Lower Decks

Another film marking its tenth anniversary certainly deserves its place in a column celebrating overlooked achievements. For my brother and me, ‘Wing Commander’ was a sci-fi experience every bit as memorable that summer as ‘The Matrix’ or ‘The Phantom Menace,’ and it wasn’t because we were big gamers or fans of Freddie Prinze Jr. or anything. It was just something that entertained us. I can’t speak for him, but for me, it remains memorable to this day, and well worth revisiting.

Probably quite obscure today, the Wing Commander game was an interactive experience that incorporated such recorded actors as Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell and was another effort to expand the horizon of storytelling. The basic story had humans in conflict with an alien species, so it wasn’t so different from any other shooting exercise typical of the medium. The movie was actually undertaken by the creator, Chris Roberts, but featured neither Hamill or McDowell, choosing instead an independent version of the plot that didn’t even have a game made to coincide with it. Though made during a boom period for adapting games into films, ‘Wing Commander’ might perhaps be best seen as a predecessor to the ‘Resident Evil’ movie franchise, something that doesn’t even need to be considered for what it came from, as long as you like what you see (and hey, lots of people like Milla Jovovich).

What made ‘Wing Commander’ so memorable for me was that it took the time to envision its own reality without beating the viewer over the head with it. In many ways, the movie might best be seen as a TV pilot, since it anticipates perhaps better the Battlestar Galactica revamp than presents quite a blockbuster atmosphere. What made it easy, then, to overlook in 1999, was that it wasn’t a brash concept like ‘The Matrix’ or something a large group of fans had been anticipating (this year someone actually released a film about the release of ‘The Phantom Menace;’ it might have been last year, but you get the point), but rather merely a fun ride. On its own packaging, the movie is described as ‘Starship Troopers’ crossed with ‘Top Gun.’

I haven’t seen ‘Troopers,’ and it isn’t quite ‘Top Gun,’ either. Prinze and Matthew Lillard, well-known at the time for films like ‘American Pie’ (they were the face of a new Brat Pack, actually, and may well have been the reason ‘Wing Commander’ could have been dismissed as just a couple of cool kids messing around in unfamiliar territory with fans hostile to such an idea), are already good friends by the time the audience meets them, before they’re tossed into a situation where Prinze is asked to employ his unique skills in a desperate attempt to prevent the Kilrathi from reaching Earth. Those skills come from his heritage as a Pilgrim, and in this context, that’s a term that represents a negative connotation.

However lightly a one-hundred minute film is able to do so, ‘Wing Commander’ features exactly the kind of nuanced script that will always interest me, no matter what else is going on. Early on, the film takes the time to lay the groundwork for a backstory that fleshes out a context for the characters and their circumstances, whether in the prologue or the mysterious pendant Prinze cherishes, but hides under his uniform (it might be added that another possible stumbling block for viewers is a rather peculiar style to the costuming, which includes an atypical use of hats and a shirt that has an unusually relaxed concept of collars and necklines). It turns out Pilgrims were among the first humans to explore deep space, which was an experience that changed them (Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ explored similar territory later) as well as the rest of humanity’s perspective on them. It broadened their minds and made others fearful of them. Prinze has an inherited, and useful, sense of navigating thanks to his Pilgrim ancestors, but bigotry to go along with it. For an age where space travel in a practical sense has been in its own kind of recession for decades now, any viewer can sympathize with a reality where it’s looked on not just as a matter of course, but with great suspicion, whether or not there are hostile aliens involved.

One of the interesting choices is to hardly feature the Kilrathi at all. If you watch ‘Wing Commander’ expecting it to be about the conflict with them, as the packaging suggests, you’ll be disappointed on that front, too. Instead, you’re treated better to the psychological effects of an extended conflict, with Saffron Burrows as your guide, a complicated love interest for Prinze and the eponymous wing commander (that’s right: the effort to coin the name for this franchise perhaps produced another disservice, at least as far as this particular version of it is concerned, since the main character is not even referenced in the title, which I suppose puts Wing Commander in the same classification as Star Wars or Star Trek, more a general suggestion of what to expect than a useful description of what exactly you’ll be following, beyond the obvious).

There are some signature effects in the film, the jump sequences that might, in another context, recall the Stargate franchise, if ‘Wing Commander’ had chosen them as more a focal point than feature, and some fine character actors, David Warner and Jürgen Prochnow among them, in supporting roles. If it had been made even a few years later, there’s no doubt that it would have, after all, been a television event, and this is not meant to disparage it in any way. Today, however, we have it as it was, the last testament of a franchise that never quite got off the ground. But, there’s always a chance that someone will get the ball rolling again. ‘Wing Commander’ is a worthy touchstone, but if it’s remain a relative self-contained experience, there could be worse fates. There will always be the opportunity that new viewers will discover it, and in that way it will live on, because for all the reasons there might have been to overlook it initially, the movie, in the end, supports itself quite well.