Word: devlin
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...full, idiosyncratic thrill-value of each. These lead to striking shots of a desert near a military base and several confused urban crowd scenes. In the beginning of other sequences, the screen bursts into white, as July 4th draws nigh. The story, written by director Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, has a handy way of faithfully returning to the bits of exposition and information dropped along the way. The drunken pilot (Randy Quaid) whom we see being teased early on for his supposed alien encounters eventually gets his just dues...
...movie is pretty obvious," Devlin admits. "The closest we get to a social statement is to play upon the idea that as we approach the millennium, and we're no longer worried about a nuclear threat, the question is, Will there be an apocalypse, and if so, how will it come?" In ID4, it comes to us. Once man, and movies, dreamed of conquering space; then we got to the moon and woke up. Now sci-fi films are passive-aggressive: we wait for the spacemen to drop by. And if the visitors are hostile, we go nuclear on their...
Their first U.S. project was Universal Soldier, a hearty exercise in RoboCop sadomachismo that starred Jean-Claude Van Damme. Then, in 1994 Emmerich and Devlin did Stargate, about a secret government agency detecting signs of extraterrestrial life and discovering that the pyramids were made by aliens. With Kurt Russell as the director's standard rogue grunt, the film was a surprise...
...Contact) and a comedy about moviemaking (Ghost Chase), he directed Moon 44, an outer-space Dirty Dozen with a story line that would recur in ID4: for a desperate space battle, a former combat pilot must assemble a ragtag band of flyers, including a loser with heroically suicidal tendencies. Devlin played the computer-nerdy male ingenue; after Moon 44, he and the director became filmmaking partners...
...Devlin, 33, comes from a movie family (his father is a producer; his actress mother appeared in a '60s Star Trek episode, "Wolf in the Fold," as a princess killed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper); adapting Fred Allen's famous jape about television, he says, "Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood." He knows that movies are to steal from. "More than any other genre," Devlin says, "science fiction cannot deny what comes before it. So, when we did a science-fiction film, especially one like this, where we wanted to have fun, we said...