Wing Commander, based upon the popular video game, is set in the year 2564 and is the story of rookie space pilot Lt. Christopher Blair (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and his friend, Todd "Maniac" Marshall (Matthew Lillard), who are assigned to a forward ship which has been ordered to hold off an impending alien invasion of Earth. The catch? The enemy are projected to reach Earth hours before Earth's own scattered defense forces can arrive to meet them. The fate of humanity rides on the crew of the small ship, and especially upon its greatly outnumbered fighter pilots.
Aboard the ship, love blooms (naturally!) between Blair and his Wing Commander, Devereaux (Saffron Burrows), while Maniac's jocular competition with his new squeeze endangers the entire mission.
With it's sub-plot of a mysterious race of despised (and defeated in war) "Pilgrims," more highly evolved human space colonists, Wing Commander is clearly hoping to be the first of many related films, as Star Wars was. There, however, whatever link there is between the two films ends. Wing Commander is not a Star Wars-wannabe -- it's an independently storied film which stands on its own merits.
In the now-wrongly-reviled scene in which Blair makes his first hyper-space jump, he is most definitely not the cocky smart-ass which the aforesaid film critic described, wildly jeopardizing his ship and its crew -- he makes the jump reluctantly and protesting, under orders from the ship's captain, played by Tcheky Karyo, who knows more about Blair's abilities than Blair himself does.
Second, Wing Commander the Movie was never intended to look, feel, or sound like a Star Wars rip-off. Director Chris Roberts, who not only wrote the story but actually created the Wing Commander game, has plainly stated, "In some ways it has more in common with Midway and The Battle of Britain than with a science fiction film." Dear readers, if some other critic rags on Wing Commander for looking like Top Gun or Run Silent, Run Deep, guess what? It's supposed to! It is primarily a war movie, but one with science fictional elements added. One critic has even complained about the fact that the Wing Commander space fighter ships of the future look like modern warplanes instead of something StarWarsy. Guess what? They are modern warplanes -- modified Royal Air Force fighters. They were altered to look the way they do by no less a Production Designer than Oscar(R) winner Peter Lamont of Titanic fame!
When Star Wars first came out, it was openly called a "space opera" (as in "horse opera" -- a B-movie Western). For all of its special effects and talk of "the Force," Star Wars is nothing but an old-fashioned Western movie in which the frontier is space and the white hats of the good guys are Jedi robes and the black hats of the bad guys are the uniforms of the Death Star's crew. That's all Star Wars is or was ever intended to be by its creator George Lucas: the archetypal story of the young hero (unknowingly the son of the infamous "gunfighter") who helps the lady rancher save her land from the villainous Railroad or Bank (or Galactic Empire). Wing Commander is a war movie, and its stereotypes and archetypes are those of war films, just as those of Star Wars were from Western movies.
Oh, my dear readers, do not be misled by the whiney carping of critics who can't even be bothered to pay attention to what's on the screen, let alone actually read the production notes which reviewers receive. Wing Commander looks, sounds, and feels just the way it's supposed to -- not the way some critic who has never made a movie wants it to look. To paraphrase a line from one of my all-time favorite movies (Savage Sam, the sequel to Old Yeller), "Critic, if you know how to make a better movie . . . go do it!"
I give Wing Commander a rating of W5: Worth $5.00 -- it's a good popcorn-chomping matinee movie, and I stand by my opinion of it. Go see Wing Commander, it's good old-fashioned rock 'em, sock 'em, zap those alien space invaders fun.
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