Pick a house, any average American house, and chances are the folks inside will be fans of science fiction. This pretty house in Washington, for example. The family has just had the cable Sci-Fi Channel installed. Mom has been known to try to commune with a dead woman who once lived there. And Dad? He just saw the new alien-invasion epic Independence Day--at home. Dean Devlin, the co-writer and producer, watched Dad watch the film, and Devlin was impressed: "He was whipping off facts about history, talking about social and international issues. But when the movie started, he pulled out a big old bucket of popcorn, kicked back, and he was Bubba again."
Bubba lives in the White House, the house that is zapped into holocaustal flames by a flying saucer's death ray in Independence Day. The house that, come Christmas, will be invaded by uggy green creatures with no manners at all in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! The house whose primary resident supposedly knows every secret of a secretive government--the hot dish about alien sightings, alien abductees, alien autopsies--except that, as viewers of TV shows like The X-Files are taught, the President doesn't know the half of it, because the information is kept from him by conspiratorial feds who may be, God help us, aliens themselves!
By 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's pet dog.
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 of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: "I could never make an evil, aggressive alien movie, but I would sure pay to see one. I'll pay to see this one. Based on the way I think people feel today, I believe Independence Day will be the No. 1 film of the year. It will do between $250 million and $300 million, if not more."