Display MoreGreetings WingNuts,
The Wing Commander movie club is back from Hell in the Pacific and we were surprised by how interesting this movie we had never heard of before was! Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune are the only actors in the film, enemies unable to communicate abandoned on an island in the pacific during World War II. They must go from deadly foes to reluctant friends in a compelling anti-war story with great acting and very meaningful cinematography. The end result is more like an overly-lush stage play than any of the epic war films we've seen in previous weeks… totally unexpected, to say the least!
While Hell in the Pacific was absolutely the prototype for Enemy Mine and at least three Star Trek episodes we could not find the Wing Commander connection. We're going to make the extremely rare claim that there isn't an apparent one. Chris Brown, VFX director on the Wing Commander movie, cited Hell in the Pacific as an influence for the look of Wing Commander, mentioning specifically "tracer fire, millies and dogfight sequences." Hell in the Pacific includes none of these. We suspect he was either falling victim to Chris Roberts' penchant for defining things by movies without actually knowing them or he simply got the title wrong.
In the latter case, it's possible he was referring to the short propaganda film Fury in the Pacific. Fury in the Pacific was released in 1945 during the actual war and it does include real footage of all the things Brown mentions in his magazine quite. You can watch it here:
One Wing Commander story is clearly based on the story started in Hell in the Pacific: Academy's Word of Honor, which strands Blair, Grunt and a Kilrathi pilot on an island on the planet Pisces. And, unlike the versions adapted by Star Trek and similar, Academy retains the dark ending!
Sully simply would've eaten both Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.
