Er, not literally – but a survey of Disaster-themed films.:)
Disaster-themed films have been around for a while, but they really took off from the mid-90s onwards when advances in computer-generated imaging made it possible to render onscreen scenes that would had been too costly or plain impossible to film. So, here’s the first of a series of five posts on these films.:)
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The first of such CG-laded films that I saw was Independence Day, or better known as ID4 (1996). The pop-corn picture about aliens invading Earth was produced by the Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich duo, two movie makers not exactly known for subtlety in their productions. So, what we got was mega sized helpings of destruction wrought by evil aliens and their death rays on the Empire State Building, Capital Hill and the White House among others.
The film was a ball of fun – call it what you will, but fans were delighted to see the White House blown into fine powder, and this was when it was Bill Clinton’s and not George Bush Jr.’s term in the office. And those dogfights between alien fighters and F-18s were epic.
OK, so ID4 wasn’t known for intelligent story-telling. In fact, 13 years after the film’s release, people still talk about how utterly absurd are the plot events or how ridiculously incorrectly is equipment deployed in the film. Who can forgot for instance the very idea that a Mac notebook can interface directly with some alien super computer, and proceed to infect it with a handily written virus…? For all the sophisticated death ray weapons those nasty aliens have on us, they don’t have firewalls?!
Still, I watched the film four times – which just goes to show how much of a glutton I am when it comes to kick-arse thrill rides, even at the expense of story or coherence.:)
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I guess it’s a little hard to do films with evil aliens invading mother earth, since there weren’t very many of this type in the next couple of years. After all, just think about the production work involved: you’d need to come up with designs for alien ships, equipment, and figure out exactly how mutant they should look.
Still, there was Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in 2005, which in itself was a remake based on H. G. Well’s famous book. The film starred Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, in roles and character dispositions that were rather different from their usual fare. Cruise for instance doesn’t pull heroic stunts on those illegal aliens. In Worlds, he runs (and runs) from them.
As for Fanning whom I so greatly enjoyed watching in I Am Sam and Man On Fire, in Worlds she turned into a whiny and screaming brat. If the aliens was going to vaporize any one, I would have wished her to be the first!
The visuals were incredible though, and there were a couple of truly scary scenes. The alien machines were massive, and the production crew’s invention of having civilians get vaporized and turned into dust was novel.
If there’s any one thing Spielberg demonstrates in every one of his films, it’s subtlety. He never shoves things in your face. There’s that scene where the resisting human armies with their humvees and tanks charge at the alien machines over a hill, but seconds later every single one of those vehicles return as a flaming wreck.
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And finally, there was The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) starring wooden Keanu Reeves and doe-eyed Jennifer Connelly. I’ve blogged about that here already. So, here comes my ratings:
Independence Day: 
War of the Worlds:
The Day The Earth Stood Still:
Next… Disaster – Monsters Inc!
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