{"id":4447,"date":"2009-07-20T06:36:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-19T22:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=4447"},"modified":"2009-07-20T06:36:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-19T22:36:00","slug":"disaster-alien-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/07\/20\/disaster-alien-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Disaster – Alien Invasion!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Er, not literally \u2013 but a survey of Disaster-themed films.:)<\/p>\n

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.:)<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"blog-disaster01\" The first of such CG-laded films that I saw was Independence Day<\/em><\/a>, or better known as ID4<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

The film was a ball of fun \u2013 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\u2019s and not George Bush Jr.\u2019s term in the office. And those dogfights between alien fighters and F-18s were epic.<\/p>\n

OK, so ID4<\/em> wasn\u2019t known for intelligent story-telling. In fact, 13 years after the film\u2019s 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\u2026? For all the sophisticated death ray weapons those nasty aliens have on us, they don\u2019t have firewalls?!<\/p>\n

Still, I watched the film four <\/em>times \u2013 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.:)<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I guess it\u2019s a little hard to do films with evil aliens invading mother earth, since there weren\u2019t very many of this type in the next couple of years. After all, just think about the production work involved: you\u2019d need to come up with designs for alien ships, equipment, and figure out exactly how mutant they should look.<\/p>\n

\"blog-disaster02\" Still, there was Steven Spielberg\u2019s War of the Worlds<\/em><\/a> in 2005, which in itself was a remake based on H. G. Well\u2019s 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\u2019t pull heroic stunts on those illegal aliens. In Worlds<\/em>, he runs (and runs) from them.<\/p>\n

As for Fanning whom I so greatly enjoyed watching in I Am Sam <\/em>and Man On Fire, <\/em>in Worlds <\/em>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!<\/p>\n

The visuals were incredible though, and there were a couple of truly scary scenes. The alien machines were massive, and the production crew\u2019s invention of having civilians get vaporized and turned into dust was novel.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s any one thing Spielberg demonstrates in every one of his films, it\u2019s subtlety. He never shoves things in your face. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

And finally, there was The Day The Earth Stood Still<\/a> <\/em>(2008) starring wooden Keanu Reeves and doe-eyed Jennifer Connelly. I\u2019ve blogged about that here already. So, here comes my ratings:<\/p>\n

Independence Day<\/em>: \"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

War of the Worlds<\/em>: \"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

The Day The Earth Stood Still: \"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Next\u2026 Disaster \u2013 Monsters Inc!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Er, not literally \u2013 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<\/p>\n

Read More Disaster – Alien Invasion!<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-entertainment","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}