Yeah, sure, Metacritic shows 21/100 from movie critics... who are a notoriously snooty bunch and not the average "anyone else" he's referring to. Metacritic's general user scorers are a much more moderate 5.3. And that's a relatively small sampling, so if you go over to somewhere with a much larger audience like Amazon (a place comprised of more typical "Average Joe" responses than you'd see at a specifically movie oriented website), the average review is 3.1/5. Not amazing, not terrible by any means... actually kind of decent, which was Dyret's point.
I'm not trying to prove that all, or even most average viewers consider the movie to be utterly terrible. Dyret stated he refused to believe that somebody who wasn't a WC fan could seriously hate the movie so badly - I demonstrated that as a matter of fact, there's quite a few people who did. And let's not get into the elitist position where we disregard the critics as an isolated group that doesn't understand anything, shall we?
At the end of the day, critics don't only try to guide the public, but are also themselves guided by the public - a critic whose reviews everyone hates will not hold a job very long. So, when a critic hates a film, there's a very high chance that many ordinary movie-goers agree with him.
I don't think the idea that there's a certain "mentality" is so far off base in some cases here. Tcheky Karyo is a good actor and a good portrayal of Paladin, but we've encountered scores of people complaining about his accent/ethnicity and how it somehow ruins things. Yet those same people ignore the drastic Blonde Paladin conversion to John Rhys Davies in WC3 (because neither change is really a big deal). That's just one example of many minor things that certain people seem to love to zero in on over and over.
This is a false equivalent. There is a universe of difference between changes that, however controversial, are seen as necessary - and changes that are both controversial and unjustified. I would argue that John Rhys-Davies was ultimately accepted as Paladin (...after a lot of initial complaining) because everyone understood that the change from cartoon to live-action would necessarily demand a change of appearance - and because for all his black-haired fatness, John Rhys-Davies spoke and acted like the old Paladin. What makes Tcheky Karyo controversial as Paladin is not the change in visual appearance, but precisely the fact that his new speech patterns are a substantially bigger change. They don't affect the mere appearance, but the actual nature of the character.
There is another factor, too. Wing Commander 3 moved the story forward. Who Paladin was in 2669 was "undiscovered country", so to speak. We did not go into Wing Commander 3 expecting Paladin to play any specific role in the upcoming events - for that matter, he could have not appeared at all, and it would have been all the same to us. But Wing Commander the movie went
backwards in time, into a period for which we knew exactly what to expect - and went against those expectations. Prior to the movie, Paladin circa 2654 wasn't just Scottish, but a Scottish combat pilot. The movie demanded that we reconcile him being a well-known, long-serving Scottish combat pilot on the Tiger's Claw while simultaneously being a French-speaking secret ops privateer guy whom nobody on the Tiger's Claw recognised.
These are things that, of course, fans can (and have) ultimately found ways to explain away, to mend the continuity of the universe. That's fine, it's what we do as fans. We find ways to fix messes like this in the universe we know and love. But I refuse to lob insults, however subtle or nuanced, at people who express their anger at Chris Roberts unnecessarily messing with the universe. Their anger is perfectly justified, because for many fans, the movie really did go far beyond what was acceptable.
I agree with all of that except for the interpretation of my comment. If you wanted to like something but couldn't because stuff, that's something you struggle with, it has nothing to do with being an insane person. I feel the same way about the Hobbit-film and its godawful action-scenes.
Well, all right - I guess I don't know what you mean by "struggle with" in this case, but it sounds like you don't mean the way it is normally used (i.e., when someone is said to be struggling with issues, that's a roundabout way of saying they have mental problems). So, no objections, I guess.
Yeah, most of the things the film gets criticized for the games, especially the FMV ones did first. WC2's expansions apparently never happened, none of the actors had much in common with the previous design of the characters, the entire fleet got redesigned in a year, several characters got massively simplified, WC4's Border Worlds and secret Nazi-projects were as massive ass-pulls as the Pilgrim stuff in the film, and people aren't nearly as upset about that. Not that they necessarily should be, it's going to happen in a long-running hand-changing series, but it's something to consider.
Well, as I responded to Chris above, this is simply not true. Of all the Wing Commander products, there isn't a single one that made more controversial and ultimately unjustified changes than the movie did. Even something as crazy as Privateer 2 is ultimately more acceptable, simply because it's isolated from the rest of the universe. The movie went and revised massive parts of the universe's history, and not in the sense of filling in places we'd never discussed before (which is what WC4 did with its surprise introduction of a new faction - "oh, you've never heard of the Border Worlds before? Well, look they were there all along, but simply never got mentioned before because we didn't discuss the government on those planets. Or something."). It changed backstories for characters, it put characters in positions that, the universe had previously established, they would not reach until later, and so on. This is not at all comparable to WC3, WC4, or any other game, where the changes generally only involved unexpected turns of events in the future, as opposed to revising the past. The only similar case is the Academy cartoon (which, I suppose, gets kind of an easy ride thanks to the fact that it's really, really good).
