Twenty years ago, Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” changed
blockbusters forever in the span of four minutes. After teasing audiences with
45 minutes of mounting tension as city-sized spaceships entered Earth’s
atmosphere and positioned themselves menacingly over some of the world’s most
famous landmarks, the summer blockbuster lets loose. Blue lasers thunder into
the Empire State Building, the U.S. Bank Tower and The White House, bursting them
like grapes. Out of their splinters bloom walls of fire that swallow New York
City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—cars, office buildings, helpless inhabitants—leaving
little but the embers burning in rubble and breath caught in our throats.
For those who saw “Independence Day” in 1996, its
destruction was something we’d never seen before. It was full of the sound and
fury that can create the awe needed for an instant all-time movie moment. Movies
may have traded in disaster and apocalypse before (Emmerich’s movie itself was
a hybrid of 1950s alien invasion and 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movies), but
not like this. This was operatic destruction—composed of screams and shattered
glass, conducted with blood lust and guilty pleasure—the scales of which we’d
never seen. Where other movies had teased annihilation in villain’s monologues,
or shown its aftermath with disheveled Statues of Liberties, “Independence Day”
not only sincerely threatened the end of the world, it made us watch it happen.
It was horrifying, which is to say that it was also spectacular.
“If ‘Jaws’ had radically downsized its threat level to that of
a single shark, then ‘Independence Day’ radically upsized its threat level to
include global catastrophe,” Tom Shone writes in his book, Blockbuster. More significantly, it didn’t leave the threat a
bluff. Blockbusters, by their high-concept and explosion-loving nature, have
always pursued bigger spectacle; “Independence Day” expanded the cinematic
vocabulary with which to do so. It was
an evolutionary leap, one blockbusters can be prone to in order to shift with
their changing environments and ensure their proliferation. Even the Godfather
of the Blockbuster saw that: When the movie was released, Steven Spielberg told Roland Emmerich, “This movie will do more to change
blockbuster summer movies than any movie before.”
That change began as soon as audiences waited for hours in
line to see “Independence Day” on opening weekend. Money doesn’t just talk in
Hollywood, it instructs, and what “Independence Day”’s eventual $817 million worldwide
earnings told studios about audiences was, “If you destroy it, they will come”
(apologies to “Field of Dreams”).
So, summer blockbusters began destroying. A year after
Emmerich’s movie was released, dueling volcano movies (“Volcano” and “Dante’s
Peak”) menaced cities with lava and ash (“Dante’s Peak’s” climax was even already miming the destructive aesthetic of Emmerich’s film).
The following year, competing cataclysmic meteor movies (“Deep Impact” and “Armageddon”)
more eagerly adopted “Independence Day”’s global catastrophe and destruction—the former drowning the world’s Atlantic coasts with a mega-tsunami, and the latter slingshoting meteor fragments into cities to wipe them out of existence.
It all abided by the adapted spirit of that co-writer
and producer, Dean Devlin, boasted in a making-of feature for “Independence Day”:
“You won’t find a film that has more on screen than this film, and that’s what
we’re most proud of.” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” represented that attitude,
hitting an irreversible turning point for blockbusters: the collision between “Independence
Day”-inspired “more on screen” lust for mass destruction and the growing ease
with which it could be satisfied with advancements in CGI technology. In the
span of two years, “Independence Day”’s elaborate four-minute apocalyptic
sequence (stitched together with practical effects, close-ups, digital
compositing, and editing) could be replaced by “Armageddon” destroying Paris in less than ten seconds with a single computer generated wide-shot. With the impossible
becoming increasingly possible to be rendered on-screen, studios could now more
easily provide audiences with new levels of disaster. If the combined $900
million international box office of “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” was any
indication, that’s exactly what audiences wanted. So, an arms race of one-upmanship
began.
9/11 provided a brief hiatus from destroyed buildings, but studios
wasted little time picking up where they left off. Roland Emmerich outdid
himself with “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004)—offering an exploding Coliseum,
Los Angeles riddled with tornados, and New York City being both drowned and
frozen. The ensuing years saw CGI became the industry standard for special
effects and destruction in blockbusters followed suit. Franchises that ran
throughout the 2000s and 2010s especially provide a barometer for how
one-upmanship affected blockbusters, and made them all feel like disaster
movies: “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” (2009) melting the Eiffel Tower led to “G.I.
Joe: Retaliation” (2013) heaving all of London into oblivion; “Transformers”’ (2007)
modest battle in Los Angeles led to “Transformers: Dark of The Moon” (2011)
having a giant robot worm crush half of Chicago into piecemeal; “Star Trek” (2009)
dropping a huge drill in the San Francisco Bay led to “Star Trek Into Darkness”
(2013) bowling an entire spaceship into the city.
