Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre to the extreme and perhaps to excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day was one of the most anticipated movies of 1996 (after a Super Bowl spot earlier in the year that generated significant buzz) and represented yet another huge leap forward for Hollywood in specials effects wizardry. The film gives us the story of aliens arriving around the Earth in fifteen mile wide ships that park themselves over several of the planet’s major cities. They make no attempt to contact us, but computer whiz David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) discovers a hidden transmission that he believes is being used to coordinate a worldwide attack. He contacts his ex-wife (Margaret Colin), who is the White House Communications Director, so that she can help him to warn the president (Bill Pullman) about the imminent attack. They escape from Washington D.C. just as the aliens launch their attack and destroy that city, New York, Los Angeles and several other major cities across the globe. The president orders a nuclear counterattack against the alien ships, but it proves ineffective because of the shields they have protecting their crafts. However, one of the small alien fighter crafts is captured after Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) decoys it into the Grand Canyon during a dogfight and causes it to crash. Levinson then comes up with the idea of using this ship to board the mothership in orbit around the planet and plant a computer virus that will disable the shields on the ships still attacking the planet. Hiller agrees to pilot the ship and Levinson goes along as they prepare for a last ditch effort to save the human race.
Now if I condense that synopsis a bit, I’m guessing it will have a very familiar ring to fans of classic Science Fiction literature and movies: An alien race with vastly superior technology comes to Earth and launches an unprovoked attack that our opposition pales against. We resort to nuclear retaliation, but it has no effect because the alien ships have impenetrable shields. In the end and against all odds, though, these technologically advanced, seemingly unstoppable aliens succumb to something as simple as a virus.
A show of hands to those who can identify the source material . . . That’s very good class, you are absolutely correct when you mention both H.G. Wells’ original novel The War of the Worlds as well as the 1953 film adaptation. Yes, Independence Day is little more that a mega-budget remake of Wells’ story throwing in some of the additions from the first film version (pretty much duplicating the nuclear attack scene from that film) and with a little bit of Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End and multiple other swipes from Science Fiction (and Action/Adventure) books, films, and TV shows as well. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with drawing from those sources, I just find it rather annoying that they give Wells absolutely no credit in the film even though they followed basically the same story (and substituting a computer virus for a biological virus does not allow them to take a mulligan here).
However, despite the fact that ID4 gives us very little in the way of originality, it’s not necessarily a bad film. In fact, I would say this one is actually Emmerich’s best film (though not that that’s saying too much). He does succeed in taking the familiar and giving it enough of a twist to at least not feel completely derivative and old hat. The special effects were spectacular for the 90′s and still look virtually flawless today and the dialogue is peppy and mostly avoids the copy-and-paste trap. And Emmerlich also managed to assemble a first-rate cast for this film that gelled and managed to give it enough of a boost to not feel like big budget hack sci fi (even though it really is). He also manages to tread that fine line between drama and humor so that both elements mix together perfectly and do not work against each other. And of course this movie proved quite a boon for Will Smith who used it as a launching point from television sitcom star to A-List movie mainstay, and his performance definitely helped carry the film. But the film had several additional standout performances as well including the often over-looked Jeff Goldblum as well as Judd Hirsch, Randy Quaid, and Star Trek: TNG veteran Brent Spinner.
I do have to admit to having a personal affinity for this film and that I can watch it over and over, but it’s definitely because it is high on the guilty pleasure scale. It’s a great popcorn film at best but it’s susceptible to the “emperor has no clothes” syndrome and quickly falls apart when put under any level of serious scrutiny. Still, it does provide a fun couple of hours to shut your mind down to and enjoy the cinematic pyrotechnics and good character acting. All that said, though, this one definitely helped kick-start a dubious trend that would develop with the mega-budget films to follow. Hollywood quickly took notice of this one’s box office success causing them to ramp up even higher the tendency toward big, dumb, loud sci fi blockbusters. After ID4, that template became the rule and no longer the exception among the blockbusters cranked out by the major studios. So feel free to enjoy this film for its dazzling special effects brain dead fun, but also know that it marked a notable, inauspicious shift in Hollywood after its release in 1996.
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