Destroying New York in Movies Is Back in Style

NEW YORK — The Brooklyn Bridge exploding and left in ruins. The Statue of Liberty decapitated, its head crashing down a street like a bowling ball. Lower Manhattan in flames with people running for their lives.

More than six years after 9/11, Hollywood has decided it's OK to blow up New York again.

And that may be a good thing.

"If popular culture no longer finds it interesting and captivating to destroy New York, that may be a sign it has declined as our most important city," said Max Page, an architecture and history professor at the University of Massachusetts.

In theaters now is "I Am Legend," which stars Will Smith in a vividly desolate New York, complete with blasted bridges, abandoned landmarks and zombies with sensitive skin.

On Jan. 18, the much-anticipated monster movie "Cloverfield" debuts, its buzz amplified by viral online marketing and previews of Big Apple destruction.

Posters and trailers showing the beheaded Lady Liberty and a demolished skyline also have stirred memories of 9/11 and prompted complaints of exploitation.

Cloverfield director Matt Reeves says the bizarre sight of the Statue of Liberty's head tossed down a street should quickly dispel thoughts of terrorism.

However, Cloverfield does speak to the fears and anxieties of our time, Reeves has said. He compares the film to the original "Godzilla," which embodied Japanese trauma from the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For New York, every cultural medium has addressed its demise, from poetry and cartoons to software and music, said Page, whose upcoming book is called "The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York's Destruction."

"Many of our worst fears and social struggles made their way into stories of New York's annihilation," he said. "If those films and novels and CD covers stop being made, it will be a sign that New York no longer dominates our imagination."

No fear of that. New York is the favorite venue for monster or disaster flicks, according to a recent Fandango Web site poll. New York had 55 percent of the vote. Trailing cities included Los Angeles (11 percent), London (15 percent) and Godzilla's traditional stomping ground, Tokyo (12 percent).

"Disaster looks better in New York," Page said. "If you're going to have some creature rampaging through, it doesn't look as good in Omaha."

Laying waste to New York City has long been a filmmaker favorite, from the 1933 rampage of "King Kong" and the 1951 flooding of "When Worlds Collide" to the 1996 "Independence Day" aliens, who delivered urban-renewal-by-death-ray.

By the end of 1998, New Yorkers felt decidedly picked on. That year "Armageddon" tore into the city with meteors, a comet strike sank it under a tsunami in "Deep Impact" and a big lizard trashed the place in the Americanized "Godzilla."

But a few years later, Sept. 11 showed that fantasy could not match the horror of reality.

Many people could only describe the devastation of that day, the sheer impossibility of it all, the only way they knew how: "It's like something out of a movie."

After that, Hollywood reined in its special effects and doomsday plots.

A trailer for the then-upcoming "Spider-Man" movie featuring a helicopter snagged in a giant web between the twin towers was pulled from theaters.

Some films with terrorism themes were delayed. The remake of "The Time Machine" was pushed back and edited because of a scene where moon fragments pummel a futuristic New York.

Briefly, it seemed that movie mayhem, especially involving New York, was off limits.

But by 2004, the city — along with much of the planet — was in the bull's-eye again in "The Day After Tomorrow." The film's relatively bloodless environmental nightmare flooded and froze the Big Apple.

Still, really bad weather was a way off from images that would evoke 9/11 memories.

Cloverfield promises to push those sensitivities.

A movie about a giant monster is hard to confuse with reality, but one early scene available online can be startling in its familiarity.

As the distant rampage begins, a confused woman asks: "What do you think? Think it's another attack?"

After the barely glimpsed monster passes by, a skyscraper collapses in a billowing cloud of debris and smoke. People stop taking pictures and start running. A few hide in a grocery store as the cloud rolls by and the ground shakes.

Online debates have raged. Some say the imagery exploits 9/11. Others counter that six years is time enough to heal. Others ask, what's a monster movie without toppled buildings and how else is that supposed to look?

Many simply say: It's just a movie.

On the Web:

Cloverfield: www.cloverfieldmovie.com

I Am Legend: iamlegend.warnerbros.com