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(1955– ). German director, writer, and producer.
Directed:
Hollywood-Monster [Ghost Chase] ] (and wrote with Oliver Eberle
and Thomas Kubisch) (1987); Universal Soldier (1992); Stargate
(and wrote with Dean Devlin) (1994)
Produced:
The High Crusade (Klaus Knoesel and Holger Neuhauser 1994); The
Visitor (tv series) (1997-1998); Godzilla: The Series (animated tv
series) (1998); The Thirteenth Floor (Josef Rusnak 1999); Eight
Legged Freaks (Ellory Eklayem 2002).
Appeared
in documentaries: The Making of Universal Soldier (tv short) (1992);
"Mechanical Effects: Nuts and Bolts" (1995), "Devastation Effects: Movie
Mayhem" (1996), episodes of Movie Magic; The Making of Independence
Day (short) Thomas C. Grane 1996); Independence Day: The ID4 Invasion
(Grane 1996); "The Making of Independence Day" (1996), "The Making of The
Day After Tomorrow" (2004), "10,000 B.C.: The Making of an Epic
World" (2008), episodes of HBO First Look; Godzilla, King of the
Monsters (1998); Godzilla: On Assignment with Charles Caiman
(short) (1998); "The Films of Roland Emmerich" (1999), episode of The Directors;
Boom! Hollywood's Greatest Disaster Movies (Shelley Lyons 2000); Independence
Day: Creating Reality (short) (2000); "Teurer Sprit und Klimaschock: Mit
Vollgas in die Katastrophe?" (2004), episode of Berlin Mitte:
"Popparit Bushin Kimpussa" (2004), episode of 4Pop; The Force Is
with Them: The Legacy of Star Wars (2004); Guns, Genes and Fighting
Machines: The Making of Universal Soldier (short) (Jeffrey Schwarz 2004);
Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001 (short) (Gary
Leva 2007); A Wild and Woolly Ride (John Wheeler 2008); 2012:
Startling New Secrets (2009); Roland Emmerich: Mein Leben (Jö
Muller 2009); Roland Emmerich: Master of the Modern Epic (video short)
(2010).
It wasn't always this way. As a young
director in Germany, and then in the United States, Emmerich initially
specialized in making the sorts of low-budget, low-profile films that gather
dust on the shelves of video rental stores awaiting a daring customer willing
to take a chance on an intriguing but unknown title. Such films, considered in
their context, are hard to castigate, and some might even discern a sort of
dopey charm in films like Joey or Moon 44, making them believe that
their two dollars weren't wasted.
But Emmerich then hooked up with rising
action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and unexpectedly hit the big time with the
sci-fi shoot-em-up Universal Soldier, the undeserved success of which
led to bigger budgets, the establishment of a profitable alliance with producer
Dean DEVLIN, and another unexpected and undeserved hit, Stargate. Like a
later exercise in mediocrity, Stephen SOMMERS's The Mummy, the film somehow
scored by combining faux Egyptian veneer, relentless action, and razzle-dazzle
special effects despite its obvious problems in casting (this was the film that
proved James Spader couldn't carry a movie) and both narrative and scientific
logic (its villain being an ancient alien who combines vast superscientific
powers and the common sense of a four-year-old). Despite his emerging status as
the major Hollywood director specializing in science fiction films, Emmerich
irksomely makes films that seem especially ignorant of and contemptuous toward
science; even his own characters cannot bother to make sense of the
perfunctory, muddled scientific explanations, generally cutting off the blather
by saying something like, "Look, just tell me where to shoot, and we'll
figure it all out later."
While no one would have identified Emmerich
as a rising star on the basis of Stargate, his next film, Independence
Day, led many to hold precisely that opinion, inasmuch as it became for a
while the highest-grossing film of all time. Yet in terms of its overall design
and execution, the film was just as slipshod and senseless as his previous
hits; its success must be attributed to its unusually evocative imagery of
immense alien spacecraft hovering above major cities—if nothing else,
Emmerich's films can occasionally look interesting—and to its remarkably
talented lead performers, Smith and Goldblum, who unlike Van Damme, Spader, or
Kurt RUSSELL actually had enough skill to almost succeed in animating
Emmerich's artless contrivances.
With Emmerich's track record, a proven
property with built-in appeal, and a lavish budget for production and
promotion, everyone knew that his next film, an American version of Godzilla,
was absolutely, positively sure to be a huge hit. It wasn't, because at this
point Emmerich's desperate desire to touch every base and please every customer
had disastrously gone into overdrive. It seems the sort of film that had not
four, but dozens of screenwriters, a steady stream of uncredited industry
veterans who each added one more sure-fire gimmick: "Let's have a
fisherman feel a pull on his line, and then out comes Godzilla!"
"Let's use the old rolling marbles trick to stop the miniature
dinosaurs!" "Let's put Godzilla in a big car chase sequence."
Its titular monster stripped of all symbolic or political significance in order
to avoid offending anyone, its potpourri of boring subplots beyond the control
of ineffectual leading man Matthew BRODERICK, Godzilla is a risible
mess, and one can be thankful that the planned second and third films of the
Godzilla trilogy have been indefinitely put on hold.
As if newly unsure of his power to deal
effectively with science fiction, Emmerich uncharacteristically retreated to
American history with The Patriot while placing more emphasis on his
second career as a producer, with uneven results. The High Crusade, more
fodder for the impulse-buyer at the video store, is a dreary evisceration of
Poul Anderson's delightful novel; The Thirteenth Floor and Eight
Legged Freaks had higher profiles, better advance buzz, but disappointing
ticket sales; and the state of television entertainment was not exactly
improved by The Visitor and an animated Godzilla series. (He is
not officially credited, and hence officially cannot be blamed, for the
relentlessly dull Stargate television series, the most recent of which
is still inexplicably on the air.)
One might have hoped that Emmerich would
carry on with historical dramas and producing assignments, but the allure of
directing big-budget, special-effects spectaculars proved irresistible, and he
caught his second wind with three more successes in this arena—The Day
After Tomorrow, 10,000 B.C., and 2012. If anything, these
were even more witless and frenetically manipulative than his previous efforts,
but all of them were solid successes at the box office, suggesting that we now
live in a world where, for certain sorts of film, quality simply doesn't
matter; if the hook is persuasive enough, the hype is energetic enough, and the
release is wide enough, any expensive science fiction film can quickly earn a
profit before audiences figure out that it is a senseless disaster. And, if
that's the sort of film that Hollywood studios wish to specialize in, Roland
Emmerich is, if nothing else, a director who can always be counted on to
deliver precisely the sort of glittering garbage that meets their needs.
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