UK Airing: Wing Commander

Thanks for the head's up!

While I thought the brief writeup was a bit harsh, it's always good for the film to get some coverage and hopefully draw newcomers to the CIC and then onto the games and other Wing Commander creations.

Cheers,


BrynS
 
I originally came to university without a tv, deciding to save 126 quid of money i'd have to spend on a liscence.

Day after day i kick myself for this decision and after seeing this i shall kick myself again.

The first and only time i saw the movie, it was pixalated due to poor reception from the arial and i couldn't see much of anything.

Anyway, my mini-rant thus complete, i'll go away.
 
We're up a hundred or two visits so far because of exposure from the movie playing tonight. It's definitely nice when an event like this causes people to think of searching for Wing Commander online. The majority of our visitors in the last hour are new people from the UK.
 
Good news, i've always been a fan of Wing Commander, and visit this site regularly, but only when the film was on, did I decide I was going to join the forums
 
Can I be honest? I think the movie is extremly bad. If it was not based on Wing Commander I might have a different opinion but I think there are alot of really bad points in the movie. First of all the Tigers Claw is hideous compaired to the original. Confed seem like they can't afford ships (as in can't pay for any decent ships not can't let one get destroyed). Paladin French! what's that all about laddie? Angle American (or sdounds like one!) another major error and Maniac. He's not a Maniac like Maniac in the games. Also I didn't like how there was made up stuff about Blair's parents. He would of been famousin WC1 like Casey was in WCP. I just don't know how Chris Roberts could of FCUKed his own creation?
p.s. don't get me on the Kilrathi who look like Ape like Cats with no skin and have weird beards?
p.p.s Don't get me wrong Im a BIG fan of the Wing Commander games which are the best flight sim even today!
 
scottandfiddle said:
Can I be honest? I think the movie is extremly bad. If it was not based on Wing Commander I might have a different opinion but I think there are alot of really bad points in the movie. First of all the Tigers Claw is hideous compaired to the original. Confed seem like they can't afford ships (as in can't pay for any decent ships not can't let one get destroyed). Paladin French! what's that all about laddie? Angle American (or sdounds like one!) another major error and Maniac. He's not a Maniac like Maniac in the games. Also I didn't like how there was made up stuff about Blair's parents. He would of been famousin WC1 like Casey was in WCP. I just don't know how Chris Roberts could of FCUKed his own creation?
p.s. don't get me on the Kilrathi who look like Ape like Cats with no skin and have weird beards?
p.p.s Don't get me wrong Im a BIG fan of the Wing Commander games which are the best flight sim even today!
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My theory is that though the film may be full of glaring bits of ghastliness, such as shaved kilrathi, the mutilated paladin, the space-born submarine image etc. but due to the fact that its wing commander related and is halfway interesting, its difficult for the average wc fan to bring themselves to hate it.

Not unlike the first star trek movie actually if i remember the criticisms of old correctly.
 
Not unlike the first star trek movie actually if i remember the criticisms of old correctly.
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The first Star Trek movie is very, very hard to get a handle on.

Like the Wing Commander movie, it has a really, really obvious criticism: Wing Commander just wasn't a good movie... and ST:TPM was really, really boring.

Unlike the Wing Commander movie, fans can't use continuity as a crutch for critiquing it: ST:TMP does a very good job of being a Star Trek movie. They brought back all the actors, explained all the stylistic changes and literally took the script from a TOS episode.

The later succesful Star Trek movies *didn't* do this and ended up being excellent films in their own right. I think that teaches us something about Hollywood's experience in adapting

Think about Star Trek II -- it's a classic movie, but it really, really isn't anything like Star Trek. Suddenly everyone is in a space Navy full of new space Navy anachronisms (hand loaded torpedo tubes, cannon broadsides and the like). Despite being played by the same actors, the characters are all completely rewritten. Kirk isn't an action hero anymore, he's someone who putters around worrying about how old he is. But it *worked* as a movie, so Star Trek fans love it. It's hard to separate the characters in movies 2-7 with them in the original series because it's so widely accepted.

My point, I think, is that if the Wing Commander movie had worked it would be universally accepted... and if it had been a completely literal translation of Wing Commander and still failed, we still would have hated it.

Angle American (or sdounds like one!) another major error and Maniac. He's not a Maniac like Maniac in the games. Also I didn't like how there was made up stuff about Blair's parents. He would of been famousin WC1 like Casey was in WCP. I just don't know how Chris Roberts could of FCUKed his own creation?
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Angel as an American is a new one to me -- she's played by English actress Saffron Burrows, so the ordinary criticism is that she's too British instead of Belgian.

I do think they got Maniac right, though... in the original game, Maniac was just an unlikable jerk. It's only in Wing Commander III/IV/P that Tom Wilson played him as a comedian -- in the original game he was just someone you hated. And I think we all hated Matthew Lillard.

As for Chris Roberts... it's a good question. We've got three drafts of the script online here at the CIC and you can see exactly what Chris Roberts' contribution was when he rewrote the thing. I don't really have a good handle on it myself yet, though.
 
Ok i'll take my argument about angel back then throw it back in as British. She supposed to be French!.
Two things I forgot to mention. Padalin in the games is a friendly guy which everybody likes (gamers and characters) but he's more ... (I don't know how to say this) hateful. He's more like a mercinary who is quiet mean and most of the characters don't really trust him and didn't even know he was confed!!??!!
p.s. I didn't hate maniac in the movies or the first game! He was just nothing much in the game to me and was just a bit annoying at times!
p.p.s. What was the whole thing about Angel and the late Bossman who I thought was alive at the start of Blair's tour of Duty in the Tigers Claw!
 
scottandfiddle said:
p.p.s. What was the whole thing about Angel and the late Bossman who I thought was alive at the start of Blair's tour of Duty in the Tigers Claw!
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Bossman's being dead was probably linked to Secret Missions two which he also died in.

