| Movies White House Down Roland Emmerich is back to demolish our nation's capital, and not even Channing Tatum can stop him. By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Jun 28, 2013, at 02:06 PM ET  Should Roland Emmerich be put on some sort of government watch list? Nearly two decades after he first publicly fantasized about the destruction of Washington, D.C., in Independence Day (1996), he's back with another massive imagined attack on our nation's capital in White House Down—this time not via alien invasion, but a humanity-driven inside job. In the Mayan-calendar disaster epic 2012, Emmerich demolished not only the seat of U.S. government but a large portion of the Earth's surface. And when not compulsively re-enacting the annihilation of all that America holds dear, the German-born director has been known to espouse radical-fringe ideology—namely, in his last film Anonymous, the belief that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the plays published under his name. I'm glad, though, that the NSA hasn't yet spirited Emmerich off to a remote location, because I rather enjoy his movies (the more self-serious Anonymous being a rare exception). Emmerich's vision of civilization's collapse is so loony, the scale of the damage he imagines so vast, that his best movies (that is to say his worst) achieve a strange tone of devil-may-care merriment. In White House Down, the spectacularly disturbing image of the Capitol rotunda exploding into flame—which dominates the film's marketing campaign—isn't some sort of action-climax dessert; it's an amuse-bouche of excitement that occurs about 15 minutes in. Things only escalate from there, as the battleground quickly moves from ... To continue reading, click here.
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