How ‘Independence Day’ freed disaster filmmakers to go berserk
I can’t believe I’m defending the disaster-movie schlock of my adolescence, but here we go.
As a 6-foot-2-inch, 59-pound teenager with a voice that broke over a period of several awkward, squeaky millennia, I saw “Earthquake” in a crouch position inside one of the Sensurround speakers parked behind the back row of Cinema I of the Cinema I & II in Racine, Wis.
I wouldn’t do it again, and my hearing’s never been the same. But having sat through “Grand Prix” at the age of 5, enthralled by director John Frankenheimer’s split-screen racing footage from an illadvised perch in the front row, my eyes already were permanently bloodshot.
Thank God I missed Smell-O-Vision. So, “Earthquake.” There I was, like millions across America that opening week, watching L.A. get clobbered by late-career Ava Gardner, in close-up, screaming at Charlton Heston to put down that pert mistress (Genevieve Bujold) and pay some attention to her. Imagine a scene like that in a Michael Bay movie.
Mainly, “Earthquake” had the earthquake. It was a pre-digital melee of disaster-film imagery, some of it ridiculous, some of it proudly old-school and beautiful, graced by Albert Whitlock’s Oscar-winning matte paintings of the rubble and ruin of a great American city, leveled. Down went everything in that movie, after a good long setup, from freeways to skyscrapers to the Capitol Records building.
As Jeff Goldblum says in “Independence Day: Resurgence,” a rather different disaster film now in theaters: “They like to get the landmarks.”
Movies such as “Airport” and its progeny, “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake,” “The Towering Inferno” and the last gasps of the ’70s disaster cycle, “The Swarm” and, released in 1980, “When Time Ran Out ...”: These were nothing without their large-scale messes. Often they were nothing, even with them. The ’70s disaster pictures relied also on the bittersweet spectacle of aging A-listers cringing, panicking, fleeing from one thing or another.
But in today’s cinemas, in the fantasy realms of Marvel and DC superhero franchises, particularly, the scale of the disaster has grown insane. The world is always about to end, always. Sometimes we’re meant to care about the collateral damage along the way, and sometimes we’re not.
The rationale is simple: Raise the stakes and the audience won’t get bored. But I don’t think it works that way anymore.
Many cite the original “Independence Day” as a turning point. It came out in 1996, and director Roland Emmerich didn’t simply blow up the White House in that film; he blew up our sense of expectation of how much global carnage was too much. The answer to that question: It’s never too much.
We’ve been suffering Earth’s imminent extinction ever since. Our existence is threatened in so many ways now, whether the story is realistic, zombie-driven, alien-provoked or just a lot of punching. My existence was certainly threatened by the Superman/Zod fistfight at the end of “Man of Steel,” and then flattened by “Batman v Superman,” director Zack Snyder’s idea of a good time released earlier this year.
Made possible by the technological expediency and increasing, numbing sameness of the fireballs and blue electricity coming out of digital effects houses, these movies offer protracted brutality, prettified but bloated.
Which is why there are times I miss the quaint, smaller-scale mediocrity and all-star casts of the ’70s. And I doubt I’m alone in missing the truly effective and exciting world-enders, like the first “Planet of the Apes” and, more ambiguously and on a grander scale of hopelessness, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” both from 1968, both offering an escape from America’s societal earthquakes that year.
In the Guardian, Nicholas Barber recently wrote about the berserk and callous scale of our current disaster movies, somewhat lower down the food chain from “2001.” Like many, he holds the first “Independence Day” in weirdly high regard. Its impact, however, was dubious, and with Bay’s “Armageddon” in 1998 and so many cine-threats of the late 20th century and the early 21st, Barber writes, “there is no doubt which film was being copied ... suddenly, blockbusters were joyless, bloated and militaristic. They featured extinction-level events, martial snare drums on the soundtrack and grave presidents played by Morgan Freeman, saying, ‘May God have mercy on us all.’ ”
The schlockbuster addict part of my personality enjoys the clunk and the silliness of Emmerich movies such as “2012” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” In their steroidal, straight-faced camp fashion, they remind me of the crap I consumed when I was younger, when our diets were counterbalanced by all sorts of really good and great films, too, from “Jaws” to “Carrie,” from Altman to Coppola to you name it.
But when I think of kids coming out of “Batman v Superman” the overwhelming punishment of the experience becomes especially galling.
Over in the Marvel world: There’s a reason audiences perked up in the recent (and good) “Captain America: Civil War,” when Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man showed up. He’s funny, for one thing. And his sense of scale, delightfully flexible (He’s small! He’s big! Now he’s really big!), offers a break from the pummeling of major cities, world landmarks, the planet itself. He’s just zipping through his day, doing what he can, on the way to the next disaster-aversion scenario.
In the apocalyptic scheme of things, he’s a blip. Modern moviemaking could use more blips like him.