The briefly mentioned Angel-Bossman thing seems a considerably strange plot device considering the secret missions where you get a fair few references to Bossman's wife and children, (particularly around the time of his funeral). Then in the movie you find he's hooked up with angel. Apart from Iceman, he's about the least likely character to pair up with her.
 
scottandfiddle said:
Ok i'll take my argument about angel back then throw it back in as British. She supposed to be French!.
Two things I forgot to mention. Padalin in the games is a friendly guy which everybody likes (gamers and characters) but he's more ... (I don't know how to say this) hateful. He's more like a mercinary who is quiet mean and most of the characters don't really trust him and didn't even know he was confed!!??!!
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Seriously, every point you've brought up has been ground up and explained in dozens and dozens of other threads here. But once again... she's not supposed to be French either, as LOAF already pointed out. These are just casting decisions and pretty minor in the scheme of things. I thought they picked an excellent actress for Angel. Things like "Paladin seems kinda mean" are really amorphous and weird issues to take. We certainly see him as hard edged spy in Wing Commander 2, and this merely sheds some light on those origins. I wouldn't even call him mean in the movie to begin with. He certainly takes good care of Blair. The only people he has conflicts with are Maniac and Gerald, who are huge jerks.

Plywood Fiend said:
Bossman's being dead was probably linked to Secret Missions two which he also died in.

The briefly mentioned Angel-Bossman thing seems a considerably strange plot device considering the secret missions where you get a fair few references to Bossman's wife and children, (particularly around the time of his funeral). Then in the movie you find he's hooked up with angel.
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The movie doesn't say they "hooked up" at all. In the Movie Confed Handbook, it's Angel that writes the letter to Bossman's wife to explain that he's MIA. Since you played Secret Missions 2, you should know that the two are just frequent wingmen who are very close friends.
 
Yeah, there's lots of people who've been introduced to the games because they saw the Wing Commander Movie on a whim one day. That's really great. People are always overly harsh and always beat up the most recent product. These might sound like minor issues today, but back in the late 90s, people screamed until they were blue in the face about Prophecy and Secret Ops' direction with the story and videos. Everyone hated Privateer 2 (not because of abstract timeline issues that we talk about today, just in general), and now we get emails from people that tell us how Privateer 2 was central in a pivotal life-changing period for them. In 1996, the big complaint was that Wing Commander IV had way too much video. Everyone derided it because they had to sit through video clips and couldn't just jump into the next mission (which influenced Prophecy, which they later complained about for not having enough video). The Academy tv show suffered many of the complaints that the movie gets today, but now it's pretty universally loved. This is always how it's been though, so it's not really a big deal. The Movie might suffer a bit more because it gets a bunch of that general game-based-movies-are-awful routine that's all over the internet. The most important thing is that each new product, especially a mass-marketed item such as a movie, adds lots of new fans to our ranks.
 
ChrisReid said:
The movie doesn't say they "hooked up" at all. In the Movie Confed Handbook, it's Angel that writes the letter to Bossman's wife to explain that he's MIA. Since you played Secret Missions 2, you should know that the two are just frequent wingmen who are very close friends.
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I never saw the handbook, or played secret missions 2 for that matter, just worked off Wedge 009's scripts.

The words *ahem* 'Bossman and I got close, alright we got too close, and he got himself killed.' On their own made it seem like a reasonable assumption.
 
What I didnt understand, and what always confused me evry time I played it was Angel in Wc3. When you first see her she speaks which what I took to be a french accent. Then when she kisses blair in the flash back, she suddenly sounds American! I dont know if its some mistake or what, its just what struck me as odd when I played it. Wc3 was my first game just so you know.
 
Not sure what you mean, really.

The actress who played Angel in Wing Commander III, Yolonda Jilot, is French... so, as the various attempts at getting her a proper accent go, she presumably comes closest.

To note again, though, Angel isn't French, she's Belgian, from Brussels.

(I suppose it's all somewhat of an awkward conceit -- if distinct American accents can arise in just 200 years, presumably everyone will sound very different indeed in six centuries...)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Not sure what you mean, really.
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Just that in the flashback scene she sounds american to me, or sounded, I havent played or watched that scene in a while.

The actress who played Angel in Wing Commander III, Yolonda Jilot, is French...
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Weird!
 
Jeeze talking of Angel I was looking at pictures of her from WC1 and WC2 and is just me or is she tanned or looks like she is a black person (not black black skin but light black skin) in WC2? If you want to know where I got this from go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Devereaux and look at the pictures
p.s. This is not another one of my famous arguments on this thread
p.s.s. I'll accept the Belgium thing but I'm sure she says French stuff like Bonjour Moisuer (pleas exuse my spelling) and s'il vu plu (again exuse my spelling) which is French for "Hello Mister" and "how are you?" then again I don't know Belgiem?
 
scottandfiddle said:
p.s.s. I'll accept the Belgium thing but I'm sure she says French stuff like Bonjour Moisuer (pleas exuse my spelling) and s'il vu plu (again exuse my spelling) which is French for "Hello Mister" and "how are you?" then again I don't know Belgiem?
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Angel speaks French because... that's the language people speak in Belgium. There is no such thing as a Belgian language.
 
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