TVScape.NET

Basic Facts:

Episodes: 24
Runtime: 42 min.
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Premiered: 1995

Format:

Series

Genres:

Action, Sci-Fi

Created By:

Glen Morgan, James Wong

Actors:

James Morrison, Joel de la Fuente, Kristen Cloke, Lanei Chapman, Morgan Weisser, Rodney Rowland, Tucker Smallwood

Made In:

USA

Premiered at:

FOX

Well, I really like sci­ence fic­tion and I really wanted to like Space: Above And Beyond, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. And I must say that I am very, very dis­ap­pointed with it, and I am not at all sur­prised that it was can­celed due to the low rat­ings. Series is cre­ated by Glen Mor­gan and James Wong and aired on FOX in 1995 and 1996 with only one sea­son and total of 24 episodes and ended with cliffhanger. But let’s get back to the start.

Story

One of the biggest prob­lems of the story is that it’s too com­pli­cated. Human race was in war with one another, there are sil­i­cates (robots basi­cally) made to fight for humans. They rebelled, so humans made tanks (made in vitro) to fight against sil­i­cates. And finally they were found by bru­tal alien race. To make things worse, cen­ter of the story are US marines (yeah US). World is seem­ingly united, but US marines are still top dogs, only now are oper­at­ing on space ships. Every­thing about them is already seen in count­less B pro­duc­tion movies and it looks very bad here. If it wasn’t for that, maybe the rest of the series wouldn’t look so bad.

I will not bore you with actual story, but it’s not any­thing you didn’t see, and it’s far from any­thing original.

Cast and characters

Cast­ing is just aver­age and bland. Char­ac­ters are not inter­est­ing and their back-​stories badly con­structed, and I couldn’t relate to any of them. Dialogs are full of cliché talk and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences to pop cul­ture of 20-​th cen­tury, and most of it is plain stupid.

Pro­duc­tion

Well, this is kind a bet­ter than both story and char­ac­ters. Visual effects are very good for the period and TV bud­get. Sets are not as good, and look too generic and bor­ing (maybe because of the mil­i­tary theme), but spe­cial effects, ships and CGI are good. Music is also good and again, much bet­ter than the series.

Con­clu­sion

So, I didn’t like it, but who knows, you may wanna try it for your­self. I know that many con­sider this a cult show, but I sim­ply can’t see that.