Word: alienness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...Mexico town is the Lourdes of psy-fi, just as Area 51, the supersecret facility in Nevada, is its Vatican. The story goes like this: in July 1947, flying saucers crashed near Roswell, and dead creatures and their spacecraft were taken into government custody; for a half-century, alien remains have been studied in Area 51. Officially, the place barely exists, but it and Roswell have entered the pop lexicon. Area 51 appeared in the second episode of The X-Files; it is the setting for much of Independence Day. In the hit movie The Rock, the FBI director says...
...think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind or another." He cites J.G. Ballard's remark: "The only truly alien planet is Earth...
...idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in '50s films often represented communists--faceless invaders who were going to take over our country. The mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic cleansing. They don't want to come...