(2 of 6)
ID4 is a vigorous, retro-'70s disaster movie, reminiscent of Airport or The Towering Inferno. Only this time the disaster is the end of the world. On July 2 in a near future year, humongous spaceships enter the Earth's atmosphere, hover over major cities around the globe, then send out a heat ray that pulverizes every urban center. Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Moscow--all barbecued. On July 3 the U.S. President (Bill Pullman) plots his counterattack with the aid of a computer genius (Jeff Goldblum), an Air Force pilot (Will Smith) and all their surviving relatives. By July 4, ID4 has soared into flyboy heaven for the climactic dogfight between Us and the Evil Other. You saw the movie's trailer--didn't it promise you fireworks? All right, ID4 delivers.
"Our movie is pretty obvious," Devlin admits. "The closest we get to a social statement is to play upon the idea that as we approach the millennium, and we're no longer worried about a nuclear threat, the question is, Will there be an apocalypse, and if so, how will it come?" In ID4, it comes to us. Once man, and movies, dreamed of conquering space; then we got to the moon and woke up. Now sci-fi films are passive-aggressive: we wait for the spacemen to drop by. And if the visitors are hostile, we go nuclear on their ass.
Brisk and churning, ID4 offers no grand vision, other than the fact that, in this post-cold war era, it looks to outer space to find new enemies worth hating, fighting and blasting into little squishy 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."
Like most sci-fi movies, ID4 is a sensation machine. You leave saying "Wow!" instead of a speculative "Hmmm." These days the real head scratchers are on TV; there you'll find the genre's cool, metallic intellect touched by the fever of despair. The X-Files' twin mantras--"The 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. Psy-fi.
And the 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).