Thursday july 11th, 1996
Source: Daily Express newspaper
from Dermot Purgavie in New York
A World that had run pitifully short of enemies - at least those it dared offend - has rediscovered aliens.
Since the end of the Cold War robbed us of the Evil Empire, we have lacked an adversary at which we could aim our hostility without violating the delicate sensibilities of political correctness.
But now, like manna from Hollywood, down comes the ideal enemy - and you can say what you like about them.
Alien loathing has reached frenzied, epidemic proportions across America since the film Independence Day arrived like a fireball.
It is a crowd-rousing, eye-jolting war of the worlds epic about the earth beset, and ultimately unified, by an invasion of aliens intent on nothing less than inter-galactic ethnic cleansing.
It has been a sensation, notching up the biggest opening in the history of movies, earning 66 million pounds sterling in just six days.
The enemy is eventually vanquished by a valiant group of flyers, led by the President of the United States, who, providentially, turns out to have been a combat pilot in his earlier life.
Much of the films appeal lies in its cartoonish heroism and the fact that there are no complicating ambiguities about Us and Them. They are the bad guys. They are ugly. They are evil. Best of all, they're not human. We can hate them without guilt.
"In movies we've run out of ideas for bad guys," says Dean Devlin, producer of Independence Day.
"We end up with politically incorrect villains like Arab terrorists or Latin drug dealers or corrupt politicians. Well, aliens are the best film villains since the Nazis." The film, known as ID4, pays affectionate tribute to every classic sci-fi movie.
The effects are stunning. Awesome 15-mile wide alien battleships move over the worlds capitals and zap them with death rays, spectacularly reducing the White House and the Empire State Building to flaming rubble.
Nobody is quite sure what makers 20th Century Fox did right. Fox's Peter Chernin said: "We keep thinking we're going to run out of people who want to see it. We keep thinking reality will set in."
Independence Day and Twister, the rampaging tornado film that has taken 140 million pounds sterling in nine weeks, have established a new line in Hollywood wisdom: You don't need expensive stars when you have compelling computer generated visual drama. Both movies have left much-hyped competition as Eraser and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Striptease with Demi Moore gasping. And if nobody can quite analyse their success, every body's going to try to repeat it. There are now more than a dozen new sci-fi films on the stocks.
But filmgoers looking for philosophical ideas will be disappointed. Devlin says: "The closest we get to social statement is to play upon the idea that as we approach the Millennium, will there be an apocalypse, and if so, how will it come?"
According to UFO expert Thomas McDonough, aliens won't come without calling first. It is, he says, "so much easier to send information than roam around the galaxy in a ship that uses more energy than our entire civilisation".
Good news, bad movie.
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