Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich made his name in German film with The Noah's Ark Principle in 1981, and founded the production company Centropolis with his sister in 1985. Hollywood took the Stuttgart born director quickly and never really let him do anything else. He is the master of disaster, a nickname the industry handed him that he has not fought very hard, and his films have taken more than three billion dollars worldwide, which puts him among the twenty highest grossing directors of all time.

The formula has been stable for thirty years. Establish a wide ensemble of ordinary people in different cities, introduce a threat visible from space, destroy a landmark the audience has an emotional relationship with, then reunite a father with the child he has been neglecting. Independence Day is the purest execution, 2012 the most extravagant, and The Day After Tomorrow the one that has aged into something uncomfortably close to a forecast. What keeps them watchable is that Emmerich is completely sincere. There is no irony in the spectacle and no wink to the audience, which is why the imitators who reached for camp never landed the same way.

He is far less comfortable outside the formula. The 1998 Godzilla is the famous misfire, Anonymous took on the Shakespeare authorship question and convinced almost nobody, and Stonewall drew heavy criticism. Stargate remains the outlier worth defending, a genuinely strange science fiction premise that outgrew its own film and became a television franchise he had nothing to do with.