INDEPENDENCE DAY

INDEPENDENCE DAY. Roland Emmerich, dir. Centropolis (prod) / Twentieth Century Fox, 1996. Patrick Tatopoulos, prod. designer. Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, stars.

Alien "environmental suits" are biomechanical in design, as is the huge mothership. Tatopoulos describes it as "about 500 miles long. It's very organic, like a cocoon or half of an egg shell." Climax includes Smith and Goldblum in an alien ship flying into the mother ship for an image of two men inside a mechanical device inside a gigantic machine, and one imaged organically. Cf. the biomechanical designs of H. R. Giger (esp. ALIEN); cf. and emphatically contrast the starship Enterprise within the vastened Voyager for the climax of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, and the entry into the mothership at the end of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND; see also STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT. (Totopoulos quotation from coverage of ID in Cinefantastique 28.1 [Aug. 1996]: 14-15.) CAUTION: ID is an exercise in pastiche, intentionally following old formulas as perfected in the 1970s disaster movies and analyzed before that in Susan Sontag's essay on much Cold War film S.F., "The Imagination of Disaster"; it is also a direct answer to the liberal view of aliens in ET and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and an exercise in stereotypes, sentiment, and cynicism. (RDE, 07/07/96)