Movie Mashup Showcases Space Battles

To keep the Wing Commander Movie's birthday train rolling another day, here's a medley by Illustrated Fiction. It condenses down many of the spaceflight scenes into a tight mini film. While the ship designs received an understandably mixed reception, the actual action-packed CGI portions of the movie were just great. Here's a chance to appreciate them together! They also paired this with a nice writeup, which you can find here.

Wing Commander (the movie) is a guilty pleasure and it is something of an oddity in that it feels both very much of its time - especially in terms of its casting - but also like a curious throwback to the 1970s and 80s.

The movie, based on the popular video game series, was released in 1999, in the middle of the CG revolution sweeping through cinemas by the late 90s (Matrix, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, etc). The movie is a mix of rubbery aliens rubbing shoulders with relatively decent CGI for the time.

The story centers on a protagonist hotshot 26th-century pilot, Lieutenant Christopher Blair played by Freddie Prinze Jr, who finds himself in the midst of an intergalactic war between humans and the antagonists of the story, the so-called alien 'Kilrathi' that threatens to destroy Earth. Blair joins forces with his superior space cadets Lieutenant 'Angel' Deveraux (Saffron Burrows), Captain Sansky (David Suchet) and Admiral Tolwyn (David Warner).