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These films were routine but easy to take; they put the fun in perfunctory. ID4 is a big step up, a doomsday fable told at warp speed. The approach of the alien ships is nicely achieved, with ominous shadows creeping across the Apollo 11 monument on the moon, then up the facades of the White House and the Empire State Building. On Earth, an ensemble cast fleshes out the stereotypes (Harvey Fierstein, whiny gay man; Judd Hirsch, crusty old Jew; Vivica Fox, stripper with heart of gold), while the three male leads mine all available righteousness and comic charm. Wryness is a big tactic here; it keeps the story from going ballistic. In the late 1990s, you will learn, there is apparently a 24-hour McLaughlin Group channel. There's also a near monopoly of Fox and Star TV news networks. The networks are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which just happens to have financed ID4.
The film has a salutary scope and bustle and enough kick in the fireball special effects to make audiences cheer--sure, it's the end of the world, but you can still party like it's 1999. As Will Smith says, "You can sell an alien attack better than the old days when you could see the zipper on the back of the alien's costume." Minute by minute, though, things look mighty familiar. If Forrest Gump was Everyman, ID4 is Everymovie, a browse through the whole film catalog: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Strangelove, Close Encounters, Alien, Top Gun, 2001, Apollo 13.
Devlin, 33, comes from a movie family (his father is a producer; his actress mother appeared in a '60s Star Trek 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 us.'"
Nothing seems so anachronistically delightful as an old movie that takes place in the future. Whatever dire thing people predicted was going to happen didn't. ID4, set in the near future, has that same comforting feeling. It's deja new. And if the picture gives us familiar thrills instead of the paranormal creeps, just wait. Ambitious writers and directors all over Hollywood are busily devising aliens whose evil is bounded only by their creators' imaginations. As Zemeckis says, "We can make them into what we want them to be, whether it's angry and vengeful or benevolent and healing."
Moviemakers don't need to conquer the aliens. They control the screen. And when they do it well, they control us, as cunningly as an ID4 alien running a mind scan on a puny Earthling. Only after the lights come up can we shake off the fear, say, "It's only a movie," and steal an anxious glance at the night sky.
--Reported by Georgia Harbison, Daniel S. Levy and Andrea Sachs/New York and Jeffrey Ressner and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles
For a special TIME online report about sci-fi, see https://www.time.com/scifi