Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995
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Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is a 1995 American action thriller film directed by Geoff Murphy, starring Steven Seagal as the ex-Navy SEAL, Casey Ryback. Set on board a train traveling through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Los Angeles, it is the sequel to the 1992 film Under Siege also starring Seagal. The title refers to the railroading term that the subject train was travelling through dark territory, a section of railroad track that has no train signals and in which communications between train dispatchers and the railroad engineers were impossible. The film was produced by Seagal along with Arnon Milchan and Steve Perry. The film’s cast also included Eric Bogosian, Everett McGill, Morris Chestnut, Peter Greene, Kurtwood Smith and Katherine Heigl. In addition to Seagal, Nick Mancuso, Andy Romano, and Dale Dye also reprised their roles from the first film.
Plot.
Following his retirement from the United States Navy, Casey Ryback settles in Denver, Colorado, where he starts and runs a restaurant business. Sometime later, his estranged brother, James Ryback, perishes in a plane crash. Upon receiving news of the incident, Casey meets James’s daughter, Sarah, whom he will accompany to Los Angeles to attend his funeral. The two board the Grand Continental, a train traveling through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Los Angeles. On board, they befriend a porter named Bobby Zachs and the train’s chefs. As the train reaches the Rocky Mountains, a group of terrorists flag it down and murder the engineer and brakeman. The group, led by former U.S. government employee and computer genius Travis Dane and his second-in-command Marcus Penn, cuts the train phone lines and takes passengers and staff hostage, herding them into the last two cars. Casey kills one terrorist, then slips away. Dane worked on Grazer One, a top secret military satellite particle weapon for underground targets. The military fired Dane, who later faked his suicide.
Dane threatens two former Department of Defense colleagues with burning needles in their eyes unless they reveal codes to take over Grazer. Despite their disclosures, after the codes are confirmed to work, they are thrown from the train over a deep valley.
Middle Eastern terrorists have offered Dane $1 billion to destroy the Eastern seaboard by using Grazer to target a nuclear reactor located under the Pentagon. Dane demonstrates Grazer to investors by destroying a Chinese biological weapons facility that was passing itself off as a fertilizer production plant. After one investor offers an additional $100 million, despite the weapon’s primary intention for subterranean targets, Dane destroys an airliner carrying the investor’s ex-wife.
The U.S. government has difficulty locating Dane or Grazer. When officials destroy what they think is Grazer, Dane explains the NSA’s best intelligence satellite was destroyed. As long as the train keeps moving, his location cannot be determined.
Development.
The film was an early credit for Matt Reeves who wrote the script with a friend of his in college. Reeves later said, “There was a big action spec market, a lot of movies that were selling, and so we wrote this movie with my thought being, ‘And then I will be able to finance my student film and that way I can become a director’.” The script was called Dark Territory at one stage and End of the Line at another. When they finished writing it “the spec market crashed and it didn’t sell.” But the script was optioned by Warner Brothers, who decided to turn the film into a sequel to Under Siege. Reeves said the film was originally “meant to be very much like a Die Hard movie, which I guess Under Siege really was too, except the difference was that in the Under Siege movies that tension is how soon before Seagal will rip out someone’s larynx. And what I love about Die Hard was this idea of the underdog, that here’s this guy, especially in that first movie, who’s a cop from New York who doesn’t even have shoes. And somehow he has got to save this building, save the day. That was what that movie was supposed to be, but it didn’t end up being that.”RELATED:
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Filming.
According to Morris Chestnut Seagal rewrote many of the scenes he was in. “The only time they really stuck to the script or had ad libs was the stuff when he really wasn’t there. It was a lot of stuff, because at that time I think he was flying a helicopter, he was doing something… He would come to set, “Okay, you’re gonna say this. I’m gonna say this and this is gonna happen and then you do that.” That’s how we did a lot of that movie.” Part of the film was shot in Chatsworth’s Stony Point Park. The production painted some of the boulders, which upset rock climbers who claimed it made them unsafe. The locomotive seen in the film had previously appeared in the 1985 film Runaway Train. Director Geoff Murphy called making the film “a very dreary process and very highly contentious at the time – lots of arguments and stuff. There was a point during the editing where I observed this incredibly high energy beast emerging, and I didn’t know where it had come from, because there wasn’t any of that energy on the set. It seemed to grow out of the editing process.”