Adding to the film's visual impact was its realistic attention to accurate detail. It's not in Star Trek or Star Wars. Usually in these pictures, space is depicted as blackness with little white dots, and we have almost none of that in Wing Commander . Still, the film may have alienated fans of director Chris Roberts' CD-ROMs because of its different approach, Moyer says. The spaceships are meant to look like World War II battleships.
Some people like it, some people hate it.
This is the area that the director and the designers really went for, and some people haven't liked it, but it's what we wanted to do. The film also replaced the CD-ROMs' cast, which included Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, with hot young stars like Freddie Prinze, Jr., Matthew Lillard and Saffron Burrows. You can't put Mark Hamill in a feature film starring role of a teenager. The beginning of the series is about young pilots. Also, we put in something for all the European audiences.