They’re once again talking about a sequel to INDEPENDENCE DAY. They’ve been talking about it since the movie came out, but have never quite managed to crack it. They’re writing two screenplays now, one for use if Wil Smith says yes and one for use of Wil Smith says no; my guess is that if it happens they will likely have to go for the second, as INDEPENDENCE DAY is an ensemble movie and Smith has already said no to a number of promising movies, DJANGO UNCHAINED among them, where he was not the sole center of attention. (He also said no to a remake of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, for the same, flatly stated reason.) Now, I happen to love INDEPENDENCE DAY. No argument possible. I know everything wrong about it, from logic to dialogue to emotional manipulation to the many moments of sheer stupidity, but I honestly don’t care; it pushes my buttons, and if I can point to well-intended scenes that fall flat as a concrete goose (like one little kid saying to the other little kid, “Are you scared? Me too.”), I can also point to others that get me, despite any attempt at common sense I bring to the table. Like Jeff Goldblum saying to the elderly father played by Judd Hirsch, “You gave me the idea. That’s right.” Like the President telling Robert Loggia, Im a fighter pilot. Im needed. Like Randy Quaid making the big decision he makes, and saying, Tell my children I love them. I mist up, dammit, when the President makes his big rallying speech. Or, hitting a deeper part of my heart, the quick flash to two air forces now working together as allies: the Israelis and Iraqis. Many viewers don’t even notice that. I get a bloody lump in my throat every time. It’s a giant inflated b movie, and I cannot apologize for buying into it; my heart does not listen to my brain. But the news that they’re attempting a sequel again leads to these random thoughts: 1) By popular consensus at the time, the President of the United States in INDEPENDENCE DAY is a Democrat and the President of the United States in AIR FORCE ONE (another summer-type movie I love, even more) is a Republican. I have absolutely no problem with agreeing to this. No Democrat I know has ever had a problem with this. It’s a reasonable theory, and it doesn’t stop me from rooting, unironically, for both Presidents re-cast as action heroes. I have, however, had Republicans hotly contest that neither one could be a Democrat, who have actually gone on to argue at ridiculous lengths that they MUST both! Be! Republicans! I won’t name the conservative science fiction writer who actually went on at great length about this, it was that important to him. Arguing with me, then blogging at length about how I was wrong. I thought he was being an asshole then and I think he was being an asshole now. It isn’t even something to be debated, I think. Politics isn’t all important to either movie. Just agree, dammit: one Democrat, one Republican. 2) The science fiction writer in me glosses off the easy take-down of an alien computer system, in hours, with terrestrial technology. That isn’t the problem, for me. The problem, for me, lies in the lasting implications of the events. Stop taking apart the movie and think about the closing circumstances like a science fiction writer. The alien space ships take a crapload of major world cities every few hours, starting with the most populated; by midway through the movie’s timeline they are down to cities the size of Houston. It is another day or so before the alien ships are shot down and defeated. How many more cities got destroyed in the interim? The movie quite cannily shuffles this off into the background, so as to note disturb the jumping up and down and celebrating of the denoument; but it is a question I have never been able to put down, ever. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Wil and Jeff and Bill Pullman and Yitzhak and Muhammad and everybody else in the world win the war just before the city-killers take out the cities the size of Binghamton, New York. Let us say that the world population is not reduced to a tenth of what it was, the impression I’ve always gotten, but something like a third; we may not want to KNOW the actual numbers, but it is clear that they exist in the story’s background, and that they amount to civilization, as we know it, being over. Some of the smaller nations must no longer even exist as nations; the others are going to have serious problems threatening collapse. This is why, sitting there in the movie theatre, whooping and hollering like everybody else who just saw the big bad aliens get blown to shit, I did what I reflexively do as a writer at so many other movies and mentally added a scene during the big hugathon in the desert where Goldblum’s character says, “Mr. President. It’s not over.” And then calmly explains how difficult rebuilding civilization is going to be. And volunteers his services as advisor. In the past, folks who’ve contemplated a sequel have pointed out that surely some aliens, possibly many aliens, survived the crashes of all their city-killers, and that a sequel could be powered by a bloody and awful ground war as humans and aliens battle for the ownership of a ruined Earth; I recognize the logic of this and I am, sorry, not interested in it. That’s just more of the same. I agree to the waving of the magic wand. I am more interested in how human civilization comes back from such a stomping. How the status quo changes, even if we manage it. That’s the story a science fiction writer finds interesting, and that’s the story Devlin and Emmerich don’t even want you think about. 3) And that is what worries me, really, about the sequel. The makers have already explained that the story has to take place twenty years later. It has to. The time to craft a filmed sequel set five minutes later when the aliens burst from their crashed vessel like ants has already passed; they have to present a world where all the actors are twenty years older, a world that has moved on from the most cataclysmic event in human history. I know that the aliens have to come back into it. That’s a given. The next wave entering the solar system. Possibly, us meeting them using reverse-engineered alien tech, in space. Jeff Goldblum could crack their computer codes in a matter of hours. He could certainly get us there. It would certainly be a bummer if the story is, instead, well, here we are sitting in our rebuilt cities, having lattes, and, oh, damn, here they are getting destroyed again! And it would CERTAINLY be a bummer if the world they presented us was an exact copy of our own contemporary one, with no real changes except that the destruction of three quarters of humanity is something kids read about in history books! Complete with easily dateable wise-ass pop culture references! I bet you right now that’s what you can expect of any sequel. And regardless of how well the action movie aspects are handled, that is where I check out.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 14:14:54 +0000
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