Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...truth is out there" and "Trust no one"--are the ideal ingredients for a sci-fi cocktail with a '90s twist. The paranormal and the paranoiac have joined hands through a pop-cultural wormhole; they meet and multiply. It's not so much science as psychic or psychoanalytic fiction...
...phenomenon is 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...
Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't 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...
...wild ride, is a can-do scholar of Hollywood moviemaking; he has built a reputation for efficient melodramas on modest budgets. (For all its locations and effects and the mandatory cast of thousands, ID4 reportedly cost a thrifty $71 million.) Emmerich first fell under the spell of science fiction as a boy watching U.S. films as well as local sci-fi TV shows in his native Germany. "For me," he says, "going on a science-fiction movie set is like visiting toyland. You see, my brother trashed all my toys when I was a kid. It's very Freudian...
...episode, "Wolf in the Fold," as a princess killed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper); adapting Fred Allen's famous jape about television, he says, "Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood." He knows that movies are to steal from. "More than any other genre," Devlin says, "science fiction cannot deny what comes before it. So, when we did a science-fiction film, especially one like this, where we wanted to have fun, we said, 'Let's out-and-out pay tribute wherever we can to movies that came before...