as spending 2 hours in the ring with Tyson with your hands behind your back and blindfolded. Not continuous punching, though -- your end would be quick and merciful. No, this would be one crushing blow to your jaw, followed by 10 minutes of that damn sissy voice. For 2 hours.
Let's start with the sound effects. Lasers should sound laser-y. Beeou! Beeou! Not the rat-a-tat-tat of circa-WWII machine guns. And I'm no physics expert, but I don't think torpedoes fired in space should leave smoke trails like that.
And dammit, every spaceship good-guys-win movie needs an enemy, which are the tiger-faced humanoid Kilrathi. Had the producers taken people and used makeup to make them look tigerish, that would have looked good. Instead, we get these Blade Runner rejects that clunk along like worn-out wind-up toys, and we barely see them anyway. And when we do, it's all gibberish and the mother of all bad subtitles. ("Hey! They're leading us into a trap! Boy, we'd better get out of here! Oh no we're dead!")
It's awfully sad to admit it, but this is the first movie based on the video game where the story was actually better in the game. And the special effects. And the acting. Really. The video game actually used Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. The movie's riddled with British accents and most of the accents are wrong (Paladin's character, who was Scottish in the game, is French, and Angel's, who was French in the game, is British). In defense of the actors in this movie (who collectively played the role of the doctor who continues to try to resuscitate a patient even as the body's in the morgue and halfway through the autopsy), the dialogue was so numbingly horrid, it was unsaveable.
Example: Freddie Prinze Jr. (our bloody hero, who one of the other spaceship-flying morons keeps calling "half-breed" the whole movie) is out in a ship and his soon-to-be-main-squeeze-chickie has bailed out of her dying ship in an escape pod. Prinze says he will help save her but she gives the old "No, go on without me" spiel, which prompts hero to put his fingers up to the glass of his ship and say, "Angel, you're alright." (she says the same thing back). Christ, just give me a family size box of kleenex, you tear-jerking buffoons.
At another point, Prinze's best friend Maniac disobeys an order, is told it is treason and punishable by death and is nearly executed. I bet that boy's agent fought like hell to get him killed off then. "Just kill him!" she probably screamed at the producers. "Everyone associated with this movie will never work again! At least minimize the suffering, you bastards!"
The movie will do better than it probably should because it is preceded by the Star Wars trailer. It should also direct its energy toward marketing. T-shirts saying "I survived Wing Commander" or "This movie is like bad sex: no climax" or some other types of typical corny crap. They ought to also issue trauma reports to all victims of this movie and have several ambulances on stand-by in the event of Post-Traumatic Head-Bashing-Against-A-Brick-Wall Syndrome.
Still with me? Let's sum it up using one of the movie's many in-your-face, forced, uninteresting concepts. In this movie, when a pilot dies, the official way to deal with the death is to tell oneself that the dead pilot never existed, so one does not have to deal with the emotional hell of dealing with it. That being said, this movie never existed. If you see this movie, may God be with you because no-one else will.
