Anyway, there are a great many improbable changes... WCM is like watching "Enterprise."
I agree. Enterprise treats Star Trek pretty much the same way the Wing Commander movie treated WC -- it throws out a lot of useless fanon.
When you have an established universe, you don't take the main concept and then rewrite every damn thing about it (bad-French-accent Paladin,
I'll bet Tchéky Karyo would take issue with your criticism of his accent -- since he is, afterall, *French*. Perhaps you're just not fluent?
Angel's move from French girl to English,
I'm pretty sure the movie never claims that Angel is British (and on the same coin, that the game never claims she's French).
her seeming amnesia about shagging Blair,
Again, two sides: 1) the game never contradicts this and 2) it never happens in the movie.
Maniac seemingly being a complete stranger in the period between WCM and WC1,
This had nothing to do with the movie -- Maniac and Blair went to the academy together. It's been a standard part of Wing Commander lore since the WC1/2 Guide at the earliest (Claw Marks implies it, too). A whole TV series was made about the concept.
Lt. Commander "Bossman" Chen dying months before you meet him in WC1,
I tend to give this one to people -- it's a continuity error. It can be explained, but it takes more steps than I like to claim are obvious. I wrote a nice fanfic outline for it for that comic book project:
https://www.wcnews.com/loaf/comicoutline.txt
ALL the kitties getting a shave...)
You mean both of the ones you see in the movie?
The movie was average-at-best generic Sci-Fi... but this is like giving every Klingon gigantic breasts and mohawks for "Star Trek 12- the search for more money" You simply don't take an established universe and completely destroy it to make a few bucks.
Didn't Star Trek redesign the Klingons several times? (Including both Klingons with mohawks and Klingons with gigantic breasts.)
If I had never played the games, I might have been able to watch it without saying "WTF!" every five minutes. (In the first five minutes, I exclaimed said phrase at least fifteen times)
Quoth Maniac, "You must be a lot of fun on a date."
Seriously, though, I wonder what fifteen things you managed to find objectionable during the credits montage, the attack on Pegasus and the start of a conversation between Admiral Tolwyn and Commodore Bellegarde.
I mean, I know I was pretty happy when I was watching the movie... but I've been arguing with intelligent people and idiots alike about the thing for five years, so I generally have a good understanding of what people complain about. The *only* thing I could possibly see someone complaining about in the first five minutes of the movie is that Admiral Tolwyn is played by David Warner instead of Malcolm McDowell (and if recasting was public exclamation-worthy, we'd still be shouting about Wing Commander III).
They put a teen-fuggin'-idol in the lead role, and not even that saved it in the box office.
This has never been much of a complaint. The vast majority of Prinze's "teen" roles came *after* Wing Commander. When they shot Wing Commander he was just another b-list actor. Since the character requirement was a wet behind the ears twenty something, you'd be able to apply the same claim to *any* actor they chose to play Blair. (Heck, consider this -- in one of the few movies Prinze headlined before Wing Commander he shared top billing with *Steven Petraca*. Somehow we don't have legions of generic commentators ranting about how horrible it was that Origin cast a twenty-something male actor to play a twenty-something male character.)
All of that aside, even if it were a case of stunt casting (and I'm reasonably sure it wasn't - it was the low budget combined with the character requirement) you as a Wing Commander fan don't have any room to complain. Do you think they cast Mark Hamill in Wing Commander III based on his acting ability and then realized, happy coincidence, he had been in some sort of space movie in his formidable years? I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no one has cast Mark Hamill in a live role based on acting ability since the late seventies.
Your complaint is simply that it's casting you didn't agree with, not that it's some sort of broad, incorrect choice that was made based on greed or idiocy or pandering. And claiming the latter is just wrong.
Incidentally, I think the casting was one of the few elements of the Wing Commander movie that was genuinely inspired. The 'fresh' (I know, how dare they cast people who later became famous among a demograph you don't like) American actors as the rookies with a very international cast as the veterans made for a really nice dichotomy.
It was commercialism at it's worst- they went entirely on a (generally uninformed) public's opinion, and it failed, miserably, because of just that. THEN, they took the already-bastardized universe, sat some paid audience down to watch it, and raped-and-reran the damned thing until the audience said, "Eh. Not as confusing as it was before..." shame there was no PLOT left...
While I will agree that yes, these words do form sentences of sorts, I don't really follow them beyond that. Lets hear some details instead of vauge, inane, populist claims that are designed to offend people without actually having to say anything. "Commercialism"? How? I, for one, would be fascinated to learn how the Wing Commander movie fits that bill. The *public*? What's the issue with the public? What's the implication here? That everyone but you is stupid -- that movies shouldn't be mare for people? What? And as always, I'd love to hear the internet jerk redefinition of the word plot. I've been enjoying that one for years.
Some of the greatest movies made confused us. Memento. Fight Club. 25th Hour.
It wasn't until the end we truly understood them.
They frickin' rocked.
So you have a problem with "teen idols", but you're a fan of all these inane pseud-intelligent pop teen movies?
However, Wing Commander was chipped away until it read like a poorly-written mongrelization of the concept. "Use the (force)Calculator, (luke)Chris. You don't need the (targeting)Navigational Computer." Adding in the Pilgrim/opressed guy because he can do math fast bit... well, in my opinion, that just sucked. Wow, I can do math faster(and, somehow, add the feel my body got from the gravity into it, like some kind of fu... frickin space-goose), so I'm going to go to war with the rest of humanity.
The Pilgrims used their abilities to colonize space, while 'non Pilgrims' were stuck on Earth -- the two cultures divided and it resulted in a war. It's kind of like how everywhere in the world isn't a British colony anymore.
I think I will say that there are plenty of people in this community who liked the movie and so one mustn't jump on the anti-movie bandwagon in order to make friends.
I'd agree with that assessment -- it's something that's very easy and 'hip' to do. Many of the people who did the same thing with Prophecy are the ones who are clamoring for new mods today...
