The invasion has begun: 'Independence Day'
                      arrives to lead the assault of science-fiction
                      movies, TV shows and books on the cultural
                      mainstream. (Cover Story) Richard Corliss.

                 Abstract: 'Independence Day' (ID4) is the most
                 spectacular of over a dozen science- fiction film for
                 summer 1996, along with at least as many current or
                 planned sci-fi TV shows. While ID4 may be 1950s paranoia
                 with 1990s special effects, other shows explore
                 psychology, humor and cynicism about government secrecy.

                 Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1996

                 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."

                 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).

                 The airwaves and cable wires already pulse with a dozen
                 TV series on the otherworldly, from the light-headed NBC
                 hit 3rd Rock from the Sun to the time-travel capering of
                 Sliders on Fox, from Showtime's The Outer Limits and
                 Poltergeist: The Legacy to the fact-based (or factoidal)
                 Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings. Two of the series, The
                 Sentinel on UPN and Fox's new Millennium, from The
                 X-Files creator Chris Carter, are psychic cop shows. The
                 media sky is darker with eerie phenomena than a
                 UFOlogist's nightscape. As a serial killer whispers in
                 the first episode of Millennium (the creepiest TV
                 premiere since Twin Peaks), "You can't stop it!"

                 In some of these shows, such as the proliferating Star
                 Trek spin-offs, the aliens are benign, intellectually
                 curious--like American mid-century liberals, only with
                 pointy ears or exposed frontal lobes. The Zeitgeistiest
                 programs, however, tap into a pop persecution mania.
                 Consider this: the U.S. stands unchallenged as a world
                 power, is not at war, enjoys a high standard of living
                 and has relatively stable rates of interest and
                 unemployment; yet polls continue to show a profound
                 malaise. People feel crushed by government, abused by
                 corporate employers, baffled by computers. "Technology is
                 moving fast-forward," says Carter, "and we rarely get a
                 chance to understand the implications. Most of us can't
                 program our VCR. We have the tools of science in our
                 hands, and we're afraid of them."

                 Today, the American theology of the '50s--the middle
                 class's belief in the government's bland benevolence--is
                 a dying creed. Rising expectations have given way to
                 escalating suspicions about those in power. It isn't only
                 the Montana Freemen who believe that we have met the
                 enemy and he is U.S. "We know we've been lied to," says
                 Bryce Zabel, Dark Skies' co-creator, "about Vietnam,
                 Watergate, Iran-contra." Moreover, as ID4's Emmerich
                 notes, "every generation creates its own mythology. Now
                 the mythology centers on the government's hiding the dead
                 alien bodies it discovered at Roswell."

                 Ah, Roswell. This New Mexico town is the Lourdes of
                 psy-fi, just as Area 51, the supersecret facility in
                 Nevada, is its Vatican. The story goes like this: in July
                 1947, flying saucers crashed near Roswell, and dead
                 creatures and their spacecraft were taken into government
                 custody; for a half-century, alien remains have been
                 studied in Area 51. Officially, the place barely exists,
                 but it and Roswell have entered the pop lexicon. Area 51
                 appeared in the second episode of The X-Files; it is the
                 setting for much of Independence Day. In the hit movie
                 The Rock, the FBI director says that Sean Connery knows
                 about "the alien landing at Roswell." Dark Skies posits
                 that the government suppressed news of the Roswell aliens
                 and that the space demons have taken over America by
                 implanting infant aliens in people's brains--a scenario
                 for people who think Oliver Stone's conspiracy theories
                 are way too timid.

                 Area 51 must be a busy place; everyone has a theory about
                 what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's
                 hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career,
                 particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin
                 Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery
                 Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on
                 the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks
                 from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents
                 into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The
                 government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks to get
                 a genetic encoding. It then puts it into a huge computer
                 so that it always knows what you are doing." Murphy takes
                 a breath. "Of course, I might be just a little paranoid."

                 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 or
                 another." He cites J.G. Ballard's remark: "The only truly
                 alien planet is Earth."

                 The idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars
                 as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David
                 Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents
                 metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in
                 '50s films often represented communists--faceless
                 invaders who were going to take over our country. The
                 mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968
                 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day
                 sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders
                 intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic
                 cleansing. They don't want to come in and settle. They
                 want to take over."

                 If we are now painting the Other as bad guys in black
                 spaceships, what does it mean? Clive Barker, the author
                 (Sacrament) and filmmaker (Hellraiser), thinks the
                 attitude is dangerously alienating. "It disconnects us
                 from being able to operate in the real world," he says.
                 "There's a sense we're unplugging from political
                 activity, civic duties or even responsibility to our
                 neighbors by saying there are things greater than us and
                 secrets hidden from us. We are a superstitious species,
                 and we need to look outside ourselves for something
                 larger that will bring either calamity or wisdom or maybe
                 both. This is about belief, not just box office."

                 It may be about belief. It is certainly about box office.
                 Peter Chernin, the 20th Century Fox chairman, didn't see
                 a holy white light when he gave the green light to ID4;
                 he was thinking grosses. Michael Sullivan of UPN didn't
                 have religion in mind when he put four sci-fi shows on
                 his network; he was thinking demographics. "Sci-fi has
                 traditionally been a cult item, and 20 years ago,
                 networks had to draw a mass audience. Now with the
                 networks' share of audience diminishing, that core
                 audience becomes more significant," he says. And NBC's
                 Warren Littlefield was not looking for metaphors when he
                 programmed an entire Saturday evening of fall shows with
                 spooky themes. He was listening to the voice of his
                 11-year-old son, to whom the fantastic is as real as it
                 is to Gibson. "I can't get him to watch a classic western
                 on television," Littlefield says and repeats this recent
                 conversation. Son: "So let me get this straight. The
                 horse doesn't fly?" Father: "No, it just rides across the
                 desert." Son: "I'm outta here."

                 It's the TV producer's job to keep kids and adults glued
                 to the screen. As The X-Files' Carter easily admits, "Our
                 goal, first and foremost, is to scare people." It's the
                 modern movie director's job to package an old idea with
                 zippy effects so that the audience will think it's seeing
                 something new--and be blown away. During the cold war,
                 even the cheesiest sci-fi filmmaker, like the legendarily
                 dyscompetent Ed Wood, had some moral admonition in mind
                 ("He tampered in God's domain"). Now it's size that
                 counts; sense and scruples don't. As Spielberg says, "If
                 the '70s and '80s were the era of the What if? movie,
                 then the '90s are the era of the What the heck! movie. We
                 say, 'Hey, this is so beyond our logical grasp, so out of
                 this world, that we're just going along for the ride.'"

                 Emmerich, 40, the conductor of ID4's 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. For my movies you can blame my
                 brother Andy."

                 Emmerich made his early films in Germany--and in English,
                 for the world market. In 1989, after a clever
                 Spielberg-rip-off kids' fantasy (Making Contact) and a
                 comedy about moviemaking (Ghost Chase), he directed Moon
                 44, an outer-space Dirty Dozen with a story line that
                 would recur in ID4: for a desperate space battle, a
                 former combat pilot must assemble a ragtag band of
                 flyers, including a loser with heroically suicidal
                 tendencies. Devlin played the computer-nerdy male
                 ingenue; after Moon 44, he and the director became
                 filmmaking partners.

                 Their first U.S. project was Universal Soldier, a hearty
                 exercise in RoboCop sadomachismo that starred Jean-Claude
                 Van Damme. Then, in 1994 Emmerich and Devlin did
                 Stargate, about a secret government agency detecting
                 signs of extraterrestrial life and discovering that the
                 pyramids were made by aliens. With Kurt Russell as the
                 director's standard rogue grunt, the film was a surprise
                 hit.

                 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.