INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) Well thank God the dog got away I heard some talk about a sequel to this movie recently, and decided that I'd revisit this long-forgotten movie I was, admittedly, once a fan of. 1995 and most of 1996 is a drunken blur for me, so I suppose I have an excuse. Still, watching this movie now for the first time since then, I have to wonder, has this movie aged incredibly badly, or was I just easy to impress at the time? Probably the latter. (oh, shut up.) One of the most hotly-anticipated movies of its (immediate) time, Independence Day had a couple of really kick-ass trailers which showed just about every moment worth seeing in the film. The appeal of this movie pretty much begins and ends with the anarchic kick of seeing Washington, New York, and Los Angeles get pounded into dust. Strangely, watching big New York buildings collapse and burn while thousands or millions perish in flames doesn't seem nearly as much fun now as it did six years ago, gee, couldn't imagine why. I'll give Independence Day (or, the handy marketing-supplied shorthand, ID4) this: it doesn't wink, it doesn't nudge, and it actually seems to want you to like it the way it is without you asking the guy next to you "Dude, was that supposed to be sarcastic?". Randy Quaid's embarrassingly stupid parting words are at least sincere in their stupidity. The reason so many 90's movies (and 00's movies too) make me sick is that they tried so goddamn hard to be as trendy and hip as their makers could make them. Load them up with the flava-of-the-month major label assembly-line soundtrack garbage, even if the movie is set in ancient Egypt. Pop culture references, at least ten every five minutes. Try to thrill, but don't try too hard; if the audience isn't thrilled by the movie, there's an easy out, because it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, right? (all this is an approach that can work, in small doses...problem is, there's an entire generation's worth of films made this way) ID4 makes no such attempt. It's dorky, naïvely sincere, foolishly convinced of its own seriousness. It's even loaded to the gunnels with teary-eyed American flag-waving - not exactly fashionable in 1996, though I've always found it one of the more cute aspects of American action movies. And I appreciate all that. I STILL think Mars Attacks sucks harder than this movie does, for that simple reason. A movie can't very well be escapist fun if it keeps reminding you of the garbage you're trying to escape. ID4 might be shit, but at least it's not trendy shit. It's shit for the ages! So, aliens are coming, in a big ship a quarter the mass of our moon, which SETI doesn't notice until it's close enough to, well, qualify as a whole new moon. (this near-sightedness repeats itself later in the film, albeit on a smaller scale, when the guards at Area 51 don't notice a caravan of hundreds of RV's driving towards them until they're pulling through the drive-thru) There aren't any really clear shots of what this mothership looks like, but so far as I can tell, it looks like a big bicycle helmet. It gets to near-Earth orbit within a day, despite its shadow falling over the moon at a pace of about a brisk jog. Then it lets go a bunch of city-sized circular ships (pretty bland ship design) and places those above major cities all over the world. Already, we can tell this is a race of evil aliens. I've never bought the argument that any species sophisticated enough to travel between the stars would have destroyed itself by then if it were hostile, but here's something I do believe. Placing city-sized ships over cities of people who have never seen city-sized ships before would scare the living shit out of a LOT of people, and no alien with good intentions would intentionally or indifferently scare the living shit out of that many people. Hence, evil. But, a lot of people in this movie are slow to clue in. Before the aliens arrive, we get to briefly meet a bunch of these people around the country. Each character has one trait or one line (sometimes said by another character) which can describe them in simple enough terms; beyond that, their appeal is limited to the natural charisma of the people portraying them. Jeff Goldblum's nerdy scientist probably comes across the best, though he still has to ominously call the aliens' positioning of their ships "Checkmate!" As an actor, he has a neat skill of being able to deliver bad lines in unexpected ways that work. But he doesn't have much to work with here; for example, the movie tries to establish that his character is smart by showing us he knows how to look up a phone number on a data CD and use a gadget to triangulate somebody else's position. Among the more embarrassed-looking performers are Harvey Fierstein playing Harvey Fierstein and making an easy lawyer joke, Bill Pullman drunkenly slurring his way through his role as the President (listen to his reaction when it's confirmed that the aliens are hostile, the man's drunk!), Judd Hirsh piling on as many charming-old-Jewish-guy traits as he can think of ("I look like a schlemiel!"), and Harry Connick Jr. as the pilot who, apparently, hasn't seen the ships yet and gets as lame a reaction to them as you can imagine when he does. With all the promotion around this movie at the time, there should've been some sort of contest where people could send in their suggestions for what would've been a funnier reaction than "Oh, god." Actually, they could've written the whole movie like this. Would the script have been any worse? ID4's "goofs" page at the IMDb beats out that of Hollowman, which is no small feat (lots of problems with geography here, on both a state and municipal level). Of course, its most celebrated screwup has to be the computer virus which infects the mother ship. Myself, I've never had that much of a problem with the computer virus. It's a cute update on War Of The Worlds, and I can dismiss compatibility problems by remembering that the aliens were using earth