The best thing about the film is that it has well-developed special effects and quality. It is also not a difficult story to comprehend, nor is it too unbelievable. Even the characters are fairly well developed.

Regardless, the movie seems underdone. The characters, despite their development, don't neccessarily come off as very likable characters. There are aspects that the film doesn't touch upon, and many of the important scenes of the story are so short that they leave little to the imagination.

The film overall is so-so. It is enjoyable at cerain levels, but dull at many other levels that normally make movies great. I myself would recommend seeing it at least once for anybody who enjoys sci-fi adventures.


stick to the games   January 14, 2003
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

I can't imagine why anybody thought this flick had even a ghost of a chance. Based on the series of "space-flight sims" that ruled PC gamers' attentions until about the mid-1990's, WC pits a hardy band of fighter jocks in their space-fighters against a vile and thoroughly genocidal race called the Kilrathi (obviously descendants of some predatory feline with glowing eyes and grunting voices). In the future, mankind has developed hyper-space travel that allows people to "jump" to distant points of the cosmos, where he presumably meets the Kilrathi. Controlling this array of jumping starships is a master computer called the Navicom - which is captured by the Kilrathi in the first scene. Now, only a single ship - shuttling fighter pilots to a new sector - stands between the Kilrathi and Earth.

So what's wrong with this movie? Let's start with the non-existent story. The basic idea of WC was fine for gaming where interactivity was enough to make you overlook how strangely familiar everything was - whether it was "Star Wars", "Babylon 5", "Battlestar Galactica" or "Space: Above and Beyond" or a host of Japanese Anime, there wasn't anything in WC that you hadn't seen before. Turning the story into a movie that you had to watch passively only highlights that sense of deja-vu to everything in sci-fi gaming (even the score, which I loved, shows its roots to "Galactica"). Even getting past a terminally derivative premise with its roots in everything, you get a ton of lame effects and low production values. CGI space scenes look no more compelling than what you get on "Babylon 5" and only remind you of the flick's beginnings as a franchise of video games. For a movie, the sets look very uncinematic - more like something you'd see on a ST: TNG clone on one of the upstart networks. Though set hundreds of years in the future, the interiors of spaceships here look as primitive those of U-boats, with exposed piping and circuitry. Actually, this could have worked had they been modeled after convincing U-boats or other WWII surplus. Though this would have made "Tigerclaw" look like the "Nostromo" from "Alien", it's better than the alternative which painfully trails in set design behind a movie released 20 years earlier. The interior scenes during battles only reminds you how far ahead of its time "Wrath of Khan" was. Then there are the leads - Freddie Prinze and Saffron Burrows are actually sympathetic characters, but their surprising likeability only reminds you how painfully uninspired the flick is. The plot develops Prinze's character as one of an all-but-ostracized religious sect called "Pilgrims" who don't otherwise appear in the games, and get little fleshing here. The producers throw in some major talent - David Warner, Tcheky Karyo and Jurgen Prochnow - who are familiar in Sci-Fi as reliable character actors, but that only makes you wonder if the producers had spent their money in the right place. In short - don't rent or buy, this flick is a perrenial appearance on the Sci-Fi channel, though you're only likely to catch it once.