Seven days later, Steven Spielberg’s “ E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” debuted to $11 million but proved to have stubby, little box office legs, eventually grossing more than half a billion dollars worldwide. After its June 4, 1982, opening, “ Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” set an unexpected record by grossing about $14 million on its first weekend. The peak of this trajectory came in the summer of 1982, in which five authentic genre classics premiered within a one-month span. The final lines of movie were prescient about the rise of the American science-fiction film, out of the B-movie trenches in the 1950s and into the firmament of the industry’s A-list several decades later. This plea for eagle-eyed vigilance suited the postwar era of Pax Americana, in which economic prosperity was leveraged against a creeping paranoia - of threats coming from above or within. “Watch the skies,” he insists breathlessly, hinting at the possibility of a full-on invasion in the final lines. At the end of Christian Nyby’s 1951 sci-fi chiller “ The Thing from Another World” - about an Arctic expedition whose members are stealthily decimated by an accidentally defrosted alien monster - a traumatized journalist takes to the airwaves to deliver an urgent warning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |