Two decades ago, when Star Wars stormed into theaters, critics noted that audiences didn’t bat an eye when Luke Skywalker’s home planet exploded in a mammoth fireball. That was, what, 5 million, 10 million people blasted to atoms in a split second? And people just sat there munching popcorn, as if they were watching Aunt Edna step on a garden rake. Well, yeah, a 12-year-old me thought at the time, plastering my lunch box with Wacky Packages stickers. It was a desert planet. There couldn’t have been that many people. So skillfully made was Star Wars that most of us brushed aside that troubling thought—of a pop entertainment using the extermination of an entire civilization as an incidental diversion.
This time, though, the planet facing destruction is ours, and the civilization-threatening death ray is pointed at us. But Independence Day has even less weight than Star Wars. It’s Armageddon as imagined by Fisher-Price—a set that comes complete with big plastic spaceships, toothpick skyscrapers that splinter on cue, and action-figure casualties. It’s a big shiny toy, and it’s a lot of fun for about two-thirds of its 130-plus minutes—until the drag sets in from watching the summer’s second $70 million remake of Earthquake.
Independence Day, like Twister, is modeled on the disaster movies of the 1970s, with an added dash of ’50s sci-fi invasion paranoia and the rah-rah tone of a ’40s fly-boy flick. As with Twister, the threat is from above, not within: Alien airships 15 miles wide block out the skies over America, hovering expectantly. The first third of the movie, which details the day the ships appear, is good eerie fun, especially the shots of ordinary Americans trying to conduct business as usual as shadows creep across the land.
The middle section, in which the aliens unleash all hell on earth, is the ne plus ultra of stuff blowing up. Cars blow up. Planes blow up. Cities blow up. Unless some cinematic Unabomber detonates every atom of matter in the universe, I think we can call a truce on movie explosions.
And yet the computer-generated devastation is so captivating—the upended cars and shattering buildings have no more substance than model-railroad scenery—that the audience is awestruck by its own demise. What’s funny about watching Independence Day with a crowd—like you can watch it any other way—is hearing audience members ooh and ahh as people just like themselves are crushed, roasted, vaporized, and swatted out of the sky.
The biggest gasps are reserved for the demolition of American landmarks: a toppled Statue of Liberty, the obliteration of the Empire State Building, and the shot that single-handedly made Independence Day the most eagerly anticipated movie of the summer, the White House being zapped into matchsticks. (The movie is going to be a monster overseas.) Instead of horror, these scenes have a gleeful anti-authoritarian kick, just as they did 40 years ago when Ray Harryhausen sent saucers crashing into the Capitol dome in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. With the earth’s cities in smoking ruins, the stage is set for a triumphant retaliation by a quartet of embattled Americans: a baby-boomer combat-hero president (Bill Pullman), a cocky jet jockey (Will Smith), a computer ace (Jeff Goldblum), and a crackpot cracker (Randy Quaid) who turns out not to be so crazy after all.
At this point Independence Day becomes an upbeat, jingoistic fantasy about human resilience, and I think the combination of innocent patriotic spirit with a high-tech wallow in global devastation is what makes the movie so irresistible. It indulges the very worst in human nature—an appetite for destruction—with the alien onslaught, and then it follows with an ode to human loyalty, bravery, teamwork, and self-sacrifice. The movie kills off more people than every war in history combined, but it’s the least sadistic and bullying of this summer’s shoot-’em-ups. It restores what used to be the primary appeal of action movies: the ability of peril to bring out man’s resourcefulness, determination, and courage.
That’s what I liked about Independence Day. I also liked the ingratiating performances of Pullman, Goldblum, Viveca Fox as a strong-willed stripper, and especially Will Smith, whose cheeky good humor is an appealing brand of grace under fire. What I didn’t like was the bland writing by Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich; the overacting of Judd Hirsch and Harvey Fierstein in ludicrous stereotypical roles; and the overacting of Randy Quaid, period. The resolution cheats by making every piece of alien technology accessible to human use, from spaceships to computers. (Apple will be delighted to learn of an untapped market out there in the cosmos.)
Even the possibilities of international camaraderie are totally neglected—there are no shots of Arabs and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Bloods and Crips, or mailmen and dogs united in brotherly ass-kicking. And despite the appeal to teamwork, the concluding slugfest in the skies leaves the average Joe on the ground with nothing to do. When the day of reckoning comes, you and I and the women of the world will apparently be lollygagging by our Winnebagos, watching the battle for the planet like campers waiting for Alan Jackson to land at Fan Fair.
