Review of Independence Day (1996) by Moviemastereddy — 02 Apr 2016

"Independence Day" is the biggest B movie ever made, the mother of all doomsday dramas. This airborne leviathan features a bunch of agreeably cardboard characters saving the human race from mass extermination in a way that proves as unavoidably entertaining as it is hopelessly cornball.

Working in a vein that is unabashedly hokey, contrived and ultra-patriotic, the “Stargate” team of director Roland Emmerich and co-writer/producer Dean Devlin clearly had great fun combining sure-fire elements from a bunch of mainstream genres in a way that is frankly intended to be overwhelming.

For the most part it is, at least in the sense that the sheer volume and variety of mass destruction, casualties, moments of dire jeopardy, opportunities for heroism and, above all, special effects, are almost certainly without precedent.

This is, in effect, the anti-“Close Encounters,” a throwback to ominous, paranoid thrillers such as “The War of the Worlds,””The Day the Earth Stood Still,””When Worlds Collide,””Invaders From Mars” and television’s “V,” a story in which the visitors from space have absolutely no interest in making nice with the earthlings and, in fact, have every intention of wiping them out so they can have Earth’s resources to themselves. Lay on top of that an Irwin Allen aesthetic sense and 10,000 special effects and you have a definition of high-concept.

The magnitude of the global threat is awesomely established in the teaser opening, which shows the black mother ship, itself a quarter the size of the moon, sailing through the lunar orbit on its way to its rendezvous with Earth. Shortly let loose are some 15-mile-wide saucers, which descend to hover directly over New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, along with other world capitals, causing no end of wonderment and panic.

In vintage disaster-pic fashion, a host of characters from all walks of life is sketched in. For starters, there is David (Jeff Goldblum), a New York computer genius whose ability to analyze the aliens’ communications code with his laptop could help expose their Achilles heel; Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith), a hot-dog fighter pilot from L.A. with an unfulfilled dream to be an astronaut; and U.S. President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), a rather green national leader widely regarded as a wimp despite his background as a combat pilot during the Gulf War.

Since David’s ex-wife, Constance (Margaret Colin), works for the president, David, along with his kvetchy father, Julius (Judd Hirsch), gains entree to the White House to announce his theory that a catastrophic countdown is under way. When some “Welcome Wagon” helicopters flashing “Close Encounters”-style lights are summarily blasted out of the sky by the aliens, it becomes clear that the visitors have come not for a picnic, but for a barbecue.

Although scenes of the lumbering warships parking themselves over the cities are eyefuls in themselves, the first real fireworks come 45 minutes in, as the spacecrafts open up their hulls to expose giant electromagnetic ray guns that simultaneously zap the soaring Library Tower in Los Angeles (where a bunch of SoCal nitwits are celebrating in welcome of the aliens), the Empire State Building and the White House. As Air Force One spectacularly manages to take off just inches ahead of onrushing flames, uncontrollable firestorms result in the destruction of all three cities and millions of casualties.

And that’s just act one. Air attacks on the alien ships reveal that they are surrounded by protective shields that ward off all weapons, but when hundreds of crustacean-like alien fighter ships zip out to engage the American planes, Hiller manages to make one crash and returns the gruesome-looking pilot to Area 51, a top-secret Nevada base where the president has taken refuge. There, 24 floors underground, the resident loony genius (Brent Spiner) reveals the existence of an alien spaceship captured long ago that just may be in working order, opening the door on a long-shot counterattack that plays out on the third day of the story, July 4.

Without giving the game away, it’s fair to say that everybody gets into the heroic final act: The president dons his flight suit once again, Hiller and David fly into outer space to take on the mother ship, and even an alky Vietnam vet (Randy Quaid) has his chance to go down in history.

This is hardly a movie for viewers interested in plausibility or intelligence in storytelling, but Emmerich throws spectacularly pulpy events at the audience at such a pace that carping about logic is moot. The never-ending special effects, while massively spectacular, are not always that special.

Pic delivers its scariest scene when it momentarily decides to become a monster movie during an alien autopsy, but violence is mostly general and directed at objects rather than people, thereby further increasing the potential kid audience.