spaceaboveandbeyond.net

Space Wars

Entering a futuristic Vietnam with Space: Above and Beyond
The first season of SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, the brainchild of Ex X-Files wirters and producers Glen Morgan and James Wong, is currently being shot in America. Joe Nazzaro talks to the boys about their latest project, a sort of Top Gun meets Full Metal Jacket in space ...

Okay, here's the situation: You're two well established TV writers, just brought over to Fox on a two-year development deal, when the president of the studio asks you to create a brand new SF series along the lines of Top Gun in space. Now, what do you do if the high-flying Tom Cruise actioner isn't exactly you're favourite film? Well, if you're Glen Morgan and James Wong, you simply come up with something completely different...

"We'd taken a class in college that we really liked, called 'The Fiction of War,' " says Space: Above and Beyond's co-creator Glen Morgan. "We read everything from The Illiad to Catch 22 to All Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage - even The Forever War by Haldeman - and, basically, we decided to do The World at War."

"For a long time, people had avoided doing action on television," continues Morgan, who, along with his partner James Wong, worked on scripts for such eclectic fare as 21 Jump Street, The Commish and several critically acclaimed episodes of The X-Files. "They would say, 'Why watch a show with action? You're competing against Terminator 2 and the Die Hard movies.' What we've tried to do is focus on our characters, so the action may not be as big, but people will become involved with the characters."

Space: Above and Beyond debuts stateside in September with a two-hour pilot movie, followed by a weekly series. The year is 2063, and mankind has started to colonise other worlds.
"It's about Nathan West (Morgan Weisser), who's going into space to be a colonist with Kylen, this girl he loves very much," explains Morgan. "On the day of the launch, they're told that there is a directive from senate, that 10 'In Vitros' have to be on board or they'll scrub the mission.
It's a sort of affirmative action program. The governor of the Tellus Colony says, 'I hate to tell you, but one of isn't going.' It's a horrible situation, and Nathan tries to stow away. He's caught, thrown off the rocket, and Kylen goes off into space."

"Meanwhile, Nathan's been told his colonial certificate is good for transfer into the Marine Corps Aviator Academy. Word is, the Marines are going to become sentries for the Tellus colony, so maybe that's a way he can get back into contact with Kylen. Nathan is thinking, 'This is stupid, we're at peace,' but he joins in, believing it his best hope to make contact with Kylen. As the ship taking the colonists to Tellus is about to land, it is attacked by an alien race. When word comes back that some of the colnists have survived the story becomes one about this guy trying to hold onto the dream that he'll meet his girl again."

Not that the show will concentrate on Nathan and Kylen, as Morgan explains:
"The main female character is called Shane Vance (played by Kristen Cloke). Her parents, killed in a previos war, were marine corps officers, so she's doing this to close the circle."

"Cooper Hawkes (Rodney Rowland) is what's known as an 'In Vitro', or 'tank'. They were raised in-vitro to be soldiers, and the only thing that differentiates them from human beings is a naval on the back of their necks. As a new race there's prejudice against them. Early on in the pilot, for example, there's a lynching scene where some guys are trying to hang Cooper, and when he tries to get back at them, the cops arrive and throw him in jail. He's then sentenced to the military. This is a guy who's never had a family and is now in the middle of all these people."

In addition to the three main characters, the two-hour pilot also introduces fellow recruits Vanessa Damphousse and Paul Wang, as well as McQueen, commander of the 58th Squadron. "Damphousse (Lanei Chapman) is still relatively undefined," says Wong, "but we know she has a relationship on Earth with someone who has a child. She's kind of a fix-it person. She was stationed at a nuclear reactor when she was on Earth, she's educated and she knows mechanical stuff. But she's not like Scotty in Star Trek..."

