Hacker Cinema
Wing Commander
1999 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Christopher Roberts
Science FictionActionAdventure
In the mid-27th century, the Terran Confederation is at war with the vicious alien Kilrathi Empire. When the Kilrathi capture a crucial navigational device that could lead them to Earth, the Confederation’s only hope rests with a small group of young fighter pilots. Lieutenant Christopher Blair, along with his wingman Todd 'Maniac' Marshall and Commander Jeanette 'Angel' Deveraux, must intercept the alien fleet and prevent the destruction of mankind. Battling overwhelming odds and racing against time, they face not only external threats but also inner fears and rivalries as they fight to save Earth from annihilation.
3 positive8 negative4 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story.
These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.
I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.
>> "most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer"
The first Wing Commander had almost 300k sales and ports for just about everything, 8 sequels, a TV show, and a movie years before Freelancer shipped, and then it got another game. It seems like a better candidate for his most famous work.
Chris Roberts had a peculiar Hollywood moment with the 1999 “Wing Commander” movie that he directed.
Hollywood producers won’t let you keep endlessly polishing a turd on their dime, so the movie went to theaters with Kilrathi puppets that look like constipated hairless rodents locked in green gas bubbles. It’s a marvel of terrible science fiction.
I like the Wing Commander series better than Star Wars, and Blair in WC4 was Mark Hamill's greatest role as far as I'm concerned.
Wing Commander is space without the opera. It's humanistic and free of woo. There are no supernaturally gifted gurus wielding magic. The good guys do not seem predestined to win. Everyone in this big cosmic drama is just an ordinary person (or other sentient being) muddling through familiar problems.
Seems like this reviewer wanted the movie parts to be more wacky and fun. Given that the premise is essentially (spoilers) space Nazis attempting a coup, I'm not sure how this would have made sense. If you want wacky fun, there are plenty of other space movies that will oblige you.
And if you read any of the profiles of Chris Roberts or people talking about working at RSI on Star Citizen (Kotaku did a multi-part series on it years ago), you'll see an image of nothing more than a petty, micromanaging boss who does nothing but interfere in literally everything, resulting in a dysfunctional studio. This isn't surprising; any cursory glance at their roadmaps, their former promises, their history, their delays etc, clearly paints a picture of severe mismanagement, no matter how much fans excuse it.
In fact, one aspect of Freelancer that's been left to history is the fact that when Microsoft bought some equity in his studio before acquiring them entirely, some producers claimed he later used part of that money to fund his failed movie ventures instead of Freelancer, which were also later held afloat by a weird German tax fraud scheme (the mastermind of which later went to jail, which also resulted in German law changing and his whole excursion into the film industry collapsing instantly). His response to this was "it's fine, because it was general equity stake and not earmarked for Freelancer." The fact they had to wrestle Freelancer away from him is absolutely not surprising when he quite literally was dicking around on C-tier shitfilms like Wing Commander while people busted their ass.
People here are mentioning the notion of auteurs, of visionaries, etc. I disagree; that's an insult to actual creatives. Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself time and time again with both his repeated success and his wide array of unusual work. Everything I've seen of him indicates to me that Chris Roberts is, essentially, an overly ambitious child of a man and petty boss who was lucky Richard Garriott ever gave him a chance, and has ridden on almost nothing more than his legacy at Origin Systems, and has been desperately attempting to capture that again ever since.
The Wikipedia article for 1999 in film is there for all to see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_film#1999_Wide-release_films
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
Yeah, I had completely forgotten the plot where the Captain of the Concordia and a former fighter pilot is sent on a commando mission (!). We never even find out why the Concordia was sunk (although I assume it was in some book).
I think a lot of this stems from Roberts' not-so-secret desire to be a movie director; my guess was he was trying to streamline it to make things more "cinematic", but the end result was as you see. (The ill-received Wing Commander movie didn't cure him of this apparently)
The more I think about it, the more I agree with you; WC really did peak with WC2 for me. I didn't buy WC4, and only bought Prophecy years afterwards on sale for 15$. Meanwhile, I actually bought WC2 on release (despite having more precarious finances), and both Secret Operations.
Because crowdfunded developers running on tight budgets generally don't throw money at stars. It might be a good business investment for a movie or television show, but most early supporters would rather the game be out sooner with B or C-list talent. Star power is icing a cake that isn't yet baked.
Particular to Star Citizen, fans remember well the use of Mark Hamill in one of the Wing Commander games, the one that came spread across six cd-roms. It was an interesting cross-media experiment but the industry took from that incident that gamers want a game, not cutscenes.
There is also great danger in hiring a star for something that will not come out until many years later. She may not be as famous in 2-5 (10?) years when the game actually arrives. She could be involved in a scandal. She could star in a series of flops. She could simply retire. Then the extra money spent on her will have been wasted. It is very odd decision to pay a premium for her over literally hundreds of equally capable but less-famous actors.
I always found it wryly amusing that Wing Commander III had bigger name actors in it than the Wing Commander movie did.
As far as video game movies go it was rather good. I enjoyed it, even having played most of the Wing Commander games that came before it.
I think that movie would be better received if it was released today instead of 19 years ago. We’ve had close to 20 years of comic book movies that are mostly divorced from their source to make such a source-material-disjointed movie more palatable.
I think I was one of three people that enjoyed the Wing Commander movie, even though it had very little relation to the game canon.
I was a huge Amiga fan as a teen, but I can still remember the moment I saw that PC gaming was where the action was going to be. It was ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990.[1]
When I saw the previews of Wing Commander (Called "Wingleader" in the magazine) and 256 color adventure games like "Rise of the Dragon" [2] I was completely floored. This was the future of gaming. However, I couldn't afford a PC until 1996.
The end of the home computer era was a difficult time for me and my circle of working class nerds. The price of computing shot up massively. As a troubled teenager who staked my future on being a self-taught programmer, this changing-of-the-era came at the worst possible time.
One of the most valuable things about the Amiga (And the Atari ST, in the case of one of my friends) was that kids like me could learn about programming, 3d modelling, music production and productivity software all with a £399 machine plugged into a 70s TV set. My whole life as a programmer and indie game developer is thanks to that machine.
[1]https://archive.org/details/ace-magazine-35 [2] See "movies in your micro" in the above magazine
We'll see if Star Citizen is as good as it promises to be, but until then, the height of Roberts' creative career is in the early 90s for now, before he went into movies with his disastrous Wing Commander film. Plus, he is just directing Star Citizen and not involved in development as he was during the Wing Commander series (where he was a programmer himself at least for the first 2 episodes).
Not to mention that the cutscenes look much better than the Wing Commander movie ;-)
I still have that game on six CDs somewhere; I wonder whether they're still unscratched enough to be playable ...
Right, except what are the odds we can raise $150 million a year, consistently, year over year?
My point is that the price that people are willing to pay for content decreases as you create more content. People might be willing to pay $50 to revive a movie from a long-dormant property, but would they pay the same $50 for the equivalent amount (2-3 episodes?) of a regular-run show?
My bet is on no, at least for now - this may change in the future.
This applies to more than just shows IMO - Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander fame) was able to raise a tremendous amount of money for his revival of the space sim genre - would he be able to raise even close to that amount if he went by, say, a yearly release?