Mercurii Retro

A World at War and War of the Worlds

There can be an exhilaration in watching chaos unfold in front of you and disrupt the ordinary. This is why disaster movies have been exciting and why action movies place someone in the middle of the action. For over a century, the genre of invasion literature that began in comfort before World War I for a bored audience seeking a thrill has continued that trend. But that genre changes dramatically when an actual invasion and the feeling of being unsafe is still entirely too fresh in the collective minds of the population. The films Independence Day and War of the Worlds are two examples of invasion media but can be analyzed very differently in the context of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. These films came out in 1996 and 2005, respectively, and with only 9 years separating them, they show two vastly different Americas.