"Joel De La Fuente, the actor who lays Wang, is very good with humour, so we've give the character some of the lighter moments. He's a sports nut, and in one episode, he sneaks his bag on a mission. When he opens it up we find he's brought a football with him. He says to Damphousse, 'I've been waiting forever for this: a planet with gravity two-thirds that of Earth!' and he throws this football and it goes on forever. He's a good source of comic relief, but I'm sure we'll get into deeper, more personal things eventually."

And their leader?

"McQueen (James Morrison) is the father figure of our group. He's going to give the 58th their assignments, and through his experiences he's hopefully going to teach them what he's learned. Our people are going to learn from their own adventures, but he certainly has more experience and a mature way of looking at things. The fact that he's an In Vitro is an interesting adjunct to that, and something to play off. If Cooper is this rebellious kind of person, you can almost see McQueen as someone who's one through it and come out the other side. I think he's going to be a really interesting character."

Finally, there's Sgt Major Bougus, the marines' ass-kicking drill sergeant, played by R Lee Ermey. According to Wong, their prototype for Bougus was Ermey's Golden Globe-nominated character from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

"We thought he was great, and the rhythms he spoke with were so real, we had to get somebody like him. After several weeks of trying to cast the right guy, we still couldn't find somebody, and finally we said, 'Why don't we just hire R. Lee Ermey?' We had stayed away from that because we were afraid of playing the Full Metal Jacket thing again, but then we thought, 'Well, we're playing the Full Metal Jacket thing anyway; let's just go with it.' And we're happy we did, because he was just terrific. Ermey was a marine drill instructor who went to Vietnam on three tours, and mostly people can't usually stand two, so he's quite a character."

Of course, no alien invasion scenario would be complete without aliens. While the invaders play a major part in the series, Wong cautions viewers not to expect too much information about them in the first few episodes. He wants us to find out about them "piece by piece."

"For instance," he explains, "there's a survivor from the Tellus Colony who we talk to. We'll keep revealing littl things until, hopefully, the end of the first season, when there will be a major revalation about these aliens. I think we can keep up the mystery and reveal cool stuff about them. It's an interesting drama."

Another group that will be making their presence felt are the artificial intelligent beings (A.I.), who figure heavily in Shane's background story. Says Wong: "They were originally made to serve, but were given a computer virus by a disgruntled scientist, and so rebelled. Now they're pirates in space whose only allegiance is to themselves, so in one episode they're the enemy, but in the next, they could be uneasy friends."

"The A.I.s are humanoids who were originally made to be pleasing to the eye, but during the rebellion they've gotten torn up, so you can see the mechanics underneath their skin. Although they might be compared to the Borg or the replicants from Blade Runner, it's how our actors play them that makes them different. For instance, with the A.I.s, the virus the scientist gave them was a very simple statement: 'Take a chance.'

"Now the only one of man's creations which theAS.I.s revere is gambling. We have a scnene where our guys are playing blackjack for their lives, and it's those elements that make the characters different."

As for the tone of the series, its creators says it's not just "The X-Files set in space," as some might have expected.

"I think our tone is more intense action-adventure," says Wong. "It's a character study of people under pressure, and it's an action-adventure show set in the furture, so you have dogfights in space, aliens and other weird stuff. The backbone is 'We're at war' more than anything else."

When Morgan and Wong got the go-ahead to film the Space pilot, they turned to David Nutter, who they'd collaborated with on some of The X-Files most striking episodes, to help out.

"I don't think I'm the kind of director who has a style," explains Nutter, "so the script for a particular piece helps lend that style, in a sense, to me. When I read the pilot's script, I saw this was not an SF future - not a future that we can't relate to, or that's inaccessible. We wanted this future to be accessible, and, in many ways, retro - to get away from that Star Trek situation, with people dressed in tight polyester suits and no shadows, darkness or grime."

"Basically, we wanted to make this future as near to what's happening now as possible, because if you look at a lot of things, they really haven't changed that much in the past 100 years. A chair is still a chair, so we're going for that kind of atmosphere."

