The “Swabian Spielberg”

Roland Emmerich Photo: Hyde Flippo Emmerich was chosen to head the jury for the 2005 Berlinale, the 55th session of the international film festival in Berlin.

Roland Emmerich, the German director of Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot , and The Day After Tomorrow, was born in Stuttgart on 10 November 1955. He graduated from high school in Sindelfingen (near Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg) in 1974, and worked in advertising before he began studying film in Munich in 1977. Starting with his earliest filmmaking projects, Emmerich demonstrated a preference for science-fiction and special effects. As a film student, Emmerich made The Noah's Ark Principle (“Das Prinzip Arche Noah”), a school project that was chosen as the official opening film of the 1983 Berlin Film Festival and was the most expensive student film ever produced in Germany.

But the really big-budget productions were to come in Hollywood after the “Swabian Spielberg” (Swabia, Schwaben in German, is the region around Stuttgart) teamed up with producer Dean Devlin, an American who had been an actor in some of Emmerich's early German sci-fi productions, the biggest of which was Moon 44 (Mond 44) in 1989. After Emmerich's first Hollywood picture, Universal Soldier (1992), earned $36 million, despite less than critical acclaim, the Devlin-Emmerich team was able to independently produce (with co-producer Ute Emmerich, Roland's sister) Stargate (1994). Stargate was a minor hit, doing OK at the box office (over $71 million), becoming a cult classic and leading to a hit spinoff television series (see below). Emmerich, his sister (as producer), and Devlin worked together again on Independence Day which was released in U.S. theaters on July 2, 1996, a day earlier than the planned July 3 release date. “ID4,” as the sci-fi film was code-named, updated the classic H.G. Wells War of the Worlds (1953) movie, but Emmerich's Martians of the '90s are much nastier, more diabolical characters, obsessed with eradicating life on earth—even blowing up the White House in one of the film's more stunning (and popular) scenes. Some say that scene alone helped make ID4 Emmerich's biggest grossing film to date.

Roland Emmerich (on right) and Dean Devlin.
PHOTO: Expresso-Online

Emmerich's “Hollywood” productions have had a high percentage of German input. The audience-pleasing effects for ID4 and Godzilla were created by another German, FX supervisor Volker Engel (current project: Coronado). Besides sister/producer Ute, the chain-smoking, workaholic Emmerich also worked with his favorite cameraman and fellow German, Karl Walter Lindenlaub up until Godzilla, which was filmed by Swiss-born Ueli Steiger (who was also behind the lens for Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow).

After recuperating in Mexico from ID4's success, Emmerich and Devlin soon began work on their next project, a remake of the classic Japanese Godzilla that starred Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno. The giant lizard had the most heavily hyped promotion of any of the Emmerich-Devlin pictures to date. As a result, even an opening $55 million take seemed like a disappointment to some observers. (Spielberg's Lost World made almost twice as much in its first weekend.) With Godzilla the Emmerich team may have milked the FX-laden, blow-'em-up genre a bit too much, but it became Emmerich's second highest grossing film to date at $136 million.

At the box office in July 2000 there was a battle of the duelling Germans. Emmerich's The Patriot and Wolfgang Petersen's Perfect Storm were released at about the same time in the U.S. Petersen's Storm enjoyed an early lead over Emmerich's Revolutionary Patriot and the total box office reflected that trend, with a $182 million take for The Perfect Storm versus $113 million for The Patriot. By comparison, Independence Day grossed over $306 million in 1996. (Sources: USA All-Time Box Office Chart - IMDb and Box Office Mojo - Emmerich) Personally, I still consider Emmerich's underrated Stargate his best film to date, even though the 1994 space odyssey earned less than $72 million.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW opened
in US theaters on May 28, 2004.
> Buy the DVD

Yet another Emmerich vs. Petersen contest arose in May 2004. Petersens' Troy opened on May 14. Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow opened two weeks later at the end of May. When I first heard about Emmerich's global-warming disaster film, it seemed a lot like the 1961 Cinemascope sci-fi adventure Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (with Walter Pidgeon and Joan Fontaine) in which the earth has become unbearably hot. In The Day After Tomorrow, a climatologist (Dennis Quaid) is also trying to save the world from rapid climate change, but global warming is making the planet freeze rather than heat up. (See the next page for more about Emmerich's films.)

Television

“Stargate SG-1”

Before it ended up in syndication and on the Sci-Fi channel, Showtime had made a 44-episode commitment to the “Stargate SG-1” series, based on the 1995 Roland Emmerich movie. The cable network premiered SG-1 in July 1997 with Richard Dean Anderson taking over the original Kurt Russell role of expedition leader Col. Jonathan “Jack” O'Neill. James Spader, as the spacey scientist-linguist, Dr. Daniel Jackson, was replaced ably by Michael Shanks for the small screen. (He also looks the most like his original character.) Also joining the TV team was Stargate expert Dr. Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping), who is one of the few Earthlings who really understand the space portal. The fact that she is an attractive blonde female member of the team—something the film lacked—is no doubt pure coincidence, but Tapping has proved to be a popular figure in the new series.

“Stargate SG-1” (what is it with these alphanumeric codes—ID4, SG-1—anyway?) sends the expedition members on weekly treks to faraway worlds via the Stargate portal, but the series' producers, Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright, are defensive about comparisons to “Star Trek” — old or new. They eagerly point out a few key differences: (1) SG-1 is set in the present rather than Trek's 23rd century, (2) the SG-1 characters are less prepared for what they may encounter, and (3) there is no space ship in SG-1.

The new series also builds on a few gaps in the original Stargate plot. For example, if there are 39 symbols on the Stargate and it only takes seven to go someplace, what are the other symbols for? SG-1 has the logical answer: there are lots and lots of stargates in the universe. In the process of filling in the plot holes of the feature film, the series has created an entire mythology of its own, expanding beyond the Egyptian focus of Emmerich's original. — Besides, it would be difficult to make the Vancouver area, where SG-1 is filmed, look like Egypt. (But computer-generated special effects solve this problem when necessary.) SG-1 joined another popular TV series, “The X-Files,” in filming in and around the Canadian city.

See SG-1 links on the next page.

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