After Action Report: Star Trek VI Wrap Up

Greetings WingNuts,

The Wing Commander Movie Club has conquered the final frontier! It's safe to say that everyone present already loved Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and our opinions certainly didn't change with this screening. It's a little jarring to notice years later that every set is repurposed from Star Trek: The Next Generation and there are plenty of odd moments that earned our gentle ribbing (like the name!)… but none of them detracted from the whole for us.

The big Wing Commander connection was the shockwave effect which appears in Star Trek VI's opening, destroying Praxis and then shaking Sulu's Excelsior. Wing Commander special effects supervisor Chris Brown credited the effect with influencing the explosion effects seen throughout the movie, particularly in the third act 'broadside' battle between the Tiger Claw and a Fralthi. While some shockwaves are visible in that scene, it's probably fewer than the rest of the movie!

...but the shockwave effect is certainly a big deal during the Skipper sequence! In fact, it's pretty clear the sequence directly influenced similar ones in Wing Commander III and IV. In Wing Commander III, we see such a shockwave during the incredible finale that destroys Kilrah and in Wing Commander IV it's Seether's 'mine trick'. In all three of these cases, the scene follows the same pattern as the Star Trek VI with a wide shot to show the scale of the explosion and then closer ones of the hero ship crashing through the wave (or in Seether's case, sailing along it).

Another scene in Wing Commander that heavily borrows Star Trek VI's shockwave is Paladin's attack on the Kilrathi dreadnaught. The Sivar blasts out a similar shockwave after it's hit... with another cool Wing Commander easter egg especially visible, the o-ring debris from the original game (visible several times in the movie, a result of using Origin veterans to do the SFX shots)! The initial article noted that the effect for Wing Commander was created digitally using the popular Pyromania stock library rather than filmed in a pyro shoot. If you're interested in experimenting with the same resource, there's a copy of the same one that would've been used by the Wing Commander SFX team available for download on the Internet Archive.

These aren't the only shockwaves in Wing Commander, of course! Another favorite is the in-flight effect when a Mace is detonated in Wing Commander IV:

Beyond this specific influence, though, the Star Trek of the early 90s was ever present during the making of the Wing Commander games. Wing Commander I writer Jeff George, the architect of much of the universe we love, remembers the original team breaking from crunch only to watch new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's not hard to imagine the Wing Commander 2 group stopping work for a few hours to catch an opening show of Star Trek VI! And the film's deeper discussions on the fear of change and the need for peace are easily detectable any time Wing Commander attempted a discussion of the conflict… from Damon Karnes' war weariness to Admiral Tolwyn's madness at the thought of peace to Fleet Action's somewhat differently stilted view on the role of the military in such times.

And then there's one bit of trivia to end on: Star Trek VI shares THREE actors with Wing Commander! Before he was space marine Decker in Wing Commander IV and Prophecy, Jeremy Roberts was an Excelsior bridge officer. He would later reprise the role, then named Lt. Cmdr. Dimitri Valtane, on an episode of Star Trek Voyager:

David Warner, who played both the mysterious Rhineheart in Privateer 2: The Darkening and Admiral Tolwyn in the Wing Commander movie, plays the ill-fated Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI:

And finally, John Schuck is the Klingon ambassador, a role he had originated in Star Trek IV. He would go on to voice Ralgha nar Hhallas, Hobbes himself, in Wing Commander III!

Sully thinks the movie needed more Kzinti.