There certainly seems to be quite a lot of the World War 2 films in the things we're trying to do...

"Yeah, I drew upon films like Twelve O'Clock High, and those sort of World War 2 films - but also things like Outland, where they really grimed things up. In our story, corporate America has run off with all the money for colonising, and the military has been basically left behind. In the army you see more old-fashioned stuff, such as the space carrier, which I refer to as 'Das Boot in outer space,' and these Hammerhead fighters they're flying in."

"That was the feel I was trying for in the pilot, and I kept it constantly in mind. I looked back at old John Ford films, and tried to make it all large, like they were. I wanted to make a classic story about young people at war, always trying to treat it with as much dignity as possible. I wanted the pilot to have a classic sense to it, like an old Western, giving the audience as large a landscape as possible on a TV screen."

Fox initially ordered 13 episodes of Space: Above and Beyond, although its creators hope it'll be successful enough to warrant an additional pick-up. In the meantime, Wong gives SFX a sneak preview of the first half-dozen or so adventures:

"In the first episode, 'Farthest Man From Home', a survivor is discovered on Tellus, the colony that Nathan was supposed to be on, and - even though it's a secret - they've smuggled this insane colonist on board the Saratoga, and Nathan finds a way to talk to him. Though this man's insane, Nathan believes Kylen is still alive, and goes AWOL to try and find her on this alien occupied planet."

"'The Dark Side of the Sun' deals with Shane's obsession with the A.I.s. The 58th are sent on a sentry mission to a planet, where a component of the fuel used for their spacecraft is mined. A convoy is deployed to pick up this ore, and when our guys are sent to protect it, they're attacked by A.I.s who are also after the ore. The story is basically about how Shane deals with her memories, and what actions she takes against these machines."

"In 'Mutiny' by Steve Zito, the 58th hitches a ride on a tramp steamer-type space vehicle, and in the cargo are cryogenically frozen humans too - and In Vitors, who do all the dirty work.

When the ship comes under attack, loses power and the crew are forced to cut power to the In Vitros sparks a mutiny. Cooper is divided as to what to do."

"'Butts' is actually the name of one of the characters - if you take Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, and mix it with Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, you'll get an idea of what he's like. He takes the 58th away from McQueen and on a secret mission, so we have a situation where our squadron hates their commander, and rightly so. They learn who he is in this episode, and it's an interesting character study."

"'Fear' [aka The Enenmy] has been scripted by Marylyn Osborne. Our heroes go to a methane planet, and are attacked by an alien weapon that affects you psychologically to a point where the marines ahead of them have killed themselves. It's about how our guys deal with the psychological terror of this weapon."

"There will also be a two-parter with the Trojan Horse idea, using a disabled alien bomber and flying it back to bomb the alien base. They get shot down and placed in a prisoner of war camp in this alien-controlled planet, from which they have to escape."

As Space: Above and Beyond gets ready for its initial launch, Morgan and Wong hope viewers will discover more than just another glossy SF series.

"What I really want this to be about is faith," says Morgan. "Not necessarily religious faith, although that's fine, but nowadays officials get elected and - whether you're on the left or the right - you say, 'Okay, this is the guy for me,' and then, in what seems a matter of weeks, they've let you down. That's why we went back to the World War 2 films, where there was that mood of 'I'm willing to die for a cause.' That's the element we want to explore."

"For Nathan, it's the hope of getting Kylen back. For Cooper, who's grown up with no family or friends, he suddenly sees people who are willing to do things for others, and he's compelled to feel that was too. We've asked our writers, 'What is this character willing to die about in this episode?', and that's what I hope the series will be about."

Disclaimer: The characters and situations of Space: Above And Beyond are legal property of James Wong and Glen Morgan, Hard Eight Production and 20th Century Fox Television. No copyright infringement intended.
All site graphics, original texts, and content other than specified © DrkNite. Fan art, fan photos, and other contributed materials © to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

© 1996 - 2006