Invasion U.S.A. - Hollywood style.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

ALTHOUGH THE FLYING SAUCER seems to be the preeminent sci-fi icon buzzing around pop culture these days, I would suggest that a more appropriate emblem for the moment is the time machine, since the recent spate of alien invasion films gives the distinct sense of being transported back to the 1950s. There is one qualification, however--the science fiction of that decade usually was more sophisticated in its morality tales and admonitions about science gone awry than the current crop of Little Green Men chillers. What does unite the 1950s to the 1990s is a feeling of disempowerment and pervasive paranoia, an attitude that gave that genre its impetus during the Cold War.

The latest crop got its kickoff from "The Arrival," a vehicle for a bloated Charlie Sheen that doesn't go very far toward resurrecting his career. This dreary and formulaic film casts Sheen as a sky-watcher whose worst fears are confirmed. It plays on the current paranoia by uniting global corporatization to the realpolitik of the space invaders.

"The Arrival" was forgotten quickly, merely a warm-up for "Independence Day," a film that reconfirms the importance of advertising, especially if what you have to sell is, in former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin's phrase, a "pseudo-event." The most apt review came from former New York Mayor Ed Koch on his daily WABC radio show, as he termed the flick "gaaaaaaarrbage." Those who caught the pre-release trailers (who didn't?) showing the explosion of the White House and the Empire State Building essentially saw the whole movie. Pyrotechnics--not very good ones--were the guilty pleasures that drew the crowds.

One of this film's principal thematics is the nostalgia for the Gulf War, which Bill Pullman as the down-in-popularity president terms "a simpler time," as if it happened somewhere around the Gilded Age. The movie has the soap-opera warm-up of the disaster film, with its stock characters muddling through their trivial and frustrated lives until the Mother Ship brings everyone together in a common cause.

What is so ludicrous about this film--and what makes it such a bore--is that it takes Judgment Day as seriously as the explosion of the Planet Krypton in the Superman origin story. The major cities of the world are obliterated by the aliens, but nothing dissuades characters from cornball humor and a sense of business as usual. Moreover, how monstrous and awe-inspiring can the aliens be if Will Smith can deck one with a single...