Review: Independence Day (1996)

 Independence Day (1996)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi destruction and violence

Score: 4 out of 5

I don't need to explain to you that Independence Day has plot holes and dumb moments. Of course it does. It's been a whipping boy among critics and movie nerds for twenty-five years, held up as a symbol of the kinds of big, stupid, bloated blockbuster action movies that are the specialty of modern Hollywood. For God's sake, it was named after the holiday weekend it was released on. It's a movie where 'Murica saves the world from alien invaders and is utterly dripping with the sort of Clinton-era liberal patriotism that ought to easily become cringeworthy in hindsight -- and for many viewers, especially those who aren't Americans, that's exactly what it is.

And yet, every Fourth of July, this movie has been thrown into millions of VCRs, DVD players, and smart TVs by an audience of nostalgic millennials who cherish it as one of the greatest films of the '90s, up there with Titanic and Men in Black as an example they point to when they say that "they don't make 'em like they used to". The hate has died down considerably since the '90s, and nowadays, like clockwork, the fireworks and barbeques are inevitably joined by people proclaiming how much they loved Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in this and how the sequel did Mae Whitman dirty by recasting her part. It's not that summer blockbusters have gotten any worse since the '90s -- I love the Marvel movies as much as anyone, and I remember when Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the respective writer and director of this film, tried their hand at the first attempt at an American Godzilla movie. It's that they utterly nailed the alchemy on this film. It manages to make its arch characters feel like archetypes rather than one-note caricatures, its race to get to the action feels like breakneck pacing (even in a film this long) rather than a lack of concern about plot or characters, and remarkably, its landmark special effects, mixing old-school practical work with the best CGI one could buy in 1996, still hold up better than even the effects in its own twenty-years-later sequel. Its flaws are known and sundry to just about anybody, but it does a really good job of making you forget about them for two and a half hours.

The setup is now iconic: on July 2, 1996, aliens make contact with us by parking gigantic, multi-mile-wide spaceships over Earth's major cities, and as we soon learn, they do not come in peace. Later that evening, the spaceships unleash death and destruction on the cities below them, having come here to loot Earth for its natural resources before moving on. Over the course of three days, culminating on the Fourth of July, we witness the stories of four groups of people who will eventually come together to save the world: President Thomas J. Whitmore and his inner circle at the White House, the New York computer engineer David Levinson whose ex-wife Constance Spano is the White House Communications Director, the ex-fighter pilot turned drunkard Russell Casse who now flies a crop duster in California's Imperial Valley, raises three kids who think he's a bum, and insists that he was once abducted by aliens, and Marine fighter pilot Steven Hiller, who is not happy that the emergency caused by the aliens' arrival means that his leave is canceled and he can't spend the Fourth of July weekend with his girlfriend Jasmine and her son Dylan.

Right away, their characterization reveals hidden depths beyond just the archetypal roles they're assigned. President Whitmore looks and speaks like every "movie President" ever, such that Bill Pullman is still many people's idea of what that type of figure is like, but it's all an act, and he's learned the hard way that his background as a war hero and skills from the military don't necessarily translate to Washington. David, the first person to realize that the aliens are hostile, is the Hollywood nerd whose brilliance lets the good guys figure out how to beat the bad guys -- but a specifically Jewish one given all the associated tics and relations, in particular his often-frustrated relationship with his nagging father Julius, with Jeff Goldblum bringing the same deadpan energy he brought to Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. Russell is the "crazy" redneck who was right all along, played by Randy Quaid in full Cousin Eddie mode, and the burden of being right has ruined his life by the time the film starts, as the rest of the town makes fun of him and uses his claims of being an abductee (including possibly getting anally probed) to cast aspersions on his sexuality. And Steven, who in another time would've been a lantern-jawed, clean-cut hero played by John Wayne or Burt Lancaster, is here played by Will Smith in the role that defined his own wisecracking screen persona, the Fresh Prince given military training and made into an action hero who takes no issue with the fact that his girlfriend is a stripper (as she points out, it's good money) and who punches an alien in the face before telling him "welcome to Earth!". Between great performances from the actors involved and writing that's a fair bit meatier than it lets on, I quickly got invested in all of this film's major and minor characters and was excited to see them interact with one another, survive the initial attack, and then get their revenge on the aliens. The film's central message of people coming together in the face of a greater threat, one that wears its celebration of liberal internationalism on its sleeve, knows exactly how cheesy it may sound, but it also knows that the best way to sell that message is through a series of personal stories of people doing just that, first on a smaller scale before moving on to a world-saving one.

