Warner Bros. Pictures
On Friday, the director Roland Emmerich returns to his roots by unleashing another movie in which, among other scenes of massive devastation, D.C. suffers the complete or near-complete demolition of its most famous landmark. Emmerich’s latest, White House Down, is the second movie to be released in 2012 in which the executive mansion is besieged and captured by terrorists. And while it is unlikely that Emmerich will let the terrorists prevail in the end, trailers and images of White House Down suggest that the White House is in for a beating when the film opens. So, in anticipation of Friday, DCist is recounting some of the most memorable instances of the White House being trashed, torched, and vaporized.
Movie: Mars Attacks!
Year: 1996
Director: Tim Burton
Cause of White House destruction: Aliens with small lasers
When it comes to destroying the earth, it seems as though aliens really have it in for White House. We first saw Zod and his cronies quickly trash the West Wing before forcing the President to kneel before him in Superman II, and then we witnessed Roland Emmerich—who at this point seems to fetishize destroying the White House (that one’s a freebie for you, commenters)—obliterate it for the first time in Independence Day, but it’s Tim Burton’s campy, ’50s throwback sci-fi laugher Mars Attacks! that finally shows what happens when a full-fledged Martian invasion takes over the White House. When the brainy, svelte-framed aliens finally take control of the White House, it’s all out carnage: Dozens of the little green men destroying everything and everyone in sight with their sophisticated laser guns. All the while tour groups, staffers, and President Jack Nicholson, First Lady Glenn Close, along with their Secret Service detail, desperately try to escape. During the mayhem the two teenaged sons of Jim Brown’s character manage to get their hands on a couple Martian laser guns and take out some of the baddies, but not before a stray shot hits a chandelier and crushes Glenn Close in a comically brutal fashion. FLOTUS down! FLOTUS down!
