It wasn't THAT bad! There's enough here to be fun.

Summary: Great sets. A somewhat cheesy movie yes, but not a crappy one. I’ve seen much worse with higher ratings on IMDB.

So, I just caught this on cable... the original video game kept me up for hours and set me on a path to divorce. Wait… I digress...

But there was a point there, and that is this movie was ported from video game land. And, it was directed by the very same person who also directed the video game’s live action. So what exactly did everyone expect? Another Battlestar Galactica?

The sets in this movie are the star. They are believable and plausible. I actually find them more plausible than Battlestar Galactica’s dark, dreary, and mis-utilized design (though I get the dark, dreary mood the BSG set needed to provide, it still wasn’t as convincing as the sets for Wing Commander). Yeah, some have complained about the look of the fighters on Wing Commander– OK – got a point… reminded me of ‘Crimson Skies”. But everything else worked. I especially liked the design of the bridges… and all the plumbing and conduits, and etc, etc, running throughout the ships. That is just simply plausible.

As far as the other elements of the movie go… Acting… it’s a video game movie, remember? Plot… it’s a video game movie, remember? Script… not as bad as one would expect for a video game movie. (If it was better, I would’ve given a higher rating). Special effects… actually not too shabby… it is a video game movie after all.

The cheesy parts? Oh, I dunno - besides the STUPID portions of the script (such as a flight leader doing a “540” in the hangar just to show-off to the new kid) – the scenes with the most nibbling potential were those that threw-back to old-fashioned naval tactics. For instance, the Tiger Claw descending to the bottom of the crater and going silent as it waited for the Japanese Destroyer… err, scratch that – the Kilarthi Battle Cruiser to sail by overhead. How about the “depth charges” it dropped. Or how about the use of “torpedoes”, eh? (Hmmm… somehow I don’t seem to be hung-up over the use of Photon “Torpedoes” in Star Trek. Oh well). Or how about the scene that took you back to the Napoleonic ‘Age of Sail’ where the tall ships would turn abeam to shoot each other with their broadsides? A good old-fashioned pirate movie shoot-out there. So I guess it wasn’t all about WWII after all.

But regardless of what era the cheesy parts throw back to, the plot is about an apparent ‘Navy’. And from the looks of the insignia and the accents of most of the characters, the future of Earth’s Military Space Force is also the future of Her Majesty’s Navy. Almost every actor in the movie seems to be from the UK (or just across the Channel) and the insignia appears to come from the Royal Navy. Though I’m not British so I can’t be sure.

But who cares? After all, what man wouldn’t want Saffron Burrows as his CO?