THE INVASION HAS BEGUN!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Pick a house, any average American house, and chances are the folks inside will be fans of science fiction. This pretty house in Washington, for example. The family has just had the cable Sci-Fi Channel installed. Mom has been known to try to commune with a dead woman who once lived there. And Dad? He just saw the new alien-invasion epic Independence Day--at home. Dean Devlin, the co-writer and producer, watched Dad watch the film, and Devlin was impressed: "He was whipping off facts about history, talking about social and international issues. But when the movie started, he pulled out a big old bucket of popcorn, kicked back, and he was Bubba again."

Bubba lives in the White House, the house that is zapped into holocaustal flames by a flying saucer's death ray in Independence Day. The house that, come Christmas, will be invaded by uggy green creatures with no manners at all in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! The house whose primary resident supposedly knows every secret of a secretive government--the hot dish about alien sightings, alien abductees, alien autopsies--except that, as viewers of TV shows like The X-Files are taught, the President doesn't know the half of it, because the information is kept from him by conspiratorial feds who may be, God help us, aliens themselves!

By summer's end, the only creatures on Earth to feel alien will be those who haven't seen ID4. (O.K., the abbreviation makes no sense, and what will they call the sequel, ID5?) The most smartly hyped film of the summer, it is also the grandest: Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the director and co-author, dare to imagine the ultimate catastrophe as it kills off tens of millions of unseen victims and ennobles a dozen major characters, from the Commander in Chief to a stripper's pet dog.

This is a busy summer for the paranormal: The Arrival sent Charlie Sheen off to battle aliens (involved in a, yes, government conspiracy), and this week, in Phenomenon, John Travolta undergoes a mysterious hoisting of his IQ and psychic powers. The season has already been a sweltering one for blockbusters: Twister has earned more than $215 million at the U.S. box office, Mission Impossible more than $160 million. But ID4, with heroic humankind battling an army of soulless space lizards, may well be the biggest. Says Steven Spielberg, who evoked the wonder of interplanetary communication in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: "I could never make an evil, aggressive alien movie, but I would sure pay to see one. I'll pay to see this one. Based on the way I think people feel today, I believe Independence Day will be the No. 1 film of the year. It will do between $250 million and $300 million, if not more."

ID4 is a vigorous, retro-'70s disaster movie, reminiscent of Airport or The Towering Inferno. Only this time the disaster is the end of the world. On July 2 in a near future year, humongous spaceships enter the Earth's atmosphere, hover over major cities around the globe, then send out a heat ray that pulverizes every urban center. Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Moscow--all barbecued. On July 3 the U.S. President (Bill Pullman) plots his counterattack with the aid of a computer genius (Jeff Goldblum), an Air Force pilot (Will Smith) and all their surviving relatives. By July 4, ID4 has soared into flyboy heaven for the climactic dogfight between Us and the Evil Other. You saw the movie's trailer--didn't it promise you fireworks? All right, ID4 delivers.

"Our 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 ass.

Brisk and churning, ID4 offers no grand vision, other than the fact that, in this post-cold war era, it looks to outer space to find new enemies worth hating, fighting and blasting into little squishy pieces. "The U.S. is desperately in search of an enemy," says Paul Verhoeven, who has directed some stunning sci-fi (RoboCop, Total Recall) and the equally otherworldly Showgirls. "The communists were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful enemy everyone can fight has been lost. Alien sci-fi films give us a terrifying enemy that's politically correct. They're bad. They're evil. And they're not even human."

Like most sci-fi movies, ID4 is a sensation machine. You leave saying "Wow!" instead of a speculative "Hmmm." These days the real head scratchers are on TV; there you'll find the genre's cool, metallic intellect touched by the fever of despair. The X-Files' twin mantras--"The truth is out there" and "Trust no one"--are the ideal ingredients for a sci-fi cocktail with a '90s twist. The paranormal and the paranoiac have joined hands through a pop-cultural wormhole; they meet and multiply. It's not so much science as psychic or psychoanalytic fiction. Psy-fi.

