Wing Commander - The Movie

This weekend's excitement was a trip to the Coliseum with some of the people from work to see the Wing Commander movie, and to play video games there while waiting.  As a bonus, we also saw the latest Star Wars trailer, which was a lot better on the big screen than as an Internet movie.

If you have played any of Chris Robert's Wing Commander video games, you'll easily recognise the characters involved.  They all have easily readable nametags too :-).  All the actors are different than the ones in the video games (Wing Commander III is the one I'm familiar with).  However, I did recognise David Warner, who was playing Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn, from another film - the bad guy in TRON (look up his filography on the internet movie database, this guy has seen a lot of action).  I didn't recognise him until looking at the IMDB, but David Suchet played the Tiger's Claw capain, yes, the bald headed Mr. Poirot was there.

The movie takes place at the start of Christopher Blair's career, with his assignment (along with Maniac) to the TCS Tiger's Claw.  There's a bit of history with Blair's pilgrim parent being a cause of discrimination.  But the rest of the story is pure 1940's aircraft carrier battle, with the future depending on one man, and lots of action.

I found it fun.  Even with the air intakes on the rockets, the bulldozer needed to push a wrecked fighter off the carrier's deck into space (for that matter the fighter didn't have to crash into the deck - it can just wait in space for a tug, it's not an airplane), the machine gun and other noises in space, and the submarine hunt scene complete with depth charges.  Silly, but fun.  I would enjoy seeing it again but don't want to dash out to the theatre to do that.

- Alex

Copyright © 1999 by Alexander G. M. Smith.