In the distant future, humanity is threatened by enemy aliens called the Kilrathi who have stolen a device that allows them to travel through worm holes in space, allowing them the chance launch a deadly surprise attack on planet Earth any time soon. A fighter squadron are the last hope. Two young bucks called Maverick and Maniac, along with female wing commander Angel lead the fight-back.Wing Commander is one of that unloved subset of movies that was based around a video game. I think it's only fair to say that this has rarely proved to be a winning idea. I personally haven't even heard of the game Wing Commander but suspect that it had little in the way of narrative impetus for a movie plot-line to easily be constructed around. In effect, this feels like a space adventure based around the plot of an old World War II fighter pilot yarn. It has the clichéd characters and basic idea that could just as easily be used for a film of that type. This one is typical of many sci-fi space adventures of the late 90's in that it is completely bland with workmanlike special effects and almost nothing to differentiate it from the crowd. The action scenes are quite tedious to be honest and the screenplay is highly mediocre. The film is not helped very much by having Freddie Prinze Jr and Matthew Lillard star as the two central heroes; they seriously fail to convince in these roles and are far too light-weight. There is a decent international cast of respected actors in many of the periphery roles but each and every one of the parts they play are what I would term 'exposition characters', i.e. people who turn up to say something bland but plot-forwarding (sort of like actors in a TV hospital soap opera). Finally, we have very poorly defined and ridiculous looking aliens (who look like comedy cats). They are hardly on screen at all in any case, so much so that it is hard really caring much about them.I wouldn't say this film is really terrible exactly but it is an extremely underwhelming experience. You really need to be a fairly forgiving sci-fi nut to get too much out of this one I reckon.

This isn't TERRIBLE.Lillard and Prinze (Jr.) aren't the dynamic heroes they need to be and the set pieces aren't incredibly good and boy oh boy those Kilrathi costumes are WORSE THAN THE VIDEO GAME'S.BUT. They surrounded the rest of the movie with some solid, fun actors and you can see where, in this modern Marvel world, someone with a little more time and budget and care for a potential franchise could've made a real solid flick.This totally isn't that but you can see it, in the cracks. This is still bad, though.

There is a little quip in Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide about a job - "The hours are good but most of the actual minutes are lousy" (paraphrasing).Wing Commander has a phenomenal cast, but that is about all. Even in saying that, all of the big name performers in this movie have been in at least one (other) stinker in their career I believe. The script is at about an eight grade level, the year is 26 something and yet we are still using torpedoes (of the submarine type), missiles and some kind of guns. I swear they throw in a submarine hiding on the ocean floor and getting depth charged type scene just to remind us what else Jurgen Prochnow is known for (and to give him a chance to look at the ceiling again).Look, if you let the movie wash over you it *is* mildly entertaining, even as it throws cliché after movie cliché at you. Don't think too hard about the script, don't worry if a scene is boring or painful because the movie moves briskly along.

It seems that there are a lot of people out there that never really liked this movie, but as far as I am concerned it wasn't all that bad. Granted it was based on a computer game in which Mark Hamil, among others, played starring roles, those obviously when the film came out minus Mark Hamil people were incredibly disappointed. Personally, which I had played the game and enjoyed it, I did not expect it to be identical to the game, and also noting that the creator of the Wing Commander franchise directed it, I at least knew that it was going to have the original creative juices flowing into it.Since Wing Commander is a space flight simulator where you fly space fighters around and shoot up Kilrathi, that is in effect was I was going to expect from this film as well, namely lots of dog fights between Kilrathi and Humans. Also the main characters from the game (and the only ones that I can remember were Paladin and Christopher Blair, though I suspect that there were a lot of others as well which I recognised from the game).The thing that I really appreciated about the film was that a lot of the craft had a very World War II feeling to them, especially the raptors, that basically looked like World War II fighter planes (without the propeller because propellers, and in fact jet engines, don't work in space). Unfortunately you don't see much of the Kilrathi, and when you do they are only briefly shown before they are gunned down, however what you do see are their ships. I guess this is because we are simply following the main characters, who are all humans, around and only being able to see what that see.As I said I liked this film, not only because it was science-fiction and had a fair share of dog fights, but also because of the way they created the setting. I also remember seeing this movie with a friend of my who was also a big fan of the games (though I only ever played one of them).