The cure for Independence Day

Twenty years ago this month, I took a day off from my summer job on an island off the coast of New Hampshire to see a concert by one of my favorite bands at the time, The Cure. It was actually probably two days off, since it necessitated an overnight. This meant I had to save up a day off from another week, since we got only one per week.

Unfortunately, not long after coming to shore, my friend J.D. and I learned that The Cure had had to cancel their show. I can no longer remember the reason for it, but that's where the internet comes in handy. The internet tells me that the July 6, 1996 show at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine -- about a 45-minute drive from where we'd come ashore -- was canceled due to poor ticket sales. I guess The Cure were already fading in popularity back then.

Suddenly without any plans, we pointed our car south to the Boston area rather than north to Portland. We stayed over at my parents' house and went that night to see Independence Day.

Which is still the only time I've seen that film. Needless to say, not a big fan.

Twenty years later, the fates are aligning again in a very humorous way. There's another Independence Day movie out in theaters -- Independence Day: Resurgence -- and later this month, I'm going to see The Cure. For only the second time ever, and the first time since that aborted attempt back in 1996.

Both are examples of the incredible power of nostalgia.

Probably no one expected them to make another Independence Day. This was before almost every summer movie was left open to the possibility of a sequel. From what I remember of that film, it was wrapped up pretty neatly. And though some people certainly got off on the destruction porn, it wasn't such a popular brand that the studio felt it was necessary to force a sequel within the usual two- to six-year timeframe.

Nowadays, though, two powerful factors are contributing to change all that. The long-delayed sequel is now a proven commodity, no longer carrying the desperate odor of a cash grab (although of course that's what it is), and nostalgia has become commodified like never before. Not only are we getting an ID4 2, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an ID4 3 or ID4 4 in a couple years.

Nostalgia is of course the dominant factor in the resurgence, so to speak, of The Cure. They've never exactly gone away, though it's been eight years since their last studio album and more than a decade since they've toured certain parts of North America (though they were here in Australia within the past five years). But they seem to be capitalizing on a certain "this may be the last time" vibe this time around, as selling tickets has not been a problem for the show at Rod Laver Arena on July 28th. At age 57, Cure frontman Robert Smith is not yet over the hill by rock star standards established by people like the Rolling Stones. But for goth rock, he's ancient.

Because it's been three years since I've seen any type of concert, and the acts I would actually want to see in concert are all getting gray, I decided to splurge for tickets -- even though I probably haven't put on a Cure album in ten years. One of my wife's friends (my friend also, but known through her) will be going with me. It should be fun. Let's hope it is, because we paid $150 each for our tickets. Another sign of how nostalgia sells, especially to aging Gen Xers.

The difference between 1996 and 2016?

This time, I probably will not be seeing the Independence Day movie, and -- unless I lose my tickets or something -- I probably will be seeing The Cure.

And my soul will rejoice at the reversal.

Happy 4th, and may it be free from bad Roland Emmerich movies.

Posters of the apocalypse

We love movies about the end of the world, don't we?

Even if we know there's a high likelihood they will suck, our excitement overwhelms us -- doesn't it?

But I'm wondering if that phenomenon wouldn't be half as powerful without a tradition of truly captivating posters ... which, a lot of times, were for movies that really sucked.

It remains to be seen what we'll think of Battle: Los Angeles, but I can tell you that the poster you see above absolutely thrilled me. It perfectly accomplishes what posters for apocalyptic movies set out to do -- it provides a single-image encapsulation of the idea of normal life supplanted by chaos. What better way to indicate "business as usual" turned upside down, than surfers waiting for the next big wave as aliens rain the heavens with artillery fire?

It's that mixture of everyday things we recognize and exotic things we don't recognize that makes the image so powerful. And that's why I think the poster for Battle: LA you see below is not as effective:

Sure, there's a basic impressiveness here: A single soldier stands and looks at ... something. We don't know what. And that's part of the problem. Is it an alien craft? Is it a chunk of land turned up on its side, and the spiky objects we're seeing are buildings or other parts of the industrial landscape? We can't really tell. It still makes me want to see the movie, but not the way the surfing poster makes me want to see the movie.

So I thought today it would be fun to go back and look at other posters of the apocalypse, and to dissect how they used familiar images to whet our appetite for the movie in question ... and whether that whetted appetite ended up resulting in a satisfying movie.

