8. Wing Commander (1999)
As it presently stands, there are more Wing Commander games on the market than I've had hot dinners, and even with this wealth of material to draw from, the filmmakers couldn't find a way to convincingly bring the popular franchise to the big screen. Remember Freddie Prinze Jr? Star of
She's All That? Married to Sarah Michelle Gellar? A former-WWE writer? In the late-90s - coincidentally, right in the lead up to an expected apocalypse - studio executives who are no doubt languishing in the ninth circle of Hollywood Hell as we speak, believed Prinze Jr. to be a viable box office commodity, and cast him as protagonist Lt. Christopher Blair (who was played by Mark Hamill in the video game's cut-scenes). Adding to the insanity was the choice to appoint the video game series' creator, Chris Roberts, as the film's director, despite demonstrating no prior promise that he could helm dramatic and action-packed scenes worthy of the big screen. Saddled with a paltry $30m budget, the costumes for the alien race Kilrathi wouldn't be out of place in a primary school reconstruction of the Ewok scenes from
Star Wars, and the visual effects of the space battles give the feel of something that would be politely referred to as "Lucas-lite". While not the worst video game adaptation, it is the most strikingly bizarre in terms of creative decisions, outside of the choice to allow Uwe Boll to make movies in the first place, of course...