I also could not believe how quickly this film went by. The film's strict adherence to three-act structure, going so far as to literally divide the film into the three days it takes place over, played some role in this, giving it the energy of a miniseries that builds up to bigger and bigger climaxes at the end of each of its three "episodes". But even with that in mind, it still boggled my mind how propulsive and lean the first act in particular was, such that I had to check my watch when the "July 3" card popped up and realized that I was already fifty minutes into the movie. The film constantly escalates the situation as more and more people, from SETI to the military to the President to eventually everybody in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, realizes that aliens have arrived, building up to one of the most famous city destruction sequences in movie history. It never feels quite as manic after that, but that's only because it takes its time to slow down for some quieter moments to flesh out the characters, the film still delivering epic aerial battles, nuclear counterattacks, and alien autopsies gone horribly wrong where, thanks to Emmerich's lively direction combined with grounded framing and shot composition (no shaky cam in sight here), the parts in the command center with the people giving the orders feel as intense as the action scenes themselves. Even though most of the film after the first act takes place with the government and the military in and around Area 51, the scope still felt substantially larger than just the Southwest, as scattered bits of dialogue and world-building, from refugee caravans fleeing the major cities to aside mentions of the destruction of Chicago, Philadelphia, and NORAD HQ at Colorado Springs, all emphasize the national, even global scope of the action. This film is certainly big, but it is not bloated.

The special effects need no introduction, but it is still shocking just how effective they remain. When the spaceships arrive over Earth's cities, their sheer size and scope felt downright unnatural, less an alien race than a sentient force of nature straight out of a disaster movie -- and a disaster is exactly what they deliver, the death rays and fireballs on screen packing a serious punch behind them. Unlike the humans, the aliens get next to no development beyond the fact that they are here to loot Earth for its resources, and that's kind of for the best; this isn't a Star Wars-style space opera set in a sprawling universe of alien races and empires. (That's why a sequel was always a lost cause: you need to explain why the aliens came back, which means you need to explain the aliens, at which point you're taking what's fundamentally a standalone popcorn action movie and entering waters sailed by other franchises that have been there for decades.) Their look alone lets us fill in the blanks; they loosely resemble the "Greys" of UFO lore inside larger biomechanical protective suits that look like the xenomorphs from Alien, and their spaceships are essentially flying saucers blown up to epic scale. They feel suitably alien, avoiding the trap of either "rubber forehead" aliens in one direction, which takes away some of their exotic, inhuman nature, or the truly unusual "starfish" aliens in the other, where you're left scratching your head as to how this can possibly be an intelligent lifeform capable of spaceflight. They were designed for one thing and one thing only: to distill every "evil alien" from decades of pop culture, going all the way back to H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, into an image that would be immediately threatening to anybody watching, and the filmmakers certainly accomplished that task, whether it's with the aliens' ominous machines or with the absolute carnage that they unleash.

I'll be the first to admit that there are parts of this movie that shouldn't work. I cannot, in good conscience, give a 5 out of 5 to a movie as blissfully cheesy and willfully dumb as Independence Day. Emmerich and Devlin made a throwback to '50s alien invasion flicks like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers that modernized the production values but kept their B-movie charm -- and that means plot contrivances that make you go "yeah, that should never have worked" once you get to the fridge to grab some water and think about it for a second. A lot of the characters' success relies on luck, improbable escapes are commonplace, Steve gets away with hijacking a helicopter by literally being that damn cool, and you're telling me that the aliens didn't have some sort of anti-virus software on their military computers? (Okay, maybe they had Norton.) Its themes are shallow and exist mainly to get the plot moving; if anything, it's the opposite of a movie designed to make you think. This film, for all the money that was put behind it, is a pinnacle of "low art" where, sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the dumb moments on screen and roll with it. It's not the genius who will go on to change the world like Jurassic Park, it's the homecoming king and queen here to entertain the crowd right now.

The Bottom Line

Independence Day is still a classic for a reason. Warts and all, it's a movie that was absolutely made for a holiday like the Fourth of July, a massive, spectacular pep rally with a ton of muscle and not a lot of fat. It's a dumb movie, to be sure, but it's a dumb movie made by smart people who are here for the roar of the crowd.