Let's start with the most recent obvious example, which also has a whole series of posters associated with it:

2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)


These posters are, frankly, perfect. They are ludicrous at the same time that they are somehow deliciously plausible. Waves crashing over the Himalayas? Not on your life would that ever happen. But would I like to see a movie where it happens? Yup, I think so. Emmerich et al were also smart to use the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, since it has a basic awesomeness that is enhanced by collapsing under the weight of a tidal wave. The final image is interesting to me, referencing the most orgiastic destruction depicted in the movie, when plate tectonics rip apart the west side of Los Angeles. It's interesting because there's a billboard for Battle: Los Angeles that features the same section of town, with those artillery blasts from the surfing poster above -- I'm wondering if that's an intentional allusion (or else direct theft) from the 2012 advertising campaign.

Was it worth it? I thought so, yes. The destruction was great on its own terms, and just removed enough that you didn't have to ponder the billions of people who were dying. Some criticized the movie for that very reason, and for dozens of other reasons, not the least of which is that they have a knee-jerk hatred for everything made by Roland Emmerich. I did previously as well, but this one really worked for me. And speaking of Emmerich ...

The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich tried to capitalize on our fears of climate change with The Day After Tomorrow, and this poster was a good start. The Statue of Liberty, up to her nose in snow? My God! AND IT MAY BE HAPPENING AS SOON AS TWO DAYS FROM NOW!

Was it worth it? Not really. The Day After Tomorrow was silly. I was able to appreciate it only on the level of seeing some of the special effects, but to be honest, the catastrophic phenomenon depicted here does not lend itself to effects the way some of his other phenomena do. In fact, the scene I remember most was where tornadoes were ripping apart Los Angeles, which doesn't even really jive with the rest of the movie. Emmerich basically threw it in there because he could. And speaking of uses of the Statue of Liberty ...

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves)


The Day After Tomorrow poster shows only the statue's head, while this poster shows only the statue's body -- because the head has been ripped off its shoulders by a giant reptilian alien. The smart thing about the Cloverfield poster is that it reminds everyone of their first exposure to the movie, which was that great teaser trailer that went viral in late 2007, in which the final shot is the statue's head coming to a rest in the street somewhere, uptown from Liberty Island. The events depicted in Cloverfield may not lead to the end of the world, but who knows ... they may.

Was it worth it? HELLS yes. Cloverfield was awesome. I got it on BluRay for Christmas and am looking forward to my third viewing. And speaking of the Statue of Liberty again ...

Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)


Of course, all these other movies' usages of the Statue of Liberty owe a debt to how it was used as a gut punch at the end of Planet of the Apes. Having this iconic image sunken into the sand just killed us -- and by "us," I mean people who saw it in the theater, which does not include me, as I was not born for another five years.

Was it worth it? Well, duh -- Planet of the Apes is a classic. However, I have to wonder if this poster was used to advertise it at the time, or only in retrospect. I'm thinking retrospect. Given that it was a highly guarded secret that this ape planet was Earth, intended to Shyamalan us 30 years before Shyamalan, I doubt they would have revealed it in the original advertising campaign. But back to Roland Emmerich ...

Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich first started blowing up the world back in 1996, with Independence Day. Talk about making it personal for us -- the White House getting blasted by an alien laser beam became the signature image of the film. And there's something about when you get to the president, who should be untouchable, that really strikes a chord with us. In fact, you could say that the White House bit worked so well, Emmerich intentionally alluded to it in 2012 with the scene where the capsized battleship flattens the White House, after riding on the crest of a tidal wave. That one scene is like every exciting thing from every disaster movie, rolled into one. (The Empire State building poster looks nicer and is good, too -- and certainly wouldn't have been possible post-9/11).

Was it worth it? I am not a fan of Independence Day. But I did like those few scenes with maximum possible destruction. They lived up to what I was expecting. And speaking of tidal waves ...

Deep Impact (1998, Mimi Leder)


Both asteroid movies that came out in 1998 were all about the tidal wave that was going to destroy the world, but only Deep Impact emphasized these in the ad campaign, while Armageddon focused more on the heroic and patriotic oil riggers-turned-astronauts. Although this poster cheeses it up a bit by showing the human drama implied by the world's coastal regions being violently drenched, the sight of the wave bearing down on New York City captures the situation pretty well.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I really liked Deep Impact -- in part because of the human drama I just poked fun at a minute ago. What can I say, I'm a sap. I should probably see it again to be sure, but I really liked it.

Okay, this post is getting long, so let's hurry through these last couple:

The Core (2003, Jon Amiel)


Talk about preposterous ... the idea behind The Core was that the Earth's core had stopped, and some scientists/adventurers had to drill into it to jump-start it. This presented all kinds of visual problems about how to represent the threat, and what they ended up with was merely adequate. Not only is the part of the Earth's surface shown in this image too abstract to make out, making the threat abstract as well, but the deep fissure depicted here is not actually the outcome of the threat -- more than anything else, it shows the hole they'd have to burrow to get down to the core.