During their rise in the 2010s, superhero movies—now our
most successful form of blockbuster—most of all became disciples of the “put
more on screen” philosophy. The more modest destructions of “The Dark Knight” and
“Iron Man” in 2008 were replaced with movies like “The Avengers,” “Man of
Steel,” “The Guardians of the Galaxy,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” films that devoted their entire third acts to spaceships careening
into skyscrapers, office buildings crumbling like peanut brittle, and laser
beams shooting from the sky. If that recalls Emmerich’s film, he agrees. “In a
way we unknowingly invented a new thing, with no plan,” the director told Complex. “I see the influence of ‘Independence Day’ everywhere: in all the Marvel movies, and all the superheroes of the DC
Universe, there’s always an alien invasion, there’s always a disaster element.”
It is into that competitive environment, governed by the
laws of modern blockbusters, that Emmerich began work on the “Independence Day”
sequel. “I see all the other big VFX films out there and I keep up on it all
and I know how competitive it is now,” Emmerich told postPerspective,
acknowledging that for a new “Independence Day” to leave a mark, it had to both
put more on screen than its current competition and the original movie.
If nothing else, you can’t say “Independence Day: Resurgence”
doesn’t put a lot on the screen. The mothership this time is the size of the
Atlantic Ocean, and when seen from space (which of course you do), looks like
it’s leeching half the Earth’s surface. It’s so massive it has its own gravity,
which apparently means it can indifferently suck up Singapore and then drop it
on London, like the world’s largest malfunctioning Roomba. When this
monstrosity touches down, its landing gear is capable of shoveling huge swaths
of cities like snow. If Emmerich’s goal was to lean into his own movie’s legacy
and surpass the size of any others, he succeeded. Certainly he seems
to think so. When Jeff Goldblum sees the mothership and says, “That’s definitely
bigger than the last one,” it sounds like self-congratulations.
Congratulations aren’t in order. “Independence Day:
Resurgence” may be big, but to such an extent that it’s absurd. It exemplifies
how the 1996 original may have changed blockbusters forever, but no longer for
the better.
There’s a moment after the movie’s emoticon-shrug-of-a-destructive-centerpiece where a soldier reports, “The damage to the East Coast
is beyond imagination.” “Beyond imagination” is a neat summation of the problem
that afflicts Emmerich’s sequel and its contemporaries. “Put more on-screen”
has run amuck. Directors, like Emmerich, may be creating more sizeable
illusions of destructive grandeur, but they’re reaching sizes that are
infantine in their separation from reality. They leave nothing to our
imagination, not just in how much they show us, but how destruction has become
too big to be imaginable. The power of the original “Independence Day” was that
the scope of its disaster (if not its source) was close enough to reality that
it enabled our awed What Ifs. Let’s not forget that when 9/11 happened, a
common reaction was, “This is just like ‘Independence Day.’” Modern movies lack
that.
Now, in a matter of seconds, skyscrapers are dominoed into
each other (“San Andreas”), whole cities are lifted into the air (“The
Avengers: Age of Ultron”), multiple planets are simultaneously snuffed out (“Star
Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens”), and one building is dropped vertically onto another (“Independence
Day: Resurgence”). None of it matters anymore; none of it resonates. How
could it? Emmerich and his peers are like hobby fishers who return from outings
saying they caught fish as big as their arm-span: Eventually you don’t buy it
anymore.
“Independence Day: Resurgence” certainly exhibits many of
the other well-documented ailments of modern blockbusters: disregard for human
casualties, tiresome repetition of disaster iconography and constant defaulting
to global threats. As Sam Adams wrote about “X-Men: Apocalypse“: “Raising the stakes actually
lowers them; it’s a threat that will never be fulfilled.” But more than
anything, it reflects the confusion of size with impact and volume with affect.
Blockbusters are so intent on size and beating their competition, they’re
forgetting why any of it should matter: to please an audience.
“Independence Day” never failed at that. In that way, the
biggest disappointment with its sequel is that it, like other modern
blockbusters, possesses so little of what made the original—and that iconic four-minute
sequence—so appealing. Twenty years ago, “Independence Day” left us excited to
get an answer to the question, “Where will blockbusters go from here?” “Independence
Day: Resurgence” and its ilk now leave us with the same question. But they’re
also increasingly providing the answer too: nowhere. It may not have been the
legacy Roland Emmerich’s film began with, but it’s the one it has now.
