The Big Bang theory: why we love watching
                          our neighborhood bite the dust.
                          ('Independence Day' and other disaster
                          films) Jay Rayner.

                     Abstract: Disaster films such as the Godzilla films
                     of the 1950s, 'Planet of the Apes' in 1968, and Mick
                     Jackson's British TV film in 1984, 'Threads,' prove
                     that destruction sells. 'Independence Day' has some
                     good acting, but is mostly the grandest of disaster
                     flicks yet marketed.

                     Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Statesman and Nation
                     Publishing Company Ltd. (UK)

                     When I was a child, eager, inventive and indecently
                     destructive, I torched a house. It had lots of rooms,
                     a nice gable end and curtains of suburban net. It was
                     also a foot tall and built entirely of cardboard and
                     Sellotape. Boy, does that stuff burn. Orange flames
                     licked hungrily at wall after wall until all that
                     remained was ash and the pungent, chemical smell of
                     rendered plastic.

                     The thrill lay not merely in destruction. It was more
                     in the wicked caprice. A powerless kid the rest of
                     the time, here I was God in my very own playpen.

                     Unlike me, the film director Roland Emmerich has not
                     yet shaken off his childhood God complex. His latest
                     movie, Independence Day, is the biggest overnight
                     box-office hit in the history of cinema. Why? In the
                     movie, which is about an alien invasion of Earth,
                     ornate flying saucers the size of cities hover over
                     lovingly constructed models of the Empire State
                     Building, the White House and downtown LA, before
                     blowing the whole lot into a steaming heap of rubble
                     and dust. And how the audience cheers. There are
                     unique thrills to be gained from witnessing the
                     trashing of modern icons.

                     Or is this just a boy thing? It is certainly true
                     that the landmark destruction movie is generally
                     light on the more subtle emotions. But who needs all
                     that touchy-feely stuff when you can see the Golden
                     Gate Bridge collapse?
                     Like James Bond and Oleg Gordievsky, the genre is a
                     direct product of the Cold War. Film makers,
                     desperate to communicate the mighty power of the atom
                     that hung over us all, found themselves in a bit of a
                     quandary. They didn't really have the special effects
                     technology to show us what an exploding city would
                     look like (other than building something out of balsa
                     wood, then shaking it a lot while keeping their hands
                     well out of shot.)

                     They did, however, have a bunch of people who knew
                     how to make really silly things out of rubber. And
                     so, plumping for metaphor rather than realism, the
                     monster movies were born. Godzilla, Gorgo and the
                     rest yomped on to the screen, the result of
                     unfortunate radioactive mutations that left them
                     rather peevish and in search of a city to knacker.

                     New York went first in the 1953 movie The Beast from
                     20,000 Fathoms, followed by Tokyo in Godzilla, King
                     of the Monsters. In 1960 it was London's turn:
                     trampled beneath the lizardy feet of Gorgo, a
                     terrifying green thing who came over fretful when he
                     got stuck in the traffic around the Hangar Lane
                     Gyratory System. In the 1962 film Reptiles, for
                     reasons never properly explained, a monster laid
                     waste to sweet, unsuspecting Stockholm. But the rash
                     of destructive mutations died out in the
                     mid-seventies with an episode of The Goodies entitled
                     "Kittie Kong", in which a large cat knocked over the
                     then Post Office Tower.

                     On the darker side of the nuclear threat, Franklin
                     Schaffer gave us the aftermath of Armageddon in his
                     1968 movie Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston
                     falling to his knees before the ancient, charred
                     remains of the Statue of Liberty (a scene to which
                     Emmerich pays fleeting tribute in Independence Day).
                     True, it was dramatic and poignant. But it didn't
                     really have the impact of seeing dear old Liberty
                     taking the blast full on, now did it?

                     For that sort of pleasure you had to wait until 1984
                     and the British TV movie Threads. Unfortunately Mick
                     Jackson's film about a nuclear strike on a British
                     city highlighted one of the great mistakes film
                     directors make with the genre: choosing the wrong
                     location. If you're going to destroy a recognisable
                    city it has to be the right recognisable city,
                     somewhere the audience relates to, somewhere that,
                     deep down, they don't really want to see destroyed.
                     In Independence Day we watch firestorms rip through
                     Washington, New York and LA, rather than, say,
                     Cleveland or Detroit.

                     For Threads Jackson chose to blow up Sheffield, a
                     city in whose radioactive ashes many people would
                     willingly party (this comment is not directed at the
                     nice and interesting bits of Sheffield, just the
                     nasty, boring ones). Look, there are more than enough
                     places whose demolition I would happily witness: the
                     whole of Elephant and Castle, the Merrion Centre in
                     Leeds, Clapham swimming pool. But as they're bound to
                     be knocked down someday soon, where's the thrill in
                     watching the special-effects department do it?

                     So it has to be somewhere we care about. In the 1970s
                     rampant nihilism brought on by the oil crisis
                     resulted in an epidemic of disaster movies, led by
                     Earthquake, in which most of LA was shaken to pieces.
                     It was a grand spectacle, which American audiences
                     adored. Heavy rocking of the camera, combined with a
                     storm of grey polystyrene chunks dropped from the
                     rooftops, almost made you think it was real. Almost.

                     Which is where Independence Day scores. Sure there
                     are some flesh and blood actors in it: Jeff Goldblum
                     plays a wonderfully mad mathematician, Bill Pullman a
                     suitably anodyne US president single-handedly saving
                     his country (and therefore the world) from alien
                     annexation. But the real stars are the special
                     effects. By combining some of the largest scale
                     models ever built for film with state-of-the-art
                     computer graphics and a few thousand gallons of high
                     octane fuel, you are left in no doubt that you have
                     seen a city (or three) meet its death.

                     These are the most impressive scenes of destruction
                     ever to appear on the big screen. They also happen to
                     be some of the most expensive, with the film's budget
                     easily crashing through the $100 million barrier. But
                     here there is a lovely symmetry. To the aficionado of
                     mass destruction it's strangely fitting that the kind
                     of money with which you could build a real city has
                     been used to blow up a false one.

                     "Independence Day" opens nationwide on 9 August