I don't know about "sci-f enthusiasts", but the movie was not well received by the general public. Just 9% fresh with an average rating of 2.8 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes. Granted, that's critics, who often take a dim view of science fiction (although not always...Serenity sits at 81% with an average rating of 7.2), but movies that came out a while back often have artificially inflated ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, because they only people that review movies that far back are fans of the movies.
Well, that should prove that the damn thing is invalid, since Serenity is a dreadful, dreadful film.
It's not a case of getting an inflated or a deflated score for movies made before the site - you just don't get an accurate one, because they tie into one or two archived reviews for such movies and don't do anything beyond that (and of course that the whole thing is unscientific in the first place -- you buy your placement and the reviewers themselves decide whether they show as rotten or fresh… which is why an awful movie can have an awful review that shows positive, since that site wants the attention.)
IMDB rates it a 3.7 out of 10, and that IS sci-fi enthusiasts, or at least people who were enthusiastic enough to see a low-budget sci-fi movie that didn't have a huge publicity machine behind it. Again, IMDB often inflates movie ratings because the only people that bother to rate it are people that care about it.
I don't think that's entirely true. There's an enormous 'I heard this was a bad movie and now I'm saying it!' phenomena on the internet. Look at the IMDb's "Bottom 100" list -- internet doofuses have spent their time carefully rating down all the movies that they only saw in the first place because they were MST3k episodes. People like being told what to think and then going to a button they can press that lets them think that way.
(As for mainstream reaction to Wing Commander, it just doesn't exist to begin with. The movie's release went by without much attention -- it had a handful of bad reviews and a handful of good ones and everyone forgot about it in time for The Matrix to surprise us all. I'm always interested in normal folks liking it, though, which happens in surprising numbers whenever it airs on TV -- you always have a bunch of Twitter postings and e-mails to us about it. The other thing that surprises me, and this is the sci-fi nerd audience, is that when we attend Dragon*Con in our Prophecy fight suits, the number one comment we get is from people waiting for sequel to the movie.)
Can you show them at a higher resolution for us, then? My first experience with the WC3 Kilrathi was just a few years ago, and they looked pretty nice to me.
I post everything I get my hands on to the CIC.
I am not talking about casting Hamill and Wilson again (though, they would have been better than what we got), but Prinze and Lillard? Especially Freddie felt like an "alien" in a sci-fi movie. It's not like there is a shortage of young actors in hollywood.
I am not talking about casting Hamill and Wilson again (though, they would have been better than what we got), but Prinze and Lillard? Especially Freddie felt like an "alien" in a sci-fi movie. It's not like there is a shortage of young actors in hollywood.
Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard were both up and coming (but still affordable) stars in 1998.
I actually think the casting is very clever -- American teen pop stars for the inexperienced newbies, British character actors for the grizzled veterans.
I think Edward Furlong would have been a better choice at the time.
I don't think this is how casting works -- but even if it were, Edward Furlong was having very visible drug problems at the time.
I recently have seen queeg's WC3 cut - the Kilrathi aren't perfect, but they don't look too bad on this 22" screen.
That's not what this means. Queeg's cut is great, but it's the video from Wing Commander III -- 320x200 pixels compressed into muddy brick shapes through Xanmovie. When you look at the source video (which would still be much, much lower resolution than film) you see awkward, goofy looking muppets. You could not shoot the WC3 Kilrathi on film.
But the complaint doesn't make sense because it wasn't a choice between the two. Everyone knows the Kilrathi in the movie didn't work - including Chris Roberts, who tried to remove or obfuscate them as much as possible in post production. There was never a choice of switching to WC3 puppets.
There were two goals here, both entirely reasonable -- 1) give the Kilrathi a "Samurai Warrior" look and 2) move them far enough away from the look in the games to avoid a lawsuit in the event the movie was successful (they're just the Kzinti with the numbers rubbed off, remember).
I think it has something to do with the joystick requirement.
That's right to a great degree - without joysticks shipping with every Dell and Gateway computer there was no built in audience for space sims… but I think there was also the idea that there was nothing new under the sun -- games like Prophecy and Descent weren't making any fantastically different changes to the formula to attract new audiences.