Was it worth it? Hopefully the abstract advertisements kept people away, because this movie was not good. However, not knowing exactly where the threat is did not matter here ...

The Day After (1986, Nicholas Meyer)


This is cheating a little bit -- The Day After was a TV movie rather than a theatrical release, so our appetite for it was not whetted by a poster. In fact, this image probably accompanied the eventual video release. But the nuclear blast in the middle of an American city is so effective that it doesn't really matter which city it is -- though I believe the action was set around Kansas City.

Was it worth it? To this day I still identify The Day After with all my fears of nuclear annihilation. It was damn effective.

I had a couple more I was going to do, but all the image files attached to this post were causing Blogger to act funny -- images disappearing (possibly being "behind" other images), etc. So I'll just leave off there. You've had enough. I'll let you off the hook.

Acronyms gone wild

It seems appropriate on this July 4th to recognize the exact moment when referring to a movie by a silly acronym became popular.

If you want to be really technical, you could say this trend first started in 1991, with the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which was quickly dubbed T2 for short. And I suppose Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have always been TMNT.

But it wasn't until five years later that Independence Day really got the trend going. The interesting thing about the "acronym" for Independence Day is that it isn't actually a correct acronym for the movie's title. That would have been ID. However, the marketers for Roland Emmerich's bombastically craptacular blockbuster thought that they should make a nod to July 4th, so the abbreviated title became ID4. And kicked off a flurry of imitators.

It's hard to search these online, but the ones that come to mind are MI: 2 and MI: III (Mission Impossible 2 and III, though the confusing alternate usage of the I as a letter and a Roman numeral should have prevented this abbreviation in the third installment), LOTR (more a convenient shortening for Lord of the Rings than an actual marketing tactic), X2 (X-Men: United), T3 (not widely used), MIB (Men in Black), MIIB (the "clever" substituting of the Roman numeral II in place of the letter I), SC3 (The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause), HSM2 and HSM3 (High School Musical 2 and 3) and perhaps even JP III (the highly forgettable third Jurassic Park movie). Okay, I will admit to doing a little research here.

My favorite ones are the ones we make up ourselves, such as PBMC (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), and the classic coined by a couple of my friends: CBTD2 (Cheaper by the Dozen 2).

The thing about these abbreviations is that they seem to cheapen the product in question. The marketing department is trying to make it more of an event or a phenomenon than a movie -- of course, the really successful movies have to be events and phenomena to make the box office the studio execs want, but there's still something cheap about it. Or maybe it's just my opposition in general to acronym-speak, such as LOL and ROTFL.

And so it was that I was a little disappointed this spring to come across this poster for a movie coming out later this month:

I don't know why I should consider the Harry Potter movies to be above the fray -- they're product just like anything else, meant to make a gazillion dollars, or as close as possible in today's economic climate. But maybe what really struck me is that the last movie was not HP5, nor was the one before that HP4. Suddenly with the sixth movie, though, Harry Potter has joined this crass marketing trend that makes us all feel a little less like consumers of art, and a little more like consumers of commerce.

Or I guess it could just be the name. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as a title, has strange undertones of racial insensitivity. I haven't read this book so I don't know who the half-blood prince is, and chances are, it doesn't have much to do with any human races we're aware of. But a "half-blood" outside the fantasy realm is someone racially mixed -- to use a term that everyone hates, a "mulatto." Maybe on some level this movie is ashamed of its own origins in the same way that a "half-blood" would stereotypically be ashamed of where he/she came from.

But it also has to do with which letters we ourselves are comfortable with as abbreviations. As a society, we seem to like shortening words to letters when the letters have an "ee" ending, don't we? Let's take people's names. People named David are often known as "D." People named Terrence might go by "T." You could call a guy named Charlie "C" and it would catch on. Paula would be "P." Veronica might be "V." But try it with other names. Robert is never going to be called "R," is he? It just doesn't sound right. Try calling Walter "W" and you will be laughed out of the building.

And so we see this trend in many of the movies listed above: T2, MIB, SC3, JPIII, and yes, HP6. It's part of the reason why CBTD2 is so funny -- all the letters have the "ee" sound at the end.

So, Harry Potter, join the party. Be an acronym. Just do us a favor and be better than so many of the other movies that have become popularly identified by a string of letters and numbers.