And the phenomenon is here to stay, for a while. Hollywood is launching more than a dozen science-fiction movies within the next year or so. Besides Mars Attacks! (a gleefully nihilistic vaudeville that promises to play Dr. Strangelove to ID4's relatively docudramatic Fail-Safe) and the inevitable sequels and remakes of Alien, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Lost in Space, you'll see big-budget versions of thoughtful sci-fi novels: Carl Sagan's Contact (directed by Robert Zemeckis), Michael Crichton's Sphere (Barry Levinson) and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven).

The airwaves and cable wires already pulse with a dozen TV series on the otherworldly, from the light-headed NBC hit 3rd Rock from the Sun to the time-travel capering of Sliders on Fox, from Showtime's The Outer Limits and Poltergeist: The Legacy to the fact-based (or factoidal) Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings. Two of the series, The Sentinel on UPN and Fox's new Millennium, from The X-Files creator Chris Carter, are psychic cop shows. The media sky is darker with eerie phenomena than a UFOlogist's nightscape. As a serial killer whispers in the first episode of Millennium (the creepiest TV premiere since Twin Peaks), "You can't stop it!"

In some of these shows, such as the proliferating Star Trek spin-offs, the aliens are benign, intellectually curious--like American mid-century liberals, only with pointy ears or exposed frontal lobes. The Zeitgeistiest programs, however, tap into a pop persecution mania. Consider this: the U.S. stands unchallenged as a world power, is not at war, enjoys a high standard of living and has relatively stable rates of interest and unemployment; yet polls continue to show a profound malaise. People feel crushed by government, abused by corporate employers, baffled by computers. "Technology is moving fast-forward," says Carter, "and we rarely get a chance to understand the implications. Most of us can't program our VCR. We have the tools of science in our hands, and we're afraid of them."

Today, the American theology of the '50s--the middle class's belief in the government's bland benevolence--is a dying creed. Rising expectations have given way to escalating suspicions about those in power. It isn't only the Montana Freemen who believe that we have met the enemy and he is U.S. "We know we've been lied to," says Bryce Zabel, Dark Skies' co-creator, "about Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra." Moreover, as ID4's Emmerich notes, "every generation creates its own mythology. Now the mythology centers on the government's hiding the dead alien bodies it discovered at Roswell."

Ah, Roswell. This New Mexico town is the Lourdes of psy-fi, just as Area 51, the supersecret facility in Nevada, is its Vatican. The story goes like this: in July 1947, flying saucers crashed near Roswell, and dead creatures and their spacecraft were taken into government custody; for a half-century, alien remains have been studied in Area 51. Officially, the place barely exists, but it and Roswell have entered the pop lexicon. Area 51 appeared in the second episode of The X-Files; it is the setting for much of Independence Day. In the hit movie The Rock, the FBI director says that Sean Connery knows about "the alien landing at Roswell." Dark Skies posits that the government suppressed news of the Roswell aliens and that the space demons have taken over America by implanting infant aliens in people's brains--a scenario for people who think Oliver Stone's conspiracy theories are way too timid.

Area 51 must be a busy place; everyone has a theory about what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career, particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks to get a genetic encoding. It then puts it into a huge computer so that it always knows what you are doing." Murphy takes a breath. "Of course, I might be just a little paranoid."

Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind or another." He cites J.G. Ballard's remark: "The only truly alien planet is Earth."

The idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in '50s films often represented communists--faceless invaders who were going to take over our country. The mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic cleansing. They don't want to come in and settle. They want to take over."

If we are now painting the Other as bad guys in black spaceships, what does it mean? Clive Barker, the author (Sacrament) and filmmaker (Hellraiser), thinks the attitude is dangerously alienating. "It disconnects us from being able to operate in the real world," he says. "There's a sense we're unplugging from political activity, civic duties or even responsibility to our neighbors by saying there are things greater than us and secrets hidden from us. We are a superstitious species, and we need to look outside ourselves for something larger that will bring either calamity or wisdom or maybe both. This is about belief, not just box office."

It may be about belief. It is certainly about box office. Peter Chernin, the 20th Century Fox chairman, didn't see a holy white light when he gave the green light to ID4; he was thinking grosses. Michael Sullivan of UPN didn't have religion in mind when he put four sci-fi shows on his network; he was thinking demographics. "Sci-fi has traditionally been a cult item, and 20 years ago, networks had to draw a mass audience. Now with the networks' share of audience diminishing, that core audience becomes more significant," he says. And NBC's Warren Littlefield was not looking for metaphors when he programmed an entire Saturday evening of fall shows with spooky themes. He was listening to the voice of his 11-year-old son, to whom the fantastic is as real as it is to Gibson. "I can't get him to watch a classic western on television," Littlefield says and repeats this recent conversation. Son: "So let me get this straight. The horse doesn't fly?" Father: "No, it just rides across the desert." Son: "I'm outta here."

It's the TV producer's job to keep kids and adults glued to the screen. As The X-Files' Carter easily admits, "Our goal, first and foremost, is to scare people." It's the modern movie director's job to package an old idea with zippy effects so that the audience will think it's seeing something new--and be blown away. During the cold war, even the cheesiest sci-fi filmmaker, like the legendarily dyscompetent Ed Wood, had some moral admonition in mind ("He tampered in God's domain"). Now it's size that counts; sense and scruples don't. As Spielberg says, "If the '70s and '80s were the era of the What if? movie, then the '90s are the era of the What the heck! movie. We say, 'Hey, this is so beyond our logical grasp, so out of this world, that we're just going along for the ride.'"

Emmerich, 40, the conductor of ID4's wild ride, is a can-do scholar of Hollywood moviemaking; he has built a reputation for efficient melodramas on modest budgets. (For all its locations and effects and the mandatory cast of thousands, ID4 reportedly cost a thrifty $71 million.) Emmerich first fell under the spell of science fiction as a boy watching U.S. films as well as local sci-fi TV shows in his native Germany. "For me," he says, "going on a science-fiction movie set is like visiting toyland. You see, my brother trashed all my toys when I was a kid. It's very Freudian. For my movies you can blame my brother Andy."

Emmerich made his early films in Germany--and in English, for the world market. In 1989, after a clever Spielberg-rip-off kids' fantasy (Making 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.

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 hit.

These films were routine but easy to take; they put the fun in perfunctory. ID4 is a big step up, a doomsday fable told at warp speed. The approach of the alien ships is nicely achieved, with ominous shadows creeping across the Apollo 11 monument on the moon, then up the facades of the White House and the Empire State Building. On Earth, an ensemble cast fleshes out the stereotypes (Harvey Fierstein, whiny gay man; Judd Hirsch, crusty old Jew; Vivica Fox, stripper with heart of gold), while the three male leads mine all available righteousness and comic charm. Wryness is a big tactic here; it keeps the story from going ballistic. In the late 1990s, you will learn, there is apparently a 24-hour McLaughlin Group channel. There's also a near monopoly of Fox and Star TV news networks. The networks are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which just happens to have financed ID4.

The film has a salutary scope and bustle and enough kick in the fireball special effects to make audiences cheer--sure, it's the end of the world, but you can still party like it's 1999. As Will Smith says, "You can sell an alien attack better than the old days when you could see the zipper on the back of the alien's costume." Minute by minute, though, things look mighty familiar. If Forrest Gump was Everyman, ID4 is Everymovie, a browse through the whole film catalog: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Strangelove, Close Encounters, Alien, Top Gun, 2001, Apollo 13.

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, 'Let's out-and-out pay tribute wherever we can to movies that came before us.'"

Nothing seems so anachronistically delightful as an old movie that takes place in the future. Whatever dire thing people predicted was going to happen didn't. ID4, set in the near future, has that same comforting feeling. It's deja new. And if the picture gives us familiar thrills instead of the paranormal creeps, just wait. Ambitious writers and directors all over Hollywood are busily devising aliens whose evil is bounded only by their creators' imaginations. As Zemeckis says, "We can make them into what we want them to be, whether it's angry and vengeful or benevolent and healing."

Moviemakers don't need to conquer the aliens. They control the screen. And when they do it well, they control us, as cunningly as an ID4 alien running a mind scan on a puny Earthling. Only after the lights come up can we shake off the fear, say, "It's only a movie," and steal an anxious glance at the night sky.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison, Daniel S. Levy and Andrea Sachs/New York and Jeffrey Ressner and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles

For a special TIME online report about sci-fi, see http://www.time.com/scifi

With reporting by GEORGIA HARBISON, DANIEL S. LEVY AND ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK AND JEFFREY RESSNER AND JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS ANGELES