The movies Roland Emmerich hates with a passion: “It’s ruining our industry”
If you want to watch a disaster movie, look no further than the German-born Roland Emmerich‘s output, who has helmed popular titles like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, and is highly skilled in crafting movies that revel in dramatic action and terrifying catastrophes that many of us love to watch but would jump barefooted on a plug not to experience in real life.
Emmerich even brought everyone’s fear of 2012 being the end of the world to life with the aptly-titled 2012, which forced audiences to face what could happen if the Earth finally reached its climactic final moments. It makes you wonder how he gets to sleep at night when his head is seemingly full of apocalyptic ideas and horrifying monsters, but evidently, he channels these fears into his work, which has made him one of the most financially successful directors of all time.
The disaster genre, which became particularly widespread in the 1970s, has since dwindled in popularity, and Emmerich, who was one of the leading filmmakers to keep the genre afloat into the 2000s, thinks he knows why, pointing to the dominance of those pesky Marvel films that have taken over mainstream cinema, causing irreversible damage to the attention spans and tastes of movie-goers; it’s pretty tragic.
“Marvel and DC Comics, and Star Wars, have pretty much taken over. It’s ruining our industry a little bit, because nobody does anything original anymore,” he told Den of Geek. When you look at the highest-grossing movies of recent years, you’ll find an array of superhero movies and epic blockbusters that form franchises, and it’s utterly depressing. Everything is based on pre-existing IP, whether that be characters like Superman and the Hulk or yet another instalment in the world belonging to Darth Vader and Han Solo.
Cinema is an art form that can produce straight masterpieces that communicate the human experience, so when you’re watching a film that is clearly made with profit, not creativity, in mind, it can be hard to connect. I mean, when you’ve got a talking raccoon and chunky alien warlords among your characters and grown adults are obsessing over them, even crying over these films, you have to wonder what went wrong for mainstream cinema.
Emmerich makes mainstream films that certainly aren’t on the same level as Jeanne Dielman or even Taxi Driver, but at least he tries to work with his own original ideas (apart from when he made Godzilla, that is). These days, you’re certainly not going to see him helming a movie where the Hulk is smashing up buildings or Han Solo is befriending hairy humanoid aliens.
“When I see Marvel movies, my eyes glaze over,” he claimed at a press conference for his movie Midway, adding, “I watch them on the plane so I can fall asleep”. It’s a sentiment that many filmmakers in the industry hold; Marvel movies just aren’t cinema, they’re commodities made to attract audiences who are already invested in these pre-existing characters. With their bright colours and constant action, they’re basically baby sensory videos for adults, and you can’t really blame Emmerich of being sick of them.
