Wing Commander Movie Night: Star Trek VI

Top Gun? More like Top Fun! The third meeting of the Wing Commander movie club was a great success; we all had a great time finding out that Top Gun maybe wasn't the perfect film we remembered from our youths… and noting its massive influences on the entire Wing Commander franchise, of course! This week instead of going for a broad inspiration, we're going to be zeroing in on a very specific one in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.

It's a good bet you're already familiar with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It's the last of the films spun off of the original Star Trek television series. It tells a story about old soldiers conspiring to prevent newly possible peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire with the Enterprise heroes there to save the day. Considered by many to be a favorite in the series, Star Trek VI is a suitable swan song for a beloved starship and her crew.

So what does this have to do with Wing Commander, as if we needed an excuse to watch more Star Trek? While Top Gun broadly influenced even the original Wing Commander, Star Trek VI wasn't even out when the series started (though the development team were famously Trek fans, breaking their crunch on the game only for an hour a week to watch new episodes of The Next Generation! Our basis for the pick is a very specific mention of the movie's influence on the Wing Commander film's explosive effects in an April 1999 Cinefex article (full article):

Seeking inspiration for the movement of the juggernaut capital ships, Digital Anvil viewed documentary footage and studied the war films Tora! Tora! Tora! and Midway. "After viewing these films," Brown stated, "Chris Roberts was adamant about holding on shots of these big ships coming across screen for a long time. That was more daring an approach than I was at first comfortable with, but in the end these long-duration shots worked very well, and they went a long way toward establishing the necessary sense of spectacle." This sense of spectacle - in the best Victory at Sea tradition - is particularly well illustrated partway through the film, when Tiger Claw is led into a trap and badly damaged during the ensuing battle. This sequence, along with the action in the movie's climactic scenes, featured vessels firing broadsides into one another, thus requiring extensive pyrotechnics to capture the grandeur of mighty ships in combat. Initially the idea had been to shy away from this scientifically inaccurate approach, since in reality, flames and fireballs would not long exist in the vacuum of space. "Pyro has been used extensively in space films, even prior to Star Wars," Chris Brown remarked. "So a lot of R&D went into developing an alternate look. But none of it worked for our traditional World War II kind of story. Our R&D didn't go entirely to waste, however, since the digital shockwave accompanying the pyrotechnic blasts only came about because of it. The idea was to do something in the vein of Star Trek VI's exploding planet shockwave, but then supplement it with rippling effects that enhanced the scale," Brown budgeted a pyro shoot into the schedule, but upon returning from Luxembourg, he discovered that the Digital Anvil team had created a viable and much less costly alternative. "They'd been experimenting with Pyromania's package of explosions on CD-ROM, and their tests were looking great. Rodney Brunet had tailored a number of the shots to make these generic explosions work for us in the context of our scenes.'

There should be lots of other things to talk about, though: Wing Commander and Star Trek VI are both products of the closing days of the cold war and they both express that influence in interesting ways. And as The Undiscovered Country is a roughly contemporary film, our franchise even shares a couple of actors!

Where can I find a copy of the movie for the watch party?

Star Trek VI is currently streaming on Paramount+ in the United States and is available for rental or sale digitally at all storefronts. If you're interested in tracking down a physical copy, a UHD version featuring a striking new transfer was released in 2022 which remains in print. If you are unable to track down a copy please ping a member of the WCCIC staff on the Discord in advance of the watch.

How do we watch the movie together?

It's pretty low tech! Simply join the Wing Commander CIC Discord on Friday and we will be chatting (in text) along with the film in the main channel. Everyone who wants to join in should bring their own copy and we will count down to play them together at 10 PM EST. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to join in the conversation; sharing your thoughts helps make the experience better for everyone!