Display MoreThe Wing Commander movie club had a great Independence Day watching Independence Day! It's one of those movies that remains just as much fun as it did when we were teenagers. It's hard to argue that it's some great piece of art or that it's especially clever… but you start watching and you're immediately having a ball.
The big connection this time around is David Arnold's Independence Day score, which was heavily used to temp track Wing Commander… presumably because Arnold was writing Wing Commander's overture! Compare the ID4 theme to the one from Wing Commander:
Chris Roberts would go on to hire ID4's alien designer, Patrick Tatopoulos, to rework the Kilrathi. The work never made it to screen but I think you can see the influence!
Maybe the most memorable 'trademark' of ID4 was the aliens' destruction of major monuments. Gamers had already blown up the White House in Command and Conquer a few months earlier… and Wing Commander III and IV used real world buildings to connect their futures with the story, too!
The alien fighters certainly bring to mind Wing Commander's Dralthi. Especially the finale where the characters fly a captured one in combat… complete with sticky notes translating the instrumentation, just like Denis Loubet's Dralthi cockpit for Secret Missions 2!
The F-18 shots are all filmed just like the Wing Commander movie, though that's nothing unusual… we saw how those techniques came into being back in the 1950s with films like The Dambusters!
The famous laptop that Jeff Goldblum's character uses to save the world is an Apple PowerNook 5300… which means that he could use it to play the Macintosh versions of Super Wing Commander or Wing Commander III… or even Wing Commander IV, which would've come out about two weeks before the events of the movie!
Sully says... maybe skip the sequel.