The best scene involves a confrontation between a captured alien and the wary earthlings: The alien’s motivation, hissed through the mouth of a human captive, is the movie’s one moment of terror. The rest of Independence Day, though often entertaining, is as disconcerting as a featherweight glimpse of the apocalypse could be. People who lose their closest loved ones barely grieve; the audience scarcely blinks when the president orders the nuking of Houston. The blitzkrieg success of Independence Day shows that we have learned to stop worrying, and we do love the bomb.—Jim Ridley
Petty Theft
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty opens with a series of shaky videocam shots of its star, Liv Tyler, as she sleeps on a plane (and later a train) bound for Italy. Some mysterious paparazzo, admiring the girl’s soft features, has caught her with her guard down; though his footage, on the surface, is winning, there’s an equally leering undercurrent. We never learn anything about the person who’s surreptitiously photographing Tyler. We feel almost as though something improper is going on—that she’s being secretly molested by the camera.
Stealing Beauty follows Tyler as she arrives in the hills of Tuscany to have her likeness done by an Irish sculptor and visit with his cosmopolitan set of family and friends. We soon learn there’s an ulterior motive to the 19-year-old’s visit—she’s a virgin, and she wants to lose her virginity in the arms of the first boy she ever kissed, in the place where her mother, in an enigmatic poem, described a past assignation.
As soon as Tyler’s plan is revealed—to a dying playwright, played by Jeremy Irons—her predominantly middle-aged hosts perk up and become unnaturally fascinated with both her virginity and her quest to lose it. As they prattle on about youth and beauty and poetry and the wonder of it all, it becomes clearer and clearer from whence the leering tone of the credit sequence has come—from Bertolucci himself. The director presents the arrogance of his artist-colony characters, who believe all the young girl needs is a good ravishing, without comment or irony. Like them, he poises himself to live vicariously through Tyler’s discoveries, and to ignore any disquiet she might feel about this grand transitional event. Like them, he’s waxing rapturous.
The first clue that Bertolucci has no vivid perspective on his characters comes when he has someone tell Tyler, “Your mother was daring,” without explaining or providing any examples. Later, when Tyler writes vapid little poems that she immediately destroys, or gets on her knees and licks a mirror at the prompting of an American entertainment lawyer (D.W. Moffett), the moments seem more than a little forced. As the film unspools, it gradually becomes clear that the actions and emotions of the film are going to be contrived rather than organic.
The biggest problem with Stealing Beauty is that Bertolucci seems smitten with his self-obsessed characters. He’s not spoofing their pretensions or commenting on their expatriate relationships to his beloved homeland. In fact, he treats their posturing quite reverently, obsessing specifically over whether Tyler will “lose her inhibitions.” The film treats this latter issue with unwelcome gravity, surrounding Tyler with performance artists and desperate secrets; the director imposes a torturous will on what is essentially a breezy summer romance. It’s as though Bertolucci were looking for a heavy excuse for light entertainment.
To Tyler’s credit, she plays her curious 19-year-old quietly and simply, somewhat removed from the hubbub surrounding her. Whether this is because she’s hipper than the warmed-over pap of the script—or because she’s just not a good enough actress to play the character as described—is a matter for debate. Either way, by the third time somebody describes how “wonderful” and “alive” Tyler is while she stares out dully into space, one senses something is out of kilter.
Stealing Beauty would be almost intolerable were it not for its setting. The cinematographer, Darius Khondji, captures those magic hours that exist only in summer, those late-afternoon/early-evening hours when a breeze calms the nerves, a glass of wine awakens the imagination, and the sun hangs around for a little while to relax and enjoy the conversation. Out in the Tuscan countryside in the twilight, clay statues that seem to have grown out of the ground observe the proceedings without comment, dispassionately accepting whatever is said and done.
It’s their casual observation that’s missing from Stealing Beauty, as well as the sense that the story is unfolding naturally, nudged along by the lead’s subtle exploration of her desires. The movie ultimately has little to do with the budding sensibility of its young protagonist; it’s more about the man with the camera and his manipulative desire to capture her in his frame, to make her follow his whims. Watching Stealing Beauty is like being stuck with a tour guide who points out his favorite signposts but misses the sights.—Noel Murray
