After Action Report: 633 Squadron Wrap Up

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander movie club has slipped the surly bonds of Earth with Squadron 633! The movie was a very pleasant surprise: it represents a new kind of World War II movie that began to become popular in the early 1960s that was more focused on action than realism. The result is something less dour than The Dam Busters with plenty of thrills and dynamic characters… but not one so meaningless that its final note didn't bring home an important message about the nature of war! It also features absolutely stunning color aircraft photography showcasing extremely cool Mosquito fighter-bombers.

633 Squadron's score, by British composer Ron Goodwin, was the big item we were looking at in terms of it connection to Wing Commander and we're happy to report that the relationship seems a lot more clear here than it did in The Dam Busters. 633 Squadron's theme sounds much more like Wing Commander's Overture than The Dam Busters' March did and the rest of the film has a rich, quality score as well. And like the other two films, 633 Squadron's theme has become synonymous with aviation in British popular culture.

We did pick up on some other possible Wing Commander connections during the screening, many of them similar to those in The Dam Busters. A big one of those was the squadron briefing, which again used shots very close to those in the Wing Commander series… but maybe even moreso since unlike The Dam Busters, Squadron 633 features a unique and eclectic cast of diverse (for 1943) pilot characters (including a sikh, an American, an Australian and a short guy… just like the Tiger's Claw!).

So it's no wonder that Chris Roberts' original name for Wing Commander was…

Squadron 633's fictional weapon is called the "Earthquake bomb" and it's extremely close to the T-Bomb from Wing Commander III, intending to cause tremors which amplify damage to a target.

Like the final attack in The Dam Busters, Squadron 633's epic climax with fighter-bombers flying through a narrow fjord also inspired Star Wars' Death Star run… and Wing Commander III's Temblor strikes!

Shots from this sequence seem in particular to be referenced by one of the Wing Commander III console planetary attack sequences.

And would it be an aviation movie without a fiery crash that kills a wingman while the survivors helplessly look on?

The landing debriefings felt a bit like the finale to Wing Commander II where all the pilots gather on the Concordia's flight deck.

And the beautiful Mosquito fighters have plenty of takeoff and landing shots like those in Wing Commander. Parked they look particularly like this shot from Super Wing Commander!

And the dogfight choreography we learned about in Top Gun is in full effect here, with plenty of head on shots of the pilots interspersed with real plane footage and model work. The cockpit shots this time look a lot like those introduced in Wing Commander 2 and especially the ones used in Super Wing Commander's introduction!