TV OF THE ABSURD: Joe Flanigan Stars in Ferocious Planet
Speaking about his new movie Ferocious Planet, Stargate Atlantis star Joe Flanigan says, "to just get back into some camouflage and run around and shoot things. Call me crazy. I know it sounds a little weird, but I felt right at home!"
As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities between the Syfy series and the new original movie, at a quick glance, it can be hard to tell them apart. Just look at the photo of Flanigan on the run with his movie co-star -- looks like Atlantis to me!
In Ferocious Planet, Flanigan plays a disgraced Colonel who has been assigned to babysit a couple of scientists working in a bunker next door to the IRS. Enter John Rhys-Davies, a borish Senator who threatens to cut off the project's funding if Dr. O'Hara (Dagmar Döring) can't convince him that she's doing something worthwhile.
Against her better judgment, she fires up the machine which creates a window into parallel dimensions. Unfortunately, things go sideways and the entire bunker is thrown through a portal and into a land that is inhabited by creepy creatures that skitter around your feet and big mama monsters who don't take kindly to visitors.
From there, it's non-stop action as Flanigan and his two teammates do all they can to protect the civilians while the Doctor and her tech work on a way to get them back home.
Like all Syfy Original Movies, Ferocious Planet surges forward with tongue firmly planted in cheek. That's not to say that it's as wild as Mega Piranha or Sharktopus. The parallel dimension plot makes the creatures much more believable, kind of like an episode of Primeval.
Flanigan plays the whole thing like a war-weary commando whose quick with a quip and more annoyed than fearful of being killed. Flanigan says his calm demeanor was less of a directorial choice and more about the fact that he was mislead in regard to the size of the monsters.
"I didn't think they'd be that big," he told reporters on a recent conference call. "When we shot this, we shot it Ireland, and we worked strictly on green screen, and we weren’t given much in the way of what it was going to look like. And that’s kind of interesting because on [Stargate Atlantis], we always knew what the Wraith were going to look like. And so, you had an idea of what you were looking at and what you were working with. [With Ferocious Planet], we weren’t entirely clear what these things were going to look like until after we shot it, so I was just hoping that our levels of appropriate fear were there..."