satellites and thus must already have compatibility problems licked. No, the problem I have here is that once the shields are down, the huge fifteen-mile-wide ships are awfully easy to destroy; one hit on a fairly wide-open target seems to be enough to make them crash. I would also consider it VERY considerate of the shipbuilders, to design their ships so that in the event of their own destruction, they fall kinda slanty-ways, so they don't fall directly down on what they were planning to destroy, but fall over there, next to the target. Roland Emmerich is not a very good director, but he does seem to be improving. So much praise cannot be lavished on screenwriter Dean Devlin (Emmerich must also hang his head in shame for his writing cocredit), whose script keeps taking, without fail, the laziest, most contrived way to get from A to B in each situation. For example, we find out everything we need to know about the aliens from a psychic link (bangs head against desk) - not just any psychic link, but, apparently, a completely accidental psychic link! There are any number of done-to-death contrivances for action and suspense - the flight to get out of the slowly closing opening, the countdown with lines like "the clock is ticking", an autopsy-on-a-dead-alien-that-isn't-really-dead scene, and last-minute attacks of conscience to stall and draw out the scene where nuclear weapons are deployed against the aliens (wow, this scene would've been even more boring if he decided not to deploy the nukes). Arguably, the whole invasion is a contrivance. After all, if the aliens wanted us out of the way so they can plunder our planet's resources, it seems to me that parking over and destroying major cities and then shooting people in fighters seems like an awful lot of effort. There are a lot of easier ways to get those pesky humans out of the way; viruses, bombardment, giant mirrors that heat up the surface of the planet, a sprinkling of dust blocking out the sun and freezing the surface of the planet, giant loudspeakers playing Nickelback 24/7, inducing billions of suicides...who knows, maybe they just like to get their hands dirty. If you're going to wipe out a civilization, I guess you might as well have fun doing it. They do seem to have the theatrical flair to park directly over, and first destroy, each city's most famous building. "Commander Vorknar! The weapon is being prepared for activation!" "Excellent. I want to see the look on that gay guy's face when a column of fire is racing up the street at him. Five blingdenars says he gets out of his car and runs." As for what does work in this movie, well, it's still kind of fun to see three cities get slagged. The big destruction scene is enjoyable from the moment the ships open up (though all the crowd shots are of remarkably small crowds), until the end...well, almost the end. I mean, this scene, which tries to make a thrill ride out of the most impossibly horrifying events imaginable (and hey, I can dig it), ends with a cute dog's triumphant slow-motion leap to safety. Agh! I like dogs, but is the audience really supposed to finish off this scene thinking "Well, at least the dog got away."? (similarly, the disastrous first dogfight which kills pretty much every pilot in town ends with Will Smith punching out an alien and saying "Now that's what I call a close encounter!") Then we see New York City in ruins, the World Trade Centre ironically the only two buildings which HAVEN'T fallen down. After that, the action scenes really aren't anything special. The alien fighters look sort of shapeless and, like the bigger ships, without much personality to their design, like a Cylon fighter with a mohawk. The blue-screening of the giant ships over the earth isn't even all that hot. The climactic dogfight is a little better, at least giving the alien fighters a cool entrance, but by this point, the ass has numbed and the attention has wandered, and I can't see anything 'cuz I'm wiping away tears of laughter from the President's motivational speech. There's a longer cut of this movie out there, supposedly clearing up the virus thing a bit, maybe giving a few other characters a second dimension, who the hell knows, I haven't seen it. Maybe there's a scene in which somebody other than the President seems bothered by all these cities being blasted off the earth like golf divots. This does not strike me as a movie which could be significantly improved without going all the way back to the conceptual stage. I seem to remember this movie taking some lukewarm heat at the time for its "right-wing" politics and morals. Very pro-military, anti-anti-miltary-protesters (dumb bastards haven't figured out the aliens are evil yet anyway), the gay guy's a cliché, the only black woman around's a stripper, and I even seem to remember some guy getting pissed off over the line "We're fighting for our right to live!" as some sort of hidden anti-abortion message. I don't really care, I just think it's funny that the stripper ends up wearing red to her own wedding, ha ha! As for the possible sequel, all I have to say is, don't. You're gonna lose. The entire hook of the first movie - seeing American landmarks and famous buildings get reduced to rubble (I don't know what it says about the U.S. that this hook worked so well there; I have an excuse, I'm Canadian) isn't gonna work this time. Not just because of the obvious reason, but what's left to blow up that wouldn't have been destroyed in the first movie? You'd have to go out into rural areas and destroy things like Lincoln's log cabin, and I don't think that would pull in very many people. Not that it much matters anyway; after destroying an object a quarter of the mass of our moon (one nuke, that's all it takes) in near-Earth orbit, you'd think that the resulting debris would turn into a world-suffocating cloud of darkness which would ultimately destroy most higher life on earth anyway. Maybe that was the aliens' plan all along. BACK TO THE I's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE