Debuting this Sunday night on TNT, Falling Skies is one of the most anticipated series of the summer. The show comes from producer Steven Spielberg and stars ER veteran Noah Wyle. It revolves around a resistance group trying to survive and possibly fight back after a group of aliens invade and conquer the Earth.
Unlike other alien invasion series, Falling Skies isn’t as concerned with the alien invasion so much as the human storylines surrounding it. In Sunday’s first episode, we hear about the invasion through a series of drawings from one of the younger characters on the show.
Spielberg tells USA Today that when it comes to possibility of alien intelligence in our universe, he believes there could be other lifeforms out there.
“I have a harder time embracing the absence of intelligent life in the universe than I do accepting it,” he says.
He goes on to say that his interest in the heavens and outer space came from his father.
“It was just a very deep interest I had, based on my father’s interest in astronomy and getting interested in the stars when I was a boy,” he says. As a filmmaker, “I was able to put that wonder to good use.”
“One of the things we all discussed was the most exciting event should be something as small as having to go to a Food King to ascertain whether it’s a bait-and-trap or an opportunity to resupply,” he says. His colleague, screenwriter Robert Rodat, saw parallels to the Revolutionary War, with aliens instead of redcoats.
Spielberg always saw Skies as a TV project because of the hours needed to answer its many questions, including the invaders’ motivation: Are they truly evil? “It’s going to take a season to answer that question.”
But while the alien invasion theme may seem a bit dark and bleak to some, Wyle says the series does offer hope.
“Negative circumstances, positive aspects of humanity. Nobility of character in dire circumstances,” says Wyle. “One of the things that attracted me early on was not so much the nature of the invasion itself, but the idea of hitting the reset button on society and having a group of people who would become the architects of the next civilization.”
“We tried to find pros and cons to this existence,” Wyle says. “The obvious cons are the level of deprivation these characters have to live with and the level of threat they live under. The pros are more subtle, but no less profound. There’s a scene with a baby shower where it’s less about getting swag for the kid and more about the communal aspects of bringing a baby into the community.”
We’ll have more on Falling Skies on the upcoming episodes of Slice of SciFi.
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