Word: alienating
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...summer's end, the only creatures on Earth to feel alien will be those who haven't seen ID4. (O.K., the abbreviation makes no sense, and what will they call the sequel, ID5?) The most smartly hyped film of the summer, it is also the grandest: Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the director and co-author, dare to imagine the ultimate catastrophe as it kills off tens of millions of unseen victims and ennobles a dozen major characters, from the Commander in Chief to a stripper...
This is a busy summer for the paranormal: The Arrival sent Charlie Sheen off to battle aliens (involved in a, yes, government conspiracy), and this week, in Phenomenon, John Travolta undergoes a mysterious hoisting of his IQ and psychic powers. The season has already been a sweltering one for blockbusters: Twister has earned more than $215 million at the U.S. box office, Mission Impossible more than $160 million. But ID4, with heroic humankind battling an army of soulless space lizards, may well be the biggest. Says Steven Spielberg, who evoked the wonder of interplanetary communication in Close Encounters...
...pieces. "The U.S. is desperately in search of an enemy," says Paul Verhoeven, who has directed some stunning sci-fi (RoboCop, Total Recall) and the equally otherworldly Showgirls. "The communists were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful enemy everyone can fight has been lost. Alien sci-fi films give us a terrifying enemy that's politically correct. They're bad. They're evil. And they're not even human...
...here to stay, for a while. Hollywood is launching more than a dozen science-fiction movies within the next year or so. Besides Mars Attacks! (a gleefully nihilistic vaudeville that promises to play Dr. Strangelove to ID4's relatively docudramatic Fail-Safe) and the inevitable sequels and remakes of Alien, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Lost in Space, you'll see big-budget versions of thoughtful sci-fi novels: Carl Sagan's Contact (directed by Robert Zemeckis), Michael Crichton's Sphere (Barry Levinson) and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven...
...enemy and he is U.S. "We know we've been lied to," says Bryce Zabel, Dark Skies' co-creator, "about Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra." Moreover, as ID4's Emmerich notes, "every generation creates its own mythology. Now the mythology centers on the government's hiding the dead alien bodies it discovered at Roswell...