If I wasn't aware that director Roland Emmerich, the once so-called "master of disaster" studio movies, was a champion of equal rights, and an active campaigner for the awareness of global warming, and whose college thesis film was a sci-fi project titled The Noah's Ark Principle, it would be easy to simply dismiss his films as mindless, special effects-laden, cliched, formulaic narratives. The openly gay German filmmaker once claimed that he witnessed overt industry racism firsthand, when studio executives were opposed to having him cast Will Smith for the lead in the 1996 blockbuster, Independence Day, and expressed a similar ambivalence in allowing Emmerich to...
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