Wing Commander is Top Gun in space.

(Actually, it's a whole lot worse. I'd rather sit through Top Gun fifteen times while hot coals were shoved up my ass than see Commander again.)

Wing Commander is a really bad Top Gun in space.

(Why is it so stinky-poo, icky-bad? Many, many reasons, but mostly because the acting sucks. Freddie Prinze, Jr. gives his nineties' equivalent of Mark Hamill's overeager performance in Star Wars, exclaiming with fanboyish glee at every positive development and offering dutiful melodramatic tears for every heartbreaking twist of the plot. The supporting roles are filled out by the dregs of the foreign film industry; everyone has a different accent, but they're united across race and nationality in their utter lack of acting talent. And Matthew Lillard is as great an enemy to good moviemaking as you'll find in his "wacky" role as Maniac, Christopher Blair's brash sidekick. He apes for the camera and behaves like a twelve-year-old unexpectedly let loose in a major Hollywood motion picture. He should still be hidden in the chorus line of a high-school production of Kiss Me, Kate, certainly not acting in anyone's movie. One of the worst performances of the decade. You can't ever build even a decent movie on bad acting, and Commander is so riddled with subpar work that it first begins to crumble based solely on the performers.)

Wing Commander is a really bad Top Gun in space, with awful performances from top to bottom.

(Then there's the plot. It's all this space government warfare gobbledygook, and if I had cared enough about anything happening on screen, I might have tried harder to follow events. There's these Kilrathi aliens and they want to destroy Earth, jumping through this wormhole with their entire space fleet to attack the planet. The Earth fleet is all that stands between Earth and the Kilrathi, so this Tiger Claw ship is dispatched to delay the Kilrathi and perform recon on what the Kilrathi might be up to. The science is somewhat intriguing, if unbelievable--why would the ships be so low-tech if the movie is set several centuries in our future?--but the universe that director Chris Roberts (who also created and directed the CD-Rom video games) has developed holds no interest or suspense whatsoever. All of the battle scenes are anti-climactic, and the dramatic moments are each a vacuum of tension, allowing for only manufactured melodrama.)

Wing Commander is a really bad Top Gun in space, with awful performances from top to bottom and a laughable plot.

(It might be one of the worst movies of the year. It's certainly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The audience got into some fun commentary and enjoyed laughing at it, but it wasn't worth the price of admission. I paid to see the Star Wars trailer, and as a bonus I get Wing Commander: a nasty excuse for decent sci-fi filmmaking. Avoid at all costs.)

Wing Commander, perhaps one of the worst movies of the year, is a really bad Top Gun in space, with awful performances from top to bottom and